EXACTLY 150 YEARS AGO, on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops and issued 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.
This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The proclamation Granger referred to was, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed two and a half years earlier but which had been impossible to enforce until the end of the Civil War.
At the time of the order, there were approximately 250,000 slaves in Texas. Over the following years many of them left rural plantations for rapidly growing urban areas like Houston, Austin and San Antonio, where they continued holding annual celebrations every year on June 19—Juneteenth, as it became known.
In 1872, a group of African American ministers in Houston helped raise money from the community to purchase a 10-acre plot of land in the Third Ward, which they named Emancipation Park.
It has served as the cultural center of the city’s African American community, and the site of Juneteenth celebrations, ever since.
