What is Juneteenth?

What Is Juneteenth?
June 19, 1865
There’d been whispers throughout Galveston, Texas, that a paper had been signed. A paper granting freedom to all enslaved people across the Southern states. The people of Texas were the last to hear the news that had changed all of the United States.

It was 1865, and Black people had suffered under slavery for more than two hundred years. Most Northern states had outlawed slavery by this time. However, in the South, it was legal and white people with money continued to use the forced, unpaid labor of Black people to grow even richer.

Although there are several different stories about what actually happened on June 19, 1865, the one that is most often told says that everyone in town-Black people and the white people who’d enslaved them-were told to gather at Ashton Villa. It had been the headquarters for the Southern army during the Civil War-a war fought for four long years between the Northern and Southern states.

Some Black people at Ashton Villa had hopes that the war might be over. For some time, the North seemed to be winning. Perhaps that explained why there’d been sightings of the US Colored Troops (USCT)-a unit of Black soldiers fighting with the Union army-marching through Galveston. If the North had won the war, what would this mean for Southern states and, most of all, for Black people? Now Major General Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony overlooking the crowd. He read a handwritten note. Its official name was General Order No. 3, which summarized the famous document known as the Emancipation Proclamation. (To emancipate people means to set them free.) He said, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States [President Abraham Lincoln], all slaves are free.” Free!
What they didn’t know that the was Emancipation Proclamation had been signed on January 1, 1863! It took almost two and a half years for the people of Galveston to find out the news that changed the future of the United States. Why did it take so long for enslaved people in Texas to find out about the Emancipation Proclamation as well as the Union victory two months earlier?

Location was reason. Among the one Confederate states, Texas was farthest west, away from the action of the war. So as Northern troops began winning the war, some enslavers left eastern Southern states such as Louisiana and Alabama and moved to Texas. There they started new plantations (very large farms). They brought along the enslaved people they owned to work their new land.
One formerly enslaved man, named Louis Love, remembered having to leave New Orleans, Louisiana, suddenly after Northern soldiers took over the city. Love’s enslaver knew that if his workers were freed, he’d have to pay them. The very next morning, Love said, that about three hundred enslaved people were ordered onto wagons and moved to Texas. In Galveston and other parts of Texas, many white people had already heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. However, they purposely kept the news from enslaved people; they wanted to continue having free work for as long as possible.

Also, there hadn’t been many Union soldiers in Texas to let Black people know about the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after General Granger made his announcement in Galveston, there were other cities in Texas where it took even longer to hear the news.

June 19, 1865, would soon become a holiday celebrated by all Black Americans across Texas and the South. Decades later, it would be honored across the country. A day of jubilee, as it was often called, for all Americans. A holiday named by blending the words “June” and “nineteenth”-Juneteenth!