An Introduction to Juneteenth

Juneteenth is the most widely recognized, long-lived Black commemoration of slavery’s demise. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when federal troops commanded by General George Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim freedom to the state’s Black residents. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two and a half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 Black men had enlisted in the fight. As one former enslaved man recalled, “the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free. . . . And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.”

Celebrations continued in 1866 with church services where ministers and educators reminded parishioners of the solemn beauty of the occasion, of their duty as emerging citizens, and their profound right in the pursuit of legal equality, themes that continue to resonate in Juneteenth commemorations. Juneteenth quickly became a counter-narrative to the displays of Confederate glorification of the Lost Cause.

Juneteenth pageants reminded audiences of slavery and revolts, the sorrow songs, abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, the Underground Railroad, Booker T. Washington, and northern philanthropy. Photographs of Juneteenth depict Black Civil War veterans, some in uniform. Pageants in the early twentieth century marking Juneteenth included “Born to be Free.” Even in a time of Jim Crow and violent terrorism, spirituals such as “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” infused hope in dark times. Juneteenth celebrants enjoyed picnics, barbecues, baseball games and other sports. They decorated carts and later automobiles with flowers.

After a lull in such festivities in the World War II period, Juneteenth’s spread was amplified by the migration of Black Texans across the nation. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the organizers of the Poor People’s March connected their effort with Juneteenth. The march ended with a ceremony attended by about 50,000 at the Lincoln Memorial on June 19, 1968. In 1973, the Reverend C. Anderson Davis, former president of the Houston NAACP, began a campaign to revive Juneteenth as “Emancipation Day” in Texas. The Black Lives Matter movement further pushed the significance of Juneteenth and led to the establishment of a federal holiday in 2021.

Graham Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University. He is the author of Slavery, Freedom, and Culture (1998), Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (1999), and Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (2018).