In two fell swoops, the last Confederate State and the cornerstone on which its slave society was built collapsed on the shores of Galveston Bay.
On the Nineteenth of June in 1865, Union General Gordon Granger entered the Texas port city. There, in fulfillment of assassinated President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he proclaimed the liberation of the state’s 250,000 slaves and rendered all laws and acts of the secessionist government of Texas null and void.
The Confederate slavocracy was officially dead.
In commemoration of that day, Juneteenth has been celebrated continuously—though not consistently—ever since. The holiday languished as Jim Crow emerged in the South, but black migrants took the tradition with them as they fled north and west during the Great Migration. There was a revival during the Civil Rights era, and by 1980, Texas became the first to make Juneteenth a state holiday (Confederate Heroes Day was already on the books).
Mostly ignored in history books, Juneteenth wouldn’t fully enter the consciousness of white America until after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It became a federal holiday in 2021, with much of the corporate world and half the states following suit.
Today, millions of Americans find themselves with a paid day off every June—but with little understanding of what it means and how we got here.
Black Austin has celebrated Juneteenth since 1867, eventually even building Emancipation Park for the annual festivities. Last Saturday, the streets of East Austin were thronged with people attending this year’s Juneteenth parade. The parade route runs through my neighborhood, tracing the spine of what used to be Austin’s “Negro District.” The procession included congressmen, the mayor, several council members, county officials, various city agencies and emergency services, civic groups, corporate sponsors, marching bands, black fraternities, a blue Santa Claus, and a few cowboys. This being Texas, there were lots of vehicles in lieu of parade floats: pick-up trucks, a city bus, utility vehicles, ATVs, and a slew of lowriders rolled on by. Children rushed into the street as the drivers and their occupants slung candy from their windows.
It was part Halloween, part Macy’s Thanksgiving Day, part Fourth of July—and appropriately situated in the middle of Pride Month.
While the parade route was lined with cheering onlookers enjoying the festive atmosphere, the most poignant image was right at its head: four black men dressed in the blue uniforms of the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, carrying the American and Texas flags as they marched.
For a moment, squinting away the present in the unforgiving Texas sun, you could almost imagine a different history—one that didn’t take the murder of George Floyd to secure federal recognition of the holiday, one in which Juneteenth was more widely celebrated across racial lines.
That isn’t how it went, of course.
From the muddled message of the Juneteenth proclamation itself, you can already see where things might go off the rails. In General Order No. 3, General Granger declared:
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…
As joyous as these words were to the freed slaves, they were shocking to white Texans. Not only were the slaves free, but with the stroke of a pen they were to have equal rights—a stunning obliteration of the plantation economy and Southern way of life. But the order goes on:
…and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain 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.
Oh…perhaps not quite.
The order evokes an ambivalence about the status of the freedmen: they are free, but still tied to their former masters; they have an “absolute equality of personal rights,” but not of personal dignity or social standing. The freedmen were promised: your forty acres and a mule are coming (they were not), but in the meantime, good luck.
Emancipation was not a plan; it was only a necessary beginning to a brave but undefined new world. The country made a go of trying to be less ambivalent about it all during Reconstruction, but then it became ambivalent about Reconstruction, too. Lacking firmness in the right, it stopped striving to finish the work of binding the nation’s wounds. Then came de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation everywhere else, and so passed another century of the dream deferred.
Among the things America lost during the century after the Civil War was a chance for real racial integration, one in which black Americans were fully welcomed into American social, economic, and civic life. The apartheid terrorist regime of the South and the redlining of the North and West only deepened our collective ignorance about the past and each other. It’s a gap so wide that, even sixty years after the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s were passed and much progress made, we have yet to fully cross it.
Austin’s Juneteenth parade marches through a city where that chasm of history is both seen and unseen.
For instance, the parade route runs through historic black Austin along Chicon Street, past the site where Emancipation Park used to be—before the city seized it to build a New Deal-era housing project. But before Austin’s 1928 Master Plan shunted blacks into the “Negro District,” “Historic Black Austin” was just…Austin. To wit, in the years after the Civil War, emancipated blacks set up freedmen’s colonies throughout the city, a legacy that remains mostly in photos and placenames. The parade bypasses that part of black Austin—along with the white people who now live there.
Elsewhere, the history is hiding in plain sight.
Also on the East Side, two blocks away from the historically black Huston-Tillotson University, you’ll find the tomb of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, overlooking a field of 2,000 headstones marking the graves of soldiers who fought for the Stars & Bars. Further afield, on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, you’ll see several Confederate monuments erected in the mythologized “Lost Cause” era of the early 1900s. The Confederate Soldiers Memorial is literally a monument to fake history: a statue of Jefferson Davis stands atop an inscription that overstates the number of Confederate war dead, accuses the North of starting the war, and lies about its causes.
Further up the Grand Allée, there’s a monument to the heroes of the most famous battle of the Texas Revolution. We choose to remember the Alamo—and forget that Texas’s first war of secession was fought at least in part to preserve slavery from Mexican abolitionists.
At the capitol, tourists, state officials, and Texas school children file past monuments to a whitewashed, mythologized past—across town, an opportunity to actually learn something real about that history passes us by. Segregated from each other, the monuments and the parade don’t converse with each other in the present, yet they each tell a story about the very same past. One story is unfinished, the other is untrue.
Surely Juneteenth should be something that all Americans know something about—not merely why they’re getting the day off, but why it matters to all Americans, why the holiday is rightly called America’s Second Independence Day. This is our collective history. Juneteenth symbolizes the unfinished work of our nation and our struggle to fulfill the promise laid out in our founding documents: “that all men are created equal,” a truth that both history and the view from Monticello have continued to prove is not, in fact, self-evident.
The past is the story we choose to tell about it. The growing awareness of Juneteenth in America is an encouraging sign that we are getting closer to the truth. But while we can squint, the dead eyes of Jefferson Davis watch unflinching as a different truth marches on in the unforgiving Texas sun.