Juneteenth: A Story and a Reflection
A Story
On what was likely a hot day under the Texas sun in June, a yankee general stood out on a balcony in Galveston, the ocean breeze whapping at his tired face, and read aloud words to anonymous onlookers who had been waiting for this guy for weeks and weeks — what seemed like an eternity. He had come hundreds of miles to tell them something they already knew, but it was still special since this time when they heard the news he would be talking directly to them, about them, and more importantly than anything he would say from a balcony, General Gordon Granger’s presence in their city was evidence that it was all true — that after four years of war, after 337 years of slavery, that something the white man said was actually coming true this time — a promise kept.
The Civil War effectively ended on April 9th, 1865 at Appomattox with the surrender of the Confederate insurgency. And so, for the next two months, the good people of Galveston waited patiently for their conquerors to arrive is something you might read in a textbook written by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. What actually happened is more in line with debased human behavior, after having realized what came to be known later as the Lost Cause was lost, former Confederate soldiers and white locals set about in opportunistic anger to destroy the city they had been protecting for four years. Angry white mobs erupted in rioting and looting all over the South, but especially in Texas since there was no Union presence in the state. Texas, for much of the Civil War, had remained battle-less and peaceful, with its main role to supply the Confederacy with soldiers, weapons, and other goods it needed for the war effort.
In this way, New York-born General Granger wasn’t so much coming to Texas to free the slaves, he was coming to Texas to assert the will of the United States government and restore order in an area which had been abandoned by an illegal government that no longer existed. What he was getting into was a city that had descended into chaotic lawlessness beginning on April 20th when news of the Confederate surrender reached Galveston. Partly driven by petty revenge against the United States, and partly out of survival since Confederate soldiers were no longer going to be paid, looting and plundering began.
The mayhem went on for two months, unabated and every man for himself, and in a race against General Granger’s arrival and one’s own capacity for theft. Recently released-from-duty soldiers pillaged local storefronts and warehouses, Confederate Generals and higher-ranking officers divided official spoils i.e. property of the Confederacy, which amounted to anything they thought they could carry or load in personal caravans including weapons and supplies amongst themselves.
When there was nothing left to steal in the city, former Confederate soldiers held up then plundered a supply train before it reached the city. And in a similar incident, still-loyal Confederate soldiers were ordered to ensure the safe dockage and unloading of a cargo ship arriving in the port, only to arrive late and see the ship already being looted by locals, then join in themselves. Similar stories can be found from all over Texas at this time: white, angry looters turning violent in acts of essentially self-preservation after having the social contract that bound them to one another broken. A similar phenomenon happened across the South, and by most analysis hastened the end of the Confederacy with not only in-fighting but a general suspicion that the common good was no longer good enough — I’m going to protect me and mine only — a stance which doesn’t work for building racist or anti-racist societies.
For the black population of Galveston, we can only imagine what they thought when they watched from their windows the destruction being carried out by their white overseers. Maybe it looked like nothing at all to them, after all they lived in a kind of banal tyranny and were used to witnessing acts of destruction and ones that defied reason, and equally used to pretending it didn’t happen. It must have been with some timidity then that after two months of this violent chaos, they shuffled out to hear what General Granger had to say. By this time the riots had ended, not least because General Granger wasn’t taking any chances and had brought along with him 2,000 troops to back up his proclamation in the newly regained enemy territory. Even the Texas Governor in Austin, separated by an over-200-mile buffer between him and General Granger’s destination, didn’t feel safe or brave enough to stay and fled his own state for Mexico the day before General Granger arrived.
With Confederate soldiers having either left or gone into hiding, General Granger arrived on June 18th to the island city in shambles and deserted. The next day after arriving in the state, on June 19th, he walked out on the balcony and read several general orders to the crowd listening below, general orders for the way things were going to be from now on. His mere presence in the city had stopped the looting and restored order, already cause for celebration.
