Google often uses its homepage to honor prominent figures and dates with doodles. But when the search engine site didn’t create an image for Juneteenth, which is celebrated on June 19, one artist took matters into his own hands.
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Davian Chester, a freelance illustrator and graphic designer in Columbus, recently shared his own version of Google Doodle to highlight Juneteenth, which commemorates the day the last slaves in Texas and more broadly the Confederate South were freed.
The artwork features black hands breaking free of shackles that form the word “Google.”
“I feel that [Juneteenth] is important to me because it is a part of my history as an African American. It upsets me that still to this day, more and more people aren't as informed as they should be about it, and the process to make that happen is too slow. Every bit counts,” the 26-year-old told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
As of Thursday afternoon, his creation, which took about an hour to finish, had been liked more than 120,000 times across Instagram and Twitter. Many gushed about how much they loved it.
Some even urged Google to hire Chester.
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Others condemned Google for not creating a Google Doodle for the occasion.
And a few took time to explain the significance of the holiday, especially since many said they didn’t learn about it in school.
While Google didn’t dedicate its homepage to Juneteenth, Google Street View did release a virtual tour of a dozen former Virginia slave dwellings to recognize the holiday, according to its blog.
"By immersing ourselves in the places where enslaved communities once lived, we are confronted with a history that cannot be ignored," it wrote. "So to virtually preserve these living spaces and give people access to them, we created custom Street View imagery for tours of a dozen slave dwellings throughout Virginia, which date from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s."
Take a look at it here.
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