Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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Excerpts from Juneteenth Address Given by Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence Myra Young Armstead

On June 2, 1865, United States Union forces finally breached what had been an impregnable stronghold of the Confederacy, the Texas border. Only a few battles had been fought there along the Gulf Coast during the Civil War. These had resulted in northern defeats allowing Texas to maintain cotton plantations, manufacturing centers, railroad lines, and even prison-of-war camps for the southern cause. So secure was Texas from penetration that following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation many enslavers from neighboring rebel states confidently relocated Black people to the Lone Star State in order to safeguard them against liberation, which slaveowners still understood as confiscation. Finally, on June 19, 1865, as Union forces established a stable presence in the state and as the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery made its way through the country for state-by-state ratification, Major General Gordon Granger in Houston issued #3 of the army’s General Orders: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States all slaves are free.” 

Never mind that resistant slaveowners in the central and interior regions of Texas stubbornly held onto Black bodies until directly confronted by federal military enforcers. African Americans celebrated the news, thus inaugurating the holiday they called Emancipation Day, or Juneteenth. The commemorations varied. There were concerts, parades and processions, religious services, cookouts, and gatherings, as well as historical and cultural readings. In Houston, for instance, community leaders from Antioch Missionary Baptist Church and Trinity Episcopal Church, both Black congregations, purchased 10 acres of land in 1872 as a place to hold Juneteenth anniversary celebrations. They called the site Emancipation Park, which has continuously served this purpose for locals to this day. Similarly, from the 1860s until the first years of the 20th century, freed people in Austin gathered in Wheeler’s Grove each year to celebrate their liberation. In 1905, Austin artist and teacher Mattie Haywood White joined her husband, Thomas White, in founding the Travis County Emancipation Celebration Association, a Black organization that purchased five acres of land they called East Woods Park where Juneteenth festivities would be held.[1]  
 
Through Black migrations, family ties, churches, fraternal societies, and newspapers, the practice of remembering June 19, 1865, spread throughout the national Black American community, and celebrants were committed to honoring Emancipation Day, even when that meant taking time from paid labor in the decades before various states made official holidays of the commemorations. For instance, the Black community’s observance of Juneteenth forced the closing of Beaumont, Texas, sawmills in 1905. The local press reported, “There is general observance on the part of the negroes of Emancipation Day. Every lumber mill in East Texas and West Louisiana is closed down today at the saw end. The negroes fill all the places in the sawmills and decline to work on the 19th. Five hundred excursionists left Beaumont today [June 19] for Brenham”—the scene of a massive fortieth anniversary Juneteenth parade.[2]

Since the expansion of Juneteenth celebrations coincided with the codification of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation throughout the country and the legal disenfranchisement of Black voters through literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, these commemorations were more than times of jubilation. They were also acts of hopeful defiance, insistence, and renewed determination to persevere in the ongoing Black freedom struggle. Perhaps this point is best demonstrated by the 1909 Juneteenth procession of African Americans in Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederacy which by then had become the site of Monument Boulevard, an architectural and sculptural ode to the southern Lost Cause.[3]
 
African Americans were equally invested in celebrations of the Fourth of July at this time, reflecting the kind of double-consciousness articulated by W.E.B. DuBois in Souls of Black Folk.[4]  They identified with the promise of equality conveyed by those unforgettable words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For African Americans, that statement was a benchmark—the most important founding principle upon which the country was built, and a standard to which the nation should be held. The gap between that standard and the lived reality of Black people is what required Juneteenth celebrations in the first place and what made them important. The keynote speaker at Galveston’s 1871 Juneteenth fête, Richard Wilson, founder of Texas’s first African American newspaper, made this point optimistically: “95 years ago American Independence was declared and five years ago that sweet sound reached our ears in the Proclamation. [...] Let us this day renew our love of that spirit which came hovering over our heads in the words of our Declaration of Freedom...”[5]
 
The message Blacks conveyed during Juneteenth therefore was double-headed:  They applauded the national birthright of American citizens to freedom, finally extended to them by the official emancipation of enslaved people. They also asserted the need for a fuller, complete emancipation—African Americans’ unimpeded access to all citizenship rights. Recognizing that the original Juneteenth was a delayed fulfillment of Black liberation, they pledged themselves each year to the attainment of this goal.
 
The double-sided dimension of African American holidays like Juneteenth was preceded in free Black community life throughout the American North even prior to the Civil War.  Following general emancipation in New York State in 1827, for instance, Black and white abolitionists held August commemorations of an earlier Emancipation Day—the 1834 liberation of enslaved people in the British Empire, particularly the British Caribbean—even as they pressed for a similar move within the United States and for egalitarian treatment of free blacks in the country outside of the South. As one example, Frederick Douglass addressed an Emancipation Day crowd on these themes in Poughkeepsie in 1858.[6] The twin ideals of American freedom and racial equality, vaunted in the antebellum and postbellum years, are reasserted nationally in the new iteration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
 

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[1] Andrew Weber, “A Look Back at the 150-Year History of Juneteenth in Texas,” KUT 90.5, June 17, 2015 https://www.kut.org/austin/2015-06-17/a-look-back-at-the-150-year-history-of-juneteenth-in-texas, accessed June 14, 2022; Isaiah Mitchell, “Today in Texas History:  Juneteenth Becomes a Native Holiday,” The Texan, June 19, 2021, https://thetexan.news/today-in-texas-history-juneteenth-becomes-a-native-holiday/.  Accessed June 14, 2022; Austin Parks Foundation, “Celebrating Juneteenth: Austin’s Historically Black Parks.” June 18, 2020, https://austinparks.org/celebrating-juneteenth-black-austins-historically-significant-parks/, accessed June 14, 2022; Texas State Historical Association, “Mattie B. Haywood White, Handbook of Texas, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/white-mattie-b-haywood, accessed June 15, 2022.

[2] The Galveston Daily News, June 20, 1905.

[3] Virginia Humanities, “Juneteenth,” Encyclopedia of Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/juneteenth/, accessed June 14, 2022;  Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, Robert P. Winthrop, Richmond's Monument Avenue. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press).

[4] Roselyne M. Jua, “Ralph Ellison and the Paradox of ‘Juneteenth,’” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (January 2005), 310-313.

[5] “Speech of the Hon. Richard Wilson on the Anniversary Celebration of Emancipation, June 19, 1871,” The Representative, Vol. 1, No. 6,, June 26, 1871,    https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth203066/m1/3/?q=emancipation, Accessed June 18, 2022.

[6] The Portage Sentinel, August 6, 1845; The Liberator, August 14, 1847; Poughkeepsie Journal, July 28, 1849; The Liberator, August 6, 1858.