Bandcamp will be donating 100 percent of their sales from the website to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on this Juneteenth (June 19) and every Juneteenth after today, in solidarity with racial justice. Juneteenth is a state recognized holiday in 46 out of the 50 states in the US, and celebrates the emancipation of slaves in the former Confederate States of America.
The organization will also be allocating $30,000 to partner with organizations which provide opportunities for people of color and promote racial justice. The NAACP has been fighting for racial justice for decades and were instrumental in ending school segregation during their landmark win in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and subsequent other prominent cases.
“The recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black people in the US and around the world are horrific tragedies,” the site wrote in a statement. “We stand with those rightfully demanding justice, equality, and change, and people of color everywhere who live with racism every single day, including many of our fellow employees and artists and fans in the Bandcamp community.”
The Bandcamp service will also be collaborating with local organizations in their space in Oakland, a city integral to the civil rights movement and the home of the original Black Panther Party. It will also continue to seek ways to empower and promote diverse artists on their platform.
Bandcamp held a fundraiser and donated 100 percent of its proceeds in support of the ACLU back in 2017. This year the organization waived revenue shares to help support artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, which they will continue to do once month until July. The next fundraiser will be on June 5, while their last fundraiser broke the site’s total sales record.
Read Bancamp’s full statement below:
The recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black people in the US and around the world are horrific tragedies. We stand with those rightfully demanding justice, equality, and change, and people of color everywhere who live with racism every single day, including many of our fellow employees and artists and fans in the Bandcamp community.
So this coming Juneteenth (June 19, from midnight to midnight PDT) and every Juneteenth hereafter, for any purchase you make on Bandcamp, we will be donating 100% of our share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a national organization that has a long history of effectively enacting racial justice and change through litigation, advocacy, and public education. We’re also allocating an additional $30,000 per year to partner with organizations that fight for racial justice and create opportunities for people of color.
The current moment is part of a long-standing, widespread, and entrenched system of structural oppression of people of color, and real progress requires a sustained and sincere commitment to political, social, and economic racial justice and change. We’ll continue to promote diversity and opportunity through our mission to support artists, the products we build to empower them, who we promote through the Bandcamp Daily, our relationships with local artists and organizations through our Oakland space, how we operate as a team, and who and how we hire.
Beyond that, we encourage everyone in the Bandcamp community to look for ways to support racial equality in your own local community, and as a company we’ll continue to look for more opportunities to support racial justice, equality and change.
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