The Northeast Community Coalition will again sponsor the annual Juneteenth Freedom Walk at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 23, that will begin and end at the Alston-Massenburg Center on North Taylor Street after winding along East Juniper Avenue to North Franklin Street and the site of the historic DuBois School and then to North Allen Road and back to East Juniper with history lessons along the way.
After the walk at the Alston-Massenburg Center there will be food, activities, music and water spray fun for the children.
Juneteenth celebrates the way enslaved people in Texas learned the Civil War had ended and they were free – and is more generally a celebration of all people’s freedom from slavery.
Texas was very isolated during the war. The news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 moved slowly, and did not reach Texas until May 1865. The Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2. On June 18, Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops to occupy Texas on behalf of the federal government. The following day, standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, Granger read aloud the contents of General Order No. 3, announcing the total emancipation of those held as slaves:
“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 freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
