Juneteenth Black Lives Matter Gallery: Blade, Black Lightning and Bishop
One small upside of all the recent Black Lives Matter protests is that they are happening around the annual unofficial holiday of Juneteenth, which is bringing greater attention to one of the most significant dates in U.S. history. June 19, 1865 is the date that the last slave state, Texas, officially proclaimed an end to slavery, even though it had been ended at a federal level more than two years prior.
Juneteenth is an official state holiday in Texas because of that and is recognized in 46 other states and the District of Columbia, and just this past week was named as a state government holiday in New York by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It would be easy to say that its status as a holiday in just Texas is responsible for the fact that it isn’t a federal holiday, but that would be ignoring that systemic racism that keeps many things of special significance to the black community from being given the importance they deserve.
Since the federal government has never named either date of the Emancipation Proclamation — Sept. 22, when it was signed by Pres. Lincoln in 1862, or Jan. 1, when it took effect in 1863 — as a federal holiday, black communities all over the country adopted the only official holiday, June 19, as their day to celebrate the end of slavery.
Getting Juneteenth named an official federal holiday would be a wonderful symbol of the U.S. finally accepting the fact that the country was built on slave labor, and that it in name at least finally ended. And that recognition would be just a good start, not an ending of the efforts to fix the 155-year-long after-effects of slavery.
All of that said, our Juneteenth gallery of black cosplayers portraying black characters is of DC’s Black Lightning, and Marvel’s Bishop and the OG daywalker, Blade.
Among the cosplayers in this gallery are Raymond Ramos Cosplay, Michael from Blade Brotherhood, Everyone’s Hero Cosplay, Brandon the Shapeshifter, Chocolate Ninja Cosplay, legendofthedaywalker, Bishop Cosplay, Alice’n Blunnderland, and many more.
We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
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