FAMOUS SPRINGS

The First Juneteenth

Why We Continue to Celebrate Emancipation Day

By Earl A. Birkett

What was Texas like in June 1865 if you were black? The American Civil War ended two months prior, in April, yet no one bothered to inform you until June 19 that, since the Confederacy lost the war, you were no longer considered chattel.

People of color have suffered under the yoke of racism and exploitation ever since the first permanent European settlers arrived in the New World in the late 15th century. Indigenous tribes throughout the Americas were the first to be targeted, first by the Spanish, then by the French. Their burden was soon enjoined by the

Dutch and the British, who kidnapped the first Africans and brought them to the

Virginia colony in 1619, first in indentured servitude, then in bondage.

General Order Number 3, freeing all Texas slaves, issued June 19, 1865

What followed was 346 more years of Africans separated from their homeland and culture, consigned to the status of property, stripped of their humanity, forbidden in most cases to read or have intact families, beaten, even killed at will, their women raped, their children sold off, and provided with the barest of subsistence, while their white English Southern colonial and early American masters engorged themselves on obscene wealth and privilege, all the result of having invented perhaps the greatest ruse in history: “Christian”-justified white supremacy. Known henceforth as racism.

While technically it was the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln, that outlawed slavery in the Southern Confederate states—largely as a means to garner allegiance from enslaved blacks behind the lines of the Confederacy—it took another two years of fighting before that proclamation could be fulfilled. Freedom, sadly, had been purchased with the blood of both blacks and whites.

It was one thing to proclaim the end of slavery in the South but quite another to enforce it. Union troops, preoccupied with fighting the war elsewhere, were slow to reach Texas, the most remote Confederate state, where slavery had expanded the most, even when the war ended. Slavery was still allowed in Union states until the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed chattel slavery in 1865 and treaties ended it in the Indian Territories (namely the Choctaw) in 1866.

So it was that the wellspring of joy sprung up when slaves in Galveston, Texas, were informed of General Order Number 3, issued by Union Army Major

Modern-day Juneteenth celebration

Photo Credit: John Minchillo/AP

General Gordon Granger, which proclaimed them free in the last Confederate state to be liberated from human bondage. The celebrations began immediately, more formally in 1866, and have endured ever since. Yet, in celebration, there remained hardship; Reconstruction would give way to Jim Crow, then the Civil Rights Movement, and finally black empowerment. Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard-based historian and law professor, said it well:

“The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for

President Biden signs legislation, June 17, 2021, to make Juneteenth a federal holiday

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci/AP free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.”

Juneteenth celebrations originally centered, as most things, around Texas churches where blacks congregated and then spread to the rest of the South. The Great Migration of the early 1900s, when many blacks relocated to the Northern, Midwestern and Western states, brought the observance nationwide. Food festivals were a staple. Official recognition of that day gathered steam in the 1970s, with Texas (fittingly and ironically) being the first state to legislate it as a holiday in 1979; it

Band playing for a Juneteenth celebration, Austin, Texas, 1900

was subsequently joined by the other 49 states and the District of Columbia. Observance has also spread to parts of Mexico, where the Mascogos— black Seminoles from Florida and Oklahoma— escaped from slavery in 1852 and settled in Coahuila, Mexico. On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, creating America’s newest federal holiday, celebrated for the first time two days later.

There is a segment that considers Juneteenth more significant than Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on January 15 and Black History Month, celebrated in February. The day is a time for traditions, including public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation; singing the black “national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; inspirational readings from noted African American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou; and festive parties, family reunions, rodeos, historical reenactments and Miss Juneteenth contests.

It is clear that Juneteenth has taken on an added meaning beyond its post-Civil War origins. All people in bondage have come to commemorate this day as an enduring symbol of the human desire to be free from all oppression wherever it exists in the world.

Gloriously commemorating Juneteenth, Anita Blanch Mays and her royal attendants ruled this annual celebration one summer in the 1920s.

Courtesy of the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, Alclair Pleasant Collection.