📜 A Combined Word
Juneteenth combines "June" and "nineteenth," and marks June 19, 1865. On that day, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army entered Galveston, Texas, with some two thousand troops and issued General Order No. 3. Its first line read: The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
⏳ Freedom, Two and a Half Years Late
Lincoln had proclaimed emancipation on January 1, 1863. But for the roughly 250,000 enslaved people in Texas, freedom was delayed two and a half years longer. There were almost no Union troops there to enforce it. The most remote corner of the Confederacy, Texas was the last place where the proclamation existed only on paper while slavery went on as before.
People who were free under the law two and a half years earlier lived on as slaves, not even knowing it, for two and a half more years. What Juneteenth marks is that freedom, arrived late.
⛓️ The Clause Within the Freedom
The order carried a clause. Even as it declared freedom, it advised the freed to remain quietly in their present homes and work for wages. They would not be allowed to gather at military posts, it stated, and idleness would be tolerated nowhere. In granting freedom, it also set the shape that freedom would take. Some slaveholders delayed or ignored the announcement, working people as slaves for weeks and months more.
🌑 Another Oppression
Juneteenth was born of liberation, but its remembrance grew up under a new oppression. When slavery ended, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and the institutional racism of the Jim Crow era followed. In several Southern states, Juneteenth observances were pushed out of public spaces. So Black communities bought their own land and made a place of their own. Houston's Emancipation Park began that way. Juneteenth became a day of memory, of education, of resistance.
🏛️ 156 Years
First celebrated in Texas in 1866, Juneteenth became the oldest commemoration of emancipation. In 1980, Texas was the first to make it a state holiday. On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed it into federal law. It was 156 years after the first order was read aloud in Galveston.
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