Blog Post #8: “Juneteenth! Why Did It Take So Long for Enslaved Texans to Be Freed?”

The name of the holiday Juneteenth is a combination of the words “June” and “nineteenth.” Two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Union Army Major-General Gordon Granger read an order to the people of Galveston, Texas, that stated: “[F]rom the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” The date was June 19, 1865.

The order delivered by Granger was meant to free the 250,000 Black people still enslaved in Texas, who had not yet been given the news by their white owners that they were legally emancipated.

Why had it taken so long for Texans to be notified? The Union Army was not in control in this state, and some of those in power deliberately withheld the information of the emancipation in order to keep the economic rewards of slave labor in place for slaveholders.

Not All Black Texans Were Immediately Freed

Louis Henry Gates wrote: “[The order] wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news … and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay ‘Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,’ in ‘Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.’”

According to some accounts, there were people who continued to be enslaved up to six years after Gordon Granger’s reading of the order. Although almost all of those who had been enslaved were eventually “freed,” Black people in Texas as well as in other states and territories had no rights and still faced violence, impoverishment, and discrimination.

Note: A significant number of Mexicans and Native Americans who were enslaved in the Southwest were not freed immediately after Granger’s order but were later on.

It Was Not the Only Time! White People Have Often Not Followed Laws That Were Supposed to Benefit Black Communities

Many times throughout U.S history, even when a law has been passed that was supposed to benefit Black people (in this case, an important proclamation about freedom), it was not carried out in a timely manner or was not followed as intended — if it was followed at all—by the white people in charge. Or it was not actually of benefit to Black people: For instance, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act supported by President Clinton was said to be aimed at helping communities of color be safer from drugs and violence. In reality, however, through punitive measures such as harsher mandatory minimum sentencing and “three-strikes” laws, the act actually led to a surge in racial profiling and the disproportionate incarceration of Black people. Many Black activists, aware of the racist tendencies of the mostly white people in charge of enforcing of these measures, were not surprised by the results.

Juneteenth Becomes a National Holiday

Every year, Juneteenth celebrations are held across the country. Six states (including Texas) have made the day an official state holiday, and all but three recognize it in some fashion. However, it wasn’t until this week that the Senate, facing pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement and many others, passed a resolution establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The measure must pass the House and be signed by President Biden to become law.

Hashtags: #juneteenth. #juneteenth2021. #blacklivesmatter