#Twitter announces Juneteenth is official company holiday

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Tuesday that moving forward, the company will celebrate Juneteenth as an official corporate holiday.

The annual festival marks the date on June 19, 1865, when the abolition os slavery was announced in the state of Texas.

The social network will observe the holiday “forevermore,” Dorsey tweeted, as will Square, the payment company at which he also serves as CEO.

Dorsey said that June 19 will be “a day for celebration, education, and connection” for the companies’ employees, and included a link to the official Juneteenth website with history of the holiday.

Dorsey’s announcement arrives less than a week after he announced that he was donating $3 million to the charity run by Colin Kaepernick.

“$3mm to Colin @Kaepernick7’s @yourrightscamp to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization to elevate the next generation of change leaders,” Dorsey tweeted last Wednesday.

Kaepernick — a former NFL quarterback — has been out of the league since beginning the movement of players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest social injustice. His kneeling became a favorite target of the president, who has repeatedly castigated the African-American QB as well as other NFL players who protested during the anthem, calling them unpatriotic.

Dorsey has led the charge in activism in big tech since the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers, which set off a week of protests across the nation.

Google chief Sunday Pichai last week announced that the search giant was donating $12 million to causes promoting racial equality, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously committed $10 million “to groups working on racial justice.”