Juneteenth: 100% of Bandcamp’s share of sales donated today

It’s a year later, life is crawling back toward a slightly less grotesque hellscape called “normal” and with it many of the organizations and corporations who had a social justice awakening last June have scaled back their obligations to posting rainbow-hued logos and other empty, performative gestures.

Bandcamp is not one of them. The Bay Area music platform has holding another 24 hour sale in which the company is donating 100% of its share of all purchases to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund “to support their ongoing efforts to promote racial justice through litigation, advocacy, and public education.”

“We held our first Juneteenth fundraiser last year in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the long-standing structural oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and daily racism faced by Black people and people of color, including many of our fellow employees and artists in the Bandcamp community,” the company notes in an announcement, pointing out that the fundraiser will be “annual” and is part of a “larger, ongoing commitment to racial equity.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that “through litigation, advocacy, and public education seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans.” The fund was founded in 1940 under the leadership of its first director, Thurgood Marshall, who successfully Brown vs. Board of Education before the Supreme Court that lead to the racial de-segregation of public schools. In 1967 Marshall became the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.

Bandcamp’s Juneteenth fundraiser will be held from midnight to midnight Pacific time on Friday, June 18 2021.