For Blacks, <i> Freedom </i> Was Just Another Word

Freedom came to slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, almost three years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the end of the Civil War.

Why did so much time pass before the slaves were freed? First of all, the proclamation applied only to those states within the Confederacy, so it had no practical effect until each state came back under federal control. For Texas, that wasn’t until Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 (although the state wasn’t readmitted to the union until 1870).

But myth offers two other versions, according to William Wiggins, associate professor of Afro-American Studies at Indiana University. He said one legend has it that Lincoln dispatched a messenger by mule, which took two years to travel all the way to the Lone Star State, the last bastion of the Confederacy; the other is that he sent the message by a black man who was killed en route.

History, however, shows that Texas slaveholders were reluctant to accept the proclamation. Alwyn Barr, author of “Black Texas: A History of Negroes in Texas from 1528-1971,” wrote that some East Texas newspaper editorials in the summer of 1865 “urged slaveholders to maintain control over their slaves and opposed the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. . . . Some slaveholders continued to hold their slaves well into the fall of 1865.”

Texas legislator Al Edwards will return on June 19 to the Ashton Villa in Galveston, Tex., where Union Gen. Gordon Granger read the following words: “The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves . . . .”

Edwards will first read the Emancipation Proclamation and then read the bill he authored in 1979 that made June 19th a Texas holiday.

June 19 is only one freedom celebration day. Descendants of slaves in Georgia, Alabama and Kentucky celebrate on Jan. 1, May 28 and Aug. 8, respectively.

For information on Juneteenth celebrations across the country, call Juneteenth U.S.A. at (713) 741-1900.