Juneteenth: tracking the progress of an emancipation celebration - Juneteenth emancipation celebration in southwestern states to commemorate the end of slavery in the US

Ain't no more Juneteenth like it used to be; When Abe Lincoln writ a letter settin all the black folks free. Ain't no more big picnincs, by the riverside, Whdre we sang "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" 'Til we all broke down and cried.

Juneteenth--the Southwestern emancipation celebration that is now celebrated by African Americans in all regions of the United States--has been making a slow but steady comeback since its decline in the 1940s. The celebrating is said to have begun on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas, with a regiment of Union Army soldiers and read General Order Number 3, which began with two memorable sentences: "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 rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer."

That historical pronouncement inspired the newly freed ex-slaves to coin a nickname for their cause for celebration--a blend of the words "June" and "nineteenth"--and to create several legends that explain the 2 1/2-year delay in the arrival of the news of emancipation in Texas. "My 86-year-old father swears that an ex-Union soldier (Negro) rode a mule from Washington, with a message given him by Abe Lincoln, yessuh, all the way to this section of the country," wrote Haywood Hygh Jr., who now resides in Compton, Calif. "And when he got to Oklahoma, he informed the slaves that they were free. From the there he went to Arkansas and Texas. It was the 19th of June when he arrived in Oklahoma."

The stories that Juneteenth celebrants tell vary. For example, Francis Stroup of Chicago contends that Juneteenth celebrants like Hygh's father, "who attributed the delay in receiving the word to slow travel on mule back, are at odds with the conventional wisdom in Texas, which holds that the message came by boat to Galveston and was diffused from there."

Another legend tells the tale of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas. Yet another claims that federal troops waited for slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.

If nothing else, the legends are indicative of the wide geographical spread of Juneteenth celebrations, and the tradition has always been strongest in Texas. Juneteenth is observed in the southeastern Texas cities of Galveston and Orange, up to the northeastern region, in such towns as Texarkana and Sherman. Big Juneteenth celebrations are also held in Fort Worth, Dallas and Houston. In 1872, the Rev. Jack Yates led a successful $1,000 fund-raising drive to purchase Emancipation Park, 10 acres of land located a few miles from downtown Houston. In 1898 the local 19th of June Organization purchased Booker T. Washington Park, another traditional Juneteenth celebration site, located in Mexia, near Waco, Texas.

Rupert Secrett of Brenham, Texas, recalls the friendly "hurrahing" between Juneteenth celebrants in Texas and Louisiana: "The people in Lousiana didn't know they was free until the people from Texas came over and told 'em." Southwestern Arkansas is another area into which the Juneteenth tradition spilled over.

Juneteenth began its expansion beyond Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas soon after its initial celebrations. In the 1800s a significant number of ex-slaves, driven by the collapse of Reconstruction, carried the cultural baggage of Juneteenth along with their meager possessions when they migrated out of the tristate area into the Western territories in search of a fresh start. As they made their homes in areas that would eventually become the states of Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, they established new Juneteenth celebration sites.

Elva S. Riggins described in a letter one of the new Juneteenth celebrations that she attended as a little girl growing up in Muskogee, Okla.: "The |town folks' celebrated by coming out into the rural areas, preferably by a creek, where they could fish and picnic in a shaded area. (We had no access to public parks.) We always had a 5-gallon freezer of store-bought ice cream, and Mama baked huge layer cakes, blackberry cobblers, fried chicken, and we boiled corn in a huge, black wash-pot. Picnic lunches were usually the fried-chicken-potato-salad-light-bread-and-pink-lemonade-in-jugs affairs. Beverages ranged from red soda-pop (a brand known as Knee-High was very popular), |bootleg' whiskey in fruit-jars, and |home-brew.' I seem to recall an intoxicant that was not aged as long as |home-brew'; it was called |Sister-get-you-ready'!

"Unfortunately, June 20th found our community buzzing with gossip--|Who got stabbed with an icepick?' or news of someone else up with a straight-edge razor or knife known as a |Dallas Special.'"

The second western mass migration of African Americans from the three original Juneteenth-celebrating states, into Arizona, California and Washington, was triggered by their flight from the Great Depression of the 1930s and their attraction to high-paying jobs during the World War II era.