Texas Prisoners Organize Strike and Boycott for Juneteenth 2022

Call from Texas prisoners for actions leading up to Juneteenth. Download and read call here.

An organization of revolutionary Texas prisoners called T.E.A.M.O.N.E., alongside another prisoners’ org titled the TX Liberation Collective, is calling for a “campaign to boycott, rally, and strike on the days approaching [Juneteenth] and on that day.”

The organizations write in their communique, “The premise of this action proceeds from the point that in the wake of social unrest the current US white house regime, in an effort to pacify a sector of the populace, did indeed make Juneteenth a federal holiday. While Juneteenth is a celebration of the ‘ending’ of slavery in the US, it is factual to state that slavery on this continent has to the present day gone on without cease. Instead slavery has been transformed, and we cannot let the narrative of a now state-sanctioned ‘holiday’ gloss over the fact the US in general and Texas in particular took systemic measures to continue the arrested development of so-called minority communities.”

The prisoners are demanding an end to mail censorship, compensation for inmate labor, an end to monopoly business practices that exploit prisoners and their family members, the abolition of long term seg, and a number of other things.

Their communique also calls for prisoners themselves to use this initiative to catalyze their own autonomous “liberatory spaces” like liberation libraries, study groups, a TX prison workers’ union, and youth engagement programs.

The communique is being spread publicly as an invitation to outside groups like Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee, Anarchist Black Cross groups, Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement chapters, and other prisoner support crews and anti-prison groups to help spread the word to prison populations in their own states as well.

photo: Hennie Stander via Unsplash