Juneteenth. Emancipation Day.
What is it exactly and how is it commemorated?
On June 19, 1865 — more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston:
“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”
That date, now known as Juneteenth, marked the end of slavery in the United States and the beginning of a national celebration. The Juneteenth holiday grew out of a need to commemorate freedom, to capture the emotion that freedman Felix Haywood expressed following the announcement. “Hallelujah broke out . . . Everyone was a-singin’. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds . . . Everybody went wild . . . We was free.”
Celebrations began the following year and grew to include church services, singing, ceremonial readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, parades, keynote speakers, ballgames, dances, children’s games, and feasting. By 1919 Juneteenth had become firmly established in Texas as a holiday for African Americans. In the 1920s and 30s, it took on a commercial aspect with stores offering Juneteenth sales, bigger sporting events, and carnivals with rides. On Juneteenth in 1936, the Texas Centennial in Dallas opened the Hall of Negro Life devoted to “negro progress.” Public celebrations declined during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, but returned in the 1970s.
In 1979, Al Edwards, a Representative from Houston, introduced a bill to make Juneteenth a Texas state holiday. He successfully campaigned for a day when “white, brown, and blacks can celebrate freedom together.” Since then, Juneteenth has grown into a celebration of black cultural heritage that is recognized in communities beyond Texas and around the world.
In honor of Juneteenth 2020, the Bullock Museum is highlighting some of the stories we’ve been privileged to tell over the years. The voices of African Americans are important to the Story of Texas and the Bullock Museum’s curators are committed to telling the good stories and the hard stories that make up the state’s shared history.
H. Wilson & Company is considered to be the first African American business in Texas. The pottery company was owned by five formerly enslaved men who started their company between 1869 and 1872. The enterprise’s success provided a livelihood for the potters that was different from the more typical sharecropping and tenant farming jobs available to African Americans following Emancipation.
Ransom and Sarah Williams were successful farmers and landowners at a time when discriminatory labor practices kept most African Americans from earning enough money to purchase land. Despite these challenges, Williams bought a farmstead in 1871. TxDOT archaeologists uncovered the remains of their farmstead in 2003, bringing to light their story. The archaeological remains of the farmstead reveal what life was like for one African American family that worked its way up the social and economic ladder.
Richard Allen was one of Texas’s first African American legislators. Allen’s entry into politics began in 1867 when he worked as a federal voting registrar. The following year, he served as an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau and helped found the Harris County Republican Party. With this growing political experience, Allen ran for and won his first term in Texas’s Twelfth Legislature from 1870 to 1871. In 1878, the Republican Party nominated him for Lt. Governor, making Allen the first African American to seek statewide office in Texas.
Elizabeth Green and her friend Kate
Acts of violence toward African Americans happened frequently in Reconstruction-era Texas. In this affidavit, Elizabeth Green bravely testified in an affidavit in Wilson County that she had witnessed Kate, a free black women, be abducted on the night of October 6, 1865. Green calls out the white attackers by name and demands justice for Kate.
Maude Sampson founded the El Paso Negro Woman’s Civic and Enfranchisement League on June 12, 1918. Already active in El Paso’s women’s clubs and the NAACP, Sampson worked with other African American women in the city to campaign for suffrage. She also worked closely with the city’s Anglo suffrage club who suggested her group join the larger National American Woman Suffrage Association. Sampson wrote a letter asking to enroll her local league in the national organization, but was denied for fear that her African American league would “embarrass the cause.”
In 1955 a group of teenagers with the NAACP Youth Council in Dallas boycotted the Texas State Fair, which allowed African Americans to attend the fair throughout its run, but only allowed them to participate in the fair’s attractions on Negro Appreciation Day. Equipped with signs proclaiming “TODAY IS NEGRO APPEASEMENT DAY AT THE FAIR,” the teens picketed throughout the day and into the night. They did not succeed in ending Negro Achievement Day, but they did draw attention to the discrimination African Americans faced. The Youth Council was given an award by the NAACP for their well organized and peaceful demonstration.
D. Joe Williams was the first African American to integrate collegiate sports in Texas. Williams attended segregated Booker T. Washington High School in McAllen where he excelled in track, cross country, and baseball. Pan American College in El Paso offered Williams a scholarship to play baseball, and in 1954 he was a starting centerfielder on their baseball team. He went on to serve the state as a lifelong coach and educator, teaching science and math in El Paso. In recognition of his athletic excellence, Williams was inducted into three different Texas sports Halls of Fame.
This post is contributed by Kathryn Siefker, Curator, at the Bullock Texas State History Museum.
Support for the Bullock Museum’s exhibitions and education programs is provided by the Texas State History Museum Foundation.
