With high anticipation, I boarded the Megabus in Austin bound for Houston.
I was off to spend the weekend with Gladys. I’d met her years ago at a meeting of mostly women, held in a tiny, airless kitchen, in South Austin. I was just starting my wholesale cookie bakery, and she was doing the same, except she was wholesaling delicious loaves of quick breads. As we discussed the rising price of butter with the other food entrepreneurs,
Gladys and I immediately clicked. By the time we left that meeting and walked into the cool evening air, we were friends.
That was thirty years ago.
And now I was going to visit her for the weekend, in LaPorte, Texas, a small coastal town just 30 minutes outside of Houston.
On my first night there, we took our drinks out to her sweet front porch and settled in for an evening full of deep belly laughs and storytelling. It was during that chat fest we decided to get up early the next morning, pack the car, and take the 45-minute trip to Galveston Island to see the sunrise.
It was so worth the 5am wakeup call. We were hours at the beach that day. And just before the searing sun made it impossible for us to stay any longer, we gather our things and headed for the town of Galveston.
And there for the first time I saw The Strand. Now a beautiful, breezy, cobblestoned area, filled with cute cafes, small stores, and curio shops. But before it was a tourist attraction, it was the site that declared freedom for enslaved people in Texas.
There are some holes for sure in this history with several accounts of what happened and why there was a delay in communication. But the most logical story seems to be that even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later.
Much later came almost two and a half years later in 1865.
It was then that U.S. General Gordon Granger flanked by over 2000 Union soldiers declared on the cobblestone steps at The Strand in Galveston, Texas that the more than 250,000 Texas slaves were indeed freed by executive decree.
Of course, that fateful day was June 19, 1865.
Shortened almost immediately to “Juneteenth,” the holiday honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday. Just last year on the 17th of June, President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a national holiday.
I didn’t know this history until I moved to Texas. I didn’t appreciate this history until my trip to The Strand at Galveston.
Black Texans have celebrated Juneteenth all of their lives. They remember marking the day with family prayers, neighborhood parades, and picnics in the park, all in commemoration of the history of our people in this state that I now call home.
Where I do not have a deep sense of nostalgia for Juneteenth celebrations, I have a newfound appreciation of its importance and we do indeed celebrate it in our home.
I am so curious to know your history with Juneteenth. Do you and your family celebrate it – if so, how? Tell us in the comments.
Oh, and btw – if you want to read more about the history of Juneteenth and some of the sources I used for this post here’s a good article and a video.
Have a happy, safe Juneteenth!
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