On a summer day in 1872, a group of people only seven years removed from bondage gathered to commemorate their freedom. The former slaves met on a ten-acre parcel of land at the corner of Dowling and Elgin streets in an area of Houston called Third Ward. According to one resident, the neighborhood looked “very much like the country” despite being part of the city of Houston. Third Ward was the kind of place where most families raised chickens, or even a cow if they were lucky, where the mud-filled roads trapped horse-drawn buggies in the aftermath of thunderstorms that frequently shook the Gulf Coast city. It was here that a pastor named Jack Yates, his wife Harriet, and a cohort of freedpeople capitalized on one of the sweetest realities of freedom – the ability to build their own neighborhoods and institutions. Jack and Harriet Yates had been born into slavery in Virginia. The married couple lived on different farms, and when Harriet’s owner decided to move to Matagorda County in Texas in 1863, Jack convinced his owner to sell him so that he could move west with his wife and their children. The Yates family re-located to Houston immediately following the end of the Civil War. When he wasn’t earning money as a drayman, Jack Yates preached at a brush harbor on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou. He later became pastor of the city’s first black church, Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. With the help of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, the congregation at Antioch raised $800 to purchase the plot of land in Third Ward in 1872. They called it “Emancipation Park.”
The former slaves who bought land for the park did not know that the area would one day become the center of a thriving black community – a neighborhood that would nurture musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Beyoncé, and her sister Solange. And they certainly had no idea that the day they commemorated, June 19, 1865, would grow from a local celebration to a holiday acknowledged by people across the United States over the next century. On that day, slaves in Texas learned they were free when Union soldiers landed on Galveston Island and General Gordon Granger read Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
A historical marker in Third Ward. Photo by the author.
Black Houstonians continued to commemorate the 19th of June at Emancipation Park for generations. My grandmother attended those celebrations in the 1930s and 1940s, where she danced to blues music, ate barbecue, and sipped red sodas. When I was growing up in Houston in the 80s and 90s, the celebration didn’t center on Emancipation Park, but could be found in parks and venues in various parts of the city. The holiday has grown in popularity in other parts of the United States, too. Today people celebrate Juneteenth across the nation with parades and barbecues.
But even as I enjoy seeing Juneteenth celebrations becoming more popular, one aspect of the holiday bothers me each year. Nearly every article or TV news story focuses on the idea that slaves in Texas learned they were free two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. These people seem to think that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery on January 1, 1863, but that slaves in Texas lived in bondage twenty-nine months longer than slaves in other parts of the South. I hear this story everywhere. A writer for the Huffington Post’s “Black Voices” states, “The Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of the legalized institution of slavery in America, but in the small town of Galveston Island, Texas, black slaves had been carrying on their lives of bondage and subjugation, oblivious to the fact that they were actually free.” The same idea can be found in a recent article in the Houston Chronicle: “The Emancipation Proclamation that outlawed slavery in Confederate states was signed in 1863, but it took two years for the news to reach Galveston.” But these statements are wholly inaccurate. Texans had known about Emancipation Proclamation since 1863. News traveled slowly in the 19th century, but not that slowly.
This focus on the timing of Juneteenth is rooted in a misunderstanding of slavery and the Civil War. The truth is that the Emancipation Proclamation had little effect on slavery in Texas during the Civil War, but it also did not free the majority of slaves in the South in 1863.
During the war, a slave’s freedom depended more on the presence of the Union army than the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the Confederacy regarded Union troops as an army of liberation. In Virginia, they fled farms and plantations to Union camps when the war began, prompting Congress to respond. The Confiscation Act of 1861 stated that the runaways were to be treated as “contraband of war” when they reached Union military lines. A year later, the Second Confiscation Act declared those fugitives “forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” As historian W. Caleb McDaniel writes, “Enslaved people in the Confederate South seem to have understood instinctively from the beginning that Union armies presented them with unique, unprecedented opportunities for flight and freedom.” A year before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves had already found a path to freedom.
Across the Confederacy, slaves fled farms and plantations when Union troops approached. In her excellent book, To ‘Joy My Freedom, historian Tera Hunter shows that 19,000 slaves followed General William Tecumseh Sherman as he crossed the state of Georgia. But this strategy depended on Union activity. In Texas, which did not have a strong Union military presence during the war, slaves had few opportunities to escape behind Union lines. By the end of the war, over 200,000 slaves lived in Texas.
But there is another important reason why so many slaves remained in bondage until 1865. Slaveholders in the Confederacy did not immediately free their slaves when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation because they did not consider him to be their president. Since they had formed a separate nation with its own federal government, Confederates did not obey Lincoln’s orders. (Also, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in the “rebel states,” so slaves in southern states that had remained loyal to the Union, like Kentucky, remained in bondage.) Slavery did not end in the South in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation.
This isn’t to say that Lincoln’s actions were unimportant. One of the most significant aspects is that the order allowed former slaves to join the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation also made ending slavery a goal of the war. A Union victory would mean freedom for slaves. On June 19, 1865, that became reality in the westernmost state of the former Confederacy.
As a historian, Texan, and descendant of slaves, I’m thrilled to see discussions and celebrations of Juneteenth occurring across the nation. I also hope that we can continue to unpack the meanings of this complicated holiday and its relationship to emancipation and the Civil War. In the meantime, Happy Juneteenth.
Sources:
Merton L. Dillon, “War of Rebellion,” in Slavery Attacked: South States and Their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Tyina Steptoe, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Elizabeth Hayes Turner, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006).
I remember going to a Juneteenth celebration when I was a pre-schooler in Houston in the 1940s. Don’t remember much about the celebration except that the Barbecue was really good and that we, a white family, were genuinely welcomed.
Have been searching for a particular history for years, as I know that the open fields around Buffalo Bayou near the current-day Waugh Drive and south to West Dallas street, was a point of coming together for former slaves after Emancipation, or whenever after that the mass migration from the farms on the Brazos River occurred. I grew up not far from that location, and knew the farm areas near the bayou in the ’40s as a child, before the shopping centers and stores lining West Gray all the way to Taft and Freedman’s town cropped up. The story was that not only was a great tent city in that location, but also a graveyard, and know that NO one has ever built on the property along the east side of Waugh near D’Amico, where I always thought it existed. I can’t find records. As a child I used to visit College Memorial Park Cemetery nearby my house on W. Dallas, where Jack Yates and others are buried, but this I’m writing about would have been a natural, non-incorporated, useful for the time period in the late 1870’s kind of graveyard (and also not ‘Founder’s’)…
Do you have any knowledge or history of it, as I can’t find it from searching.
Amen and Amen and Amen!!! This was beautifully written. Thank you so much for putting this together for people who seek to be educated. I am proud of the black community that surrounds me and I am happy to see my brothers in sisters gather to acknowledge Juneteenth.