Juneteenth, a combination of the words June and nineteenth, is a commemoration of the end of institutional slavery in the United States held in Galveston, Texas. The U.S. Civil War had ended a month prior but news traveled slowly to the outermost territories, and when word arrived on June 19, the newly freed slaves celebrated wildly. Since 1865 the date has been traditionally celebrated by African Americans as a day to spend with family, picnics, special sermons, parades, and storytelling, and over time the holiday has spread to most of the states of the United States. It is a legal holiday in some states and there is a movement to recognize the date as a federal holiday. Juneteenth as a celebration has moved in and out of favor over the years, with its approval shifting in response to changes in the level of civil rights activism and economic prosperity among African Americans.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger issued the General Orders, Number 3 from the balcony of the Ashton Villa at the Union Headquarters District of Texas in Galveston. The location, which had been the site of the offices of the Confederate Army in the area, was thus an especially symbolic location for the proclamation’s reading. The orders informed the people of Texas that slaves were freed and established legal equality between the races. Former slaves now assumed a working, wage-earning relationship with their former masters. Newly freed men and women were to go unmolested and allowed to remain in their homes, but they were also advised not to congregate on military posts. The proclamation may have seemed basic and obvious to the major general, but due to the slow nature of communication in the era, it was news to many people, a cause for both celebration and conflict.
Texas, which was one of the later states to rejoin the Union, was not a battleground state, and many slaveholders from further East had, during the course of the war, fled to the largely peaceful state to establish new plantations. East Texas, for example, boasts planting conditions similar to those of northern Mississippi and Louisiana, and so was a good place for traditional Southern farming practices to migrate. Thus, the numbers of slaves in Texas had increased by more than 150,000 slaves by the end of the Civil War (Gates 2013). Contemporary accounts comment on the increased number of slaves being brought to the area. The number of slaves in the formerly independent Republic of Texas was around 250,000 slaves (Gates 2013).
It should be no surprise that given the large numbers of slaves, the reading of the proclamation of emancipation prompted immediate celebration. These included putting gunpowder into trees and lighting them on fire—an effective, if homespun, type of fireworks (Gates 2013). However, many freed slaves were cautious about overt celebrations because they still had few legal protections against being harmed by neighbors who did not share their sentiments. There are accounts of freed slaves who attempted to find better working conditions being whipped, shot, and lynched by less enthusiastic owners and neighbors. In one instance a woman, Katie Darling, remained a de facto slave to her former owner up to six years later from fear of being beaten (Gates 2013).
The news was not received with enthusiasm by slave owners and others who had vested interests in keeping the newly freed slaves in the dark about their new legal status. Some slave owners chose not to tell the freed slaves about their emancipation, delaying until after they could get their crops harvested with still-free labor (Myers 2014). A few former slaves immediately chose to leave the area and head to the North, without any pay or other compensation for their labors, hoping to reunite with their families (Gates 2013). Thus the Great Migration and the U.S. version of the Black Diaspora began.
It wasn’t until a year later, in 1866, that formal celebrations of Juneteenth began. Some freed men and women traveled back to Texas from other states to celebrate with family that had chosen to stay. They held picnics, often with traditional Southern foods, dressed in their finest clothing, read out loud from the Emancipation Proclamation, enjoyed religious celebrations, sang hymns, and listened to special sermons. In the following years, some cities would ban or simply oppose celebrations of Juneteenth on public grounds, which caused black leaders and community members to raise money to purchase areas specifically for such celebrations. These include Emancipation Park in Houston, purchased in 1872; what is now Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia; and Emancipation Park in East Austin (Turner 2007).
Changing economic prosperity in the years following, newly widespread Jim Crow laws, and sheer weariness often led to Juneteenth celebrations falling out of observance (Dingus 2001). It seems obvious, though, that the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s would eventually lead to resurgence in Juneteenth’s popularity. The Poor People’s March of 1968, a campaign to increase awareness of economic conditions in the United States, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, ended with the celebration of Juneteenth. Many of the leaders of the group carried their newfound knowledge of the celebration back to their home states, including states like Minnesota and Michigan (Luthern 2009). The movement to recognize and honor Juneteenth regained momentum, and in 1979 Texas legally proclaimed Juneteenth an official holiday, making it the first state in the United States to do so. In more recent years Texas representative Al Edwards led a movement to make it a federal holiday. The National Juneteenth Observance Foundation sponsors an official Juneteenth flag, which is designed with a large horizontal red stripe on the bottom, blue stripe on the top, and a white star, surrounded by a starburst, centered between the stripes.
Many of the foods of Juneteenth celebrations are traditional Southern foods, especially barbecue, but also smothered chicken, fried green tomatoes, sweet potato biscuits, red beans and rice, greens, fried catfish, fried okra, fruit cobblers, ice tea, and various red drinks, like strawberry soda. Red foods are said to be representative of the blood that was shed during slavery. These food traditions have garnered complaints that the holiday simply reinforces stereotypes from critics such as Representative Clay Smothers of Dallas County, who opposed the legislation in Texas declaring it a holiday on the grounds that the celebration was “fraudulent” and thus not worthy of recognition (Dingus 2001, 2). Supporters counter, however, that the date is the oldest historically grounded celebration of emancipation, and that traditional foods should be a part of the holiday.
Kimberly Ann Wells
See also Jumping the Broom; Playing the Dozens
Further Reading
Dingus, Anne. 2001. “Once a Texas-Only Holiday Marking the End of Slavery, Juneteenth Is Now Celebrated Nationwide with High Spirits and Hot Barbecue.” Texas Monthly. http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/independence-day/. Accessed September 7, 2015.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2013. “What Is Juneteenth?” The Root, the African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. PBS website. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/. Accessed September 7, 2015.
Litwack, Leon F. 1979. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf/Random House.
Luthern, Ashley. 2009. “Juneteenth: A New Birth of Freedom.” Smithsonian. June 19. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/juneteenth-a-new-birth-of-freedom-9572263/?no-ist=. Accessed September 7, 2015.
Myers, Ronald. 2014. “Juneteenth Movement.” National Juneteenth. http://www.nationaljuneteenth.com/Juneteenth_Movement.html. Accessed September 7, 2015.
Robinson, Cliff. “Juneteenth World Wide Celebration.” Juneteenth World Wide Celebration. http://www.juneteenth.com/history.htm. Accessed September 7, 2015.
Turner, Elizabeth Hayes. 2007. “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory.” In Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas, edited by Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, 143–176. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.