The History of Juneteenth

It's Friday, June nineteenth. It's Juneteenth. If you have the day off, you probably know it's connected to the end of slavery. Most people know that much. But if someone asked you to explain what actually happened on June 19, 1865, you'd probably say something like "that's when enslaved people in Texas found out they were free." I would have said the same thing. And it's not exactly right. The popular version of the story is that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 and it took two and a half years for the news to reach Texas because it was so remote. Like it was a communication problem. Like the mail was slow. The real story is different and, in a lot of ways, harder to sit with. The slaveholders in Texas knew. Many of the enslaved people knew. What was missing wasn't information. It was someone with enough soldiers to walk in and make the slaveholders stop. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. But it's worth understanding what it actually said, because most people assume it freed all enslaved people in the country. It didn't. Lincoln's proclamation specifically applied only to enslaved people in states that had seceded from the Union, the Confederate states. It deliberately excluded enslaved people in border states like Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri that had stayed loyal to the Union. The president freed the people he had no jurisdiction over and left enslaved the people he did. The logic was political: Lincoln couldn't risk pushing the border states toward the Confederacy by abolishing slavery there. So the Emancipation Proclamation was, in practice, a military strategy as much as a moral statement. It told the Confederacy "your labor force is legally free," which encouraged enslaved people to escape to Union lines and weakened the Southern war economy. But it left slavery legally intact in Union territory.

In the Confederate states, enforcement depended entirely on the presence of Union troops. As the Union army advanced through the South, enslaved people were liberated in the areas the army controlled. But Texas was the farthest western Confederate state, separated from the main theaters of the war by hundreds of miles. The Union had tried to invade Texas through Galveston in 1863 and been repelled. After that defeat, there was minimal Union military presence in the state for the rest of the war.

This made Texas a refuge for slaveholders who wanted to keep their enslaved people in bondage. Thousands of slaveholders from other Confederate states moved their enslaved workers to Texas precisely because it was the hardest place for the Union to reach. The enslaved population of Texas actually grew during the war as slaveholders fled westward with their human property. By June 1865, there were over 250,000 enslaved people in Texas, many of whom had been forcibly relocated from states where they would have been freed years earlier. On June 18, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston, Texas with roughly 2,000 troops. The next day, June 19, he stood at the Osterman Building on Strand Street and read General Order No. 3: "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free."

The popular narrative treats this as a moment of discovery, like Granger was delivering news that nobody in Texas had heard. But that framing misses the point. The slaveholders knew about the Emancipation Proclamation. Many of them had literally moved to Texas to avoid it. And many enslaved people knew about it too. A formerly enslaved man named Felix Underwood later said, "Oh, we knowed what was goin' on in it all the time. We had papers in them days, just like now." The information wasn't the issue. The power to enforce it was.

What Granger brought to Galveston wasn't a scroll with news on it. It was 2,000 soldiers with bayonets. His role wasn't to inform. It was to enforce. For two and a half years, the law had said these people were free, and the slaveholders had simply refused to comply because there was nobody there to make them. Granger's arrival was the moment that refusal stopped working.

And even then, the liberation wasn't instant. Some slaveholders withheld the information from their enslaved workers until after the harvest season, squeezing out one last round of free labor before complying. Others responded with violence. Freed people who tried to leave were attacked and in some cases killed. Freedom had been declared. Enforcing it was a different matter entirely.

The full text of General Order No. 3 is also worth reading carefully, because even the document that freed a quarter million people managed to tell them to go back to work. The order stated that freed people were "advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages" and that "they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere." The liberation order itself told the newly freed to stay on the plantations and labor for the people who had enslaved them, just now for pay. The celebrations that followed June 19, 1865 became the foundation of what we now call Juneteenth. Freed people in Texas gathered annually to mark the anniversary, calling it "Jubilee Day" or "Emancipation Day." But they weren't allowed to celebrate in public parks or public spaces, because local governments prohibited it. So freed communities pooled their money and bought their own land. Emancipation Park in Houston was purchased in 1872 for a thousand dollars by a group of formerly enslaved people specifically so they'd have a place to celebrate. They had to buy the right to be happy in public.

Full abolition didn't come until December 6, 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified, nearly six months after Juneteenth. The amendment banned slavery everywhere in the United States, including the border states Lincoln's proclamation had left untouched. And even then, not every state ratified it right away. Mississippi didn't officially ratify the 13th Amendment until 2013. That's not a typo. The state that was home to some of the largest slave plantations in American history didn't formally agree to ban slavery until eleven years ago.

Juneteenth celebrations spread across the country as Black Texans migrated to other states, but for most of the twentieth century it remained a community celebration that the broader American public knew little about. That changed in 2021, when Congress passed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. We covered this in our Memorial Day episode: it was signed into law on June 17, two days ago, and it moved from Senate passage to presidential signature in three days, making it the fastest creation of a federal holiday in modern history. It was propelled by the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

The thing I keep coming back to is the gap. Not just the two-and-a-half-year gap between the proclamation and the enforcement, but all the gaps that followed. The gap between the 13th Amendment and Mississippi ratifying it: 148 years. The gap between Juneteenth as a Black community celebration and Juneteenth as a national holiday: 156 years. The gap between the law saying people are free and the reality matching the law. That gap has been a recurring theme on this show, from the Indian Citizenship Act to Loving v. Virginia. The law says one thing. The enforcement takes decades. The culture takes longer. And the people who are supposed to benefit from the law spend the waiting period buying their own parks because nobody else will let them celebrate. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas with 2,000 troops and announced that the 250,000 enslaved people in the state were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier, but it only applied to Confederate states and could only be enforced where Union troops were present. Texas was the farthest Confederate state from Union lines, and slaveholders had been moving their enslaved people there specifically to avoid emancipation. The popular story says enslaved people didn't know they were free. Many of them did. The slaveholders definitely did. What was missing wasn't information. It was enforcement. Even after Granger's order, some slaveholders withheld freedom until after harvest. The liberation order itself told freed people to stay on the plantations and work for wages. Full abolition didn't come until the 13th Amendment in December 1865. Mississippi didn't ratify it until 2013. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, 156 years after the first celebration. The distance between a law being written and a law being real has never been as short as it should be.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.