And so 71 days after the Civil War ended, General Granger was there, standing on the same balcony that many Confederate officers had stood on since he was reading from the former headquarters of the Confederate Army of Texas. It was a white man standing in a white man’s place, but this time he was saying something different. He had already given two orders, warming up his delivery for what would come next and be etched into time with General Order №3. It’s unlikely the anonymous people in the crowd below had ever heard a yankee accent, maybe it would come to sound like freedom to them:
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 personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly 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.
We are told from history that the black onlookers rejoiced. That the keep quiet part was not immediately heeded, and a joy and exultation followed the proclamation and carries straight through to today’s celebrations in some way. They had survived. Survived the anarchy, survived a war, survived generations as property and there was a narrow beam of light shining through a new crack in the white tyranny, the ruling apparatus they’d been born into and all they’d ever known. The sun must have felt good on that day, warm but not too hot, like an embrace after so much pushing away.
If there was skepticism in the crowd that heard General Granger’s proclamation, or any record of irony in telling black freedmen to be quiet when days before it was white mobs causing destruction in the streets, it doesn’t seem to be registered with history. But a black person standing in earshot of the balcony on that day that was at least a 35-year-old resident of Texas had already been free once in 1830, when then Mexican Texas outlawed slavery. Six years later, in 1836, they were enslaved again after the Texas revolution birthed the Texas Republic and at the very first meeting of the new nation’s congress slavery was enshrined in the constitution. The same would hold in 1845 when Texas joined the United States as a slave state.
But a story of skepticism is not what’s passed down from history — the formerly enslaved in the audience celebrated in the streets. They were free, or so they would have thought at the time. Not just from slavery, but from a different kind of tyranny, one that allowed the white majority to do whatever, whenever, as exemplified by the recent two-month riot. White society had a freedom from consequences, freedom from justice, and this wasn’t going to end overnight, but what did begin at least in that moment was a sense that something better was coming, and some white people cared about that something.
And so began the approximately 3,000 new lives of freedpeople in Galveston, about a fourth of the population of the city, since it was under immediate Union occupation. However, for many other black people in Texas, including the majority of them working cotton plantations farther north in East Texas, they would remain enslaved for months and even years afterward when their owners refused to release them. Over 200,000 black slaves were in Texas by the end of the Civil War, or about one in three Texans. Some had lived there for generations, and others had been recently brought as captives of their owners. During the war, since Texas had only been occupied after the war, many slave-owning families fled the deep South where the fighting was with their slaves in tow.
There was a reason General Granger showed up with 2,000 troops initially, and another 50,000 or so would soon follow. Restoring order in Texas, which also meant the new idea of ending slavery, had little to do with balcony-based proclamations and would have to be done the old-fashioned way, through swift righteous violence delivered upon those who got in the way of the government’s plan, which was simultaneously banal and revolutionary: all citizens will follow the law. General Granger’s order promised force, which at that moment was more important than freedom — people can be free on their own, but it would take force to get the white man’s boot off the black man’s neck.
It would go on for months like this, insurrections and skirmishes, leading to the deaths of at least 400 newly-freed black people in supposed uprisings, which put another way were massacres when compared to just 10 deaths of white people during the same events, in the same period. General Granger had effectively delivered only what historian Gregory Downs calls “promissory notes of freedom” — it would take a months-long extension of the Civil War, months after it had supposedly ended, to squash the Texas rebellion in one last struggle for slavery.
Early Juneteenth celebrations in this context should be seen as defiant acts of courage on the part of recently freed people. There was no guarantee, like we have now with the hindsight of history, that the white slaveowners wouldn’t somehow be able to regain control of the state or smaller, slaveholding fiefdoms. After all, still fresh in everyone’s memory was that the Confederacy had successfully repelled advances from the U.S. Army during the Civil War, nothing was taken for granted.
Like the East Texas slaveowners who refused to release their black slaves, and before Juneteenth was an agreed upon good thing by the board rooms of Nike and Twitter, it was not widely known among the white population and when it was it was usually to suppress the associated celebrations. Public parks, used by all citizens in free countries, could not be used in many cases for the first anniversaries of Juneteenth, at the time known as “Jubilee Day,” either through intimidation by local whites or through legal Black Codes also known as apartheid.
