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North East Digital Village
Juneteenth
BACK TO COMMUNITY CELEBRATIONS
TO THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
"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, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor. The freed 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."
General Order #3 (Read by General Gordon Granger, "19th of June", 1865 Galveston, TX)
www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/JJ/lkj1.html
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000 slaves in Texas. The tidings of freedom reached slaves gradually as individual plantation owners read the proclamation to their bondsmen over the months following the end of the war. The news elicited an array of personal celebrations, some of which have been described in The Slave Narratives of Texas (1974). The first broader celebrations of Juneteenth were used as political rallies and to teach freed African Americans about their voting rights. Within a short time, however, Juneteenth was marked by festivities throughout the state, some of which were organized by official Juneteenth committees.
Juneteenth has been celebrated through formal thanksgiving ceremonies at which the hymn "Lift Every Voice". Public entertainment, picnics, and family reunions, dramatic readings, pageants, parades, barbecues, and ball games are all part of traditional Juneteenth celebrations.
www.ashbrook.org/books/ellison.html
Author Ralph Ellison's, Juneteenth,
Juneteenth draws on the full richness of America's black cultural heritage, from the dazzling range of vernacular sources in its language to the way its structure echoes the call-and-response pattern of the black church and the riffs and bass lines of jazz. It offers jubilant proof that whatever else it means to be a true American, it means to be "somehow black," as Ellison once wrote. For even as Juneteenth's, racist Senator Sunraider was bathed from birth in the deep and nourishing waters of African-American folkways, so too are all Americans.
www.19thofjune.com
The campaign to establish Juneteenth Independence Day as a National Holiday continues to gain great momentum as Juneteenth State Holiday Bills are being introduced throughout the country.
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