Early traditions for celebrating grew out of the necessary secrecy freedpeople needed to practice in order to remain safe. In early Juneteenth celebrations it was common to have a picnic beside a river or in the woods far out of town, as opposed to one’s own backyard, so that festivities could be relaxing and uninterrupted by either the white gaze or white violence. One can trace the establishment of some present-day parks, like Emancipation Park in Houston, to freedpeople pooling their funds together in order to purchase land specifically for Juneteenth gatherings where they wouldn’t be at the whims of white people to allow or disallow gatherings in supposed public parks.
Another park which is well-known for Juneteenth celebrations is Wright Cuney Park in Galveston, just down the street from the balcony where General Order №3 was read. Without the global pandemic known as COVID-19, which has like so many other calamities affected the black population in America disproportionately, this is one of the main places where Juneteenth would have been celebrated today in the city. The park is named for Norris Wright Cuney, a Texas-born slave who rose to prominence in Reconstruction-era Galveston after taking General Granger’s words not just as rhetoric, but as a mandate. The son of a white slaveowner and mixed-race mother, he wielded his light skin and privilege like the superpower that it is for the advancement of black Texans in the areas of labor, education, and voting. On this theme, the earliest celebrations of Juneteenth were held as voter registration and voter education drives, far from images of singing and merriment which may be conjured today. The nascent political power of freedpeople was being flexed for the first time and in what can be seen as one of Juneteenth’s earliest and most original traditions, it provided a time and place for political organizing.
Galveston held an allure for many former slaves, Cuney among them, who saw in the island city a beacon of freedom, just being in closer proximity to that historic day was enough to give people more hope and confidence that it wouldn’t all be suddenly taken back — if it was the first place to give freedom, maybe it would be the last to take it away. It became a destination for recently freed slaves who were looking for a place to begin their new lives. It also became a destination for freedpeople to come to from across the state every June 19th, a pilgrimage to that historic spot where their freedom was created out of the thin sea breeze.
Some freedmen got the hell of out of Texas and never looked back, to celebrate Juneteenth would not have made much sense to them, a painful reminder of the sorry place they came from and how they had been treated there. While others who were a generation or two removed from slavery set off west and north as part of the Great Migration beginning in the mid-1910s when over five million black people left Texas, Juneteenth celebrations meant carrying a little piece of home with them wherever they went. And so, as historian Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns (and my personal inspiration for writing this) Juneteenth celebrations began popping up in far-flung places like Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle. Many more of course stayed in Texas, not wanting to leave the only home they’d ever known. Leaving for many sounded like defeat, giving up on the intimate fight for a better life which had been fought through generations.
A Reflection
Juneteenth in 2020, given its timing this year amid much continuing racial injustice and resultant turmoil, may have reached its apex thus far in terms of popularity and awareness. People like me (a white man), and maybe you too, are taking serious notice of a holiday for the first time. Juneteenth, while in no way having to do with white onlookers like myself, still offers for me a reminder of a promise unfulfilled. It will take more than Google adding it to its list of U.S. holidays and therefore to our collective calendars to reverse the momentum of history with its brutal reach for black Americans, with the white hand or knee of injustice.
While Juneteenth is largely celebrated for its rhetoric as many modern-day white politicians and businesspeople have suddenly become aware of, General Granger as an extension of the U.S. government of 1865 wasn’t about rhetoric, he was about action. We, as white people, should understand that General Granger wasn’t just using his voice in a grand gesture for equality — that’s why he came with 2,000 troops and set up a plan to stamp out slavery wherever he found it. There seems to be a well-documented divide present day between what people are willing to say in support of a general movement like Black Lives Matter and what they are willing to do. Juneteenth came about from action, when the U.S. government heeded James Baldwin’s insight even 59 years before he was born, which was this: whatever white people do to black people they do to themselves because we are the same. The fate of the country is the fate of its black population, what will be redeemed by granting them freedom denied will be redeemed for us all. And it can be redeemed, an “absolute equality of personal rights” is still waiting to be delivered.
As a weary Union General, we can see Granger as a military man taking orders from his superiors, presumably an unwitting mouthpiece for historical justice. But as such a mouthpiece, he spoke for something that rarely speaks — the U.S. government. By the nature of its bureaucracy it is designed to say nothing. But here it was, nevertheless, with a captive audience that at that moment was still captive, saying something that it had to say because a dead President had said it two years before and this was after all an ongoing military operation to bring Texas back under the jurisdiction of U.S. authority. And he also couldn’t have known, with his proclamation at turns making promises and warnings, that he was participating in a cycle that continues today.
Whether General Order №3 was intended as a lifeless piece of military protocol or an aspirational promise, it was heard as the latter and therefore became cause for celebration for all who heard it. It continues to inspire today as an aspirational promise for those who seek for their government to fulfill the same 155-year-old promise. With protests and unrest across the U.S. at this moment, it’s clear that yet again some are asking, others demanding, the promise be kept, and the waiting period is over.
We may not get invited to the barbeque, as white people, but we can like Cuney use our whiteness for good. As writer, activist, and comedian Baratunde Thurston recently said on a podcast, “Start asking questions about your own relationship with what it means to be white, with the unearned privilege. It’s not a negative thing, but it’s a true thing. And what else you could do with it besides feel bad about it. Feeling bad about your superpower helps no one. Superman doesn’t mope around about his super strength. He uses it to help people.” Hopefully this doesn’t lead to an embarrassment of white savior complexes, but what Thurston said rings true. No one likes a moper, be like Cuney, who with what whiteness he had transformed it into incredible gains for black people in a short amount of time. Imagine what you could do with your superpowers to lift up and speak out for black justice.
There have been many martyrs for the cause of freedom from white tyranny, and the latest one who captured our attention is George Perry Floyd Jr. In his imperfect way, Floyd’s life is a testament to the work that’s still left to be done, that a man can be executed in the street by a government that freed his ancestors 155 years ago is not just a single tragedy, it’s a society whose rotting moral core produces tragedies, and in this way will continue to cause the deaths of countless others. And something happens when tragedies are seen to be manufactured rather than appearing one day on social media, when they’re manufactured they are not inevitable, they are co-created, predictable, purposeful, and preventable.
A two-year-old Floyd would move with his mother in 1975 to another place honoring Cuney’s legacy, Cuney Homes, a public housing complex in Houston, a city where Cuney had briefly lived as a slave. As we know, Floyd grew up to become a martyr for black justice. Floyd is back home in Texas now, buried next to his mother in Pearland, a short 45-minute drive to Galveston where Juneteenth began with a promise of freedom that can still be revoked on a whim in Minneapolis in 2020.
Juneteenth celebrates a promise of a better life, which at the time was imagined perhaps to be fulfilled completely, and in that moment, maybe it was. The celebrators on that 1865 day couldn’t have known about the white forces that would align against them in Jim Crow, segregation, mass incarceration, and many other systematic movements to curb the gains proclaimed from a Galveston balcony and fought for in the backwoods of East Texas. But Juneteenth is the beginning of something, they saw something that white Americans had never seen before because it’s not possible to fully know it if it’s never been taken away — they were born again in freedom.
You can ask people to apologize if you want it in words, you can ask them for anti-racist policies if you want it in action, and you can ask them to remember every so often, like Juneteenth does annually — remembering is how we got here and if there is a pathway out, it will lead us there. To borrow again from Downs, we now have an opportunity, as with any anniversary or ritual, to celebrate our gains, sustain our hopes, assess our defeats, and plan paths forward.
Juneteenth, for me, a white man, is about remembering but also imagining what could be. There are many, many stories from the past to tell which I hope we all have long lives to be able to write and read and tell, but history is not past, we are living in it, and there are many more stories that will be told. What will those stories be about? Can we start writing one now, now that we know it begins on a Texas balcony on June 19th, 1865, one that makes the promise contained in General Order №3 ring truer when we meet back here next year?
