Today I remember my maternal ancestors and wonder what they were doing on this day in Mexia Texas when they heard these words:

“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.*

Were they in the field or in the kitchen or wondering barefoot in the Tehuacana Hills?
Were they silently reflecting or tearfully rejoicing for freedom from the yolk and lash of slavery in the dawn of Reconstruction?

Then in an act of betrayal white America imposed the New Slavery of sharecropping, convict leasing and now, the prison industrial complex

Today, as we celebrate our liberation from bondage we pledge to our ancestral spirits that their centuries of suffering and sacrifice will not be in vain and that we “will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

*Though the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on September 22, 1862, with an effective date of January 1, 1863, it had minimal immediate effect on most slaves’ day-to-day lives, particularly in Texas, which was almost entirely under Confederate control. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves. Legend has it while standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, Granger read the contents of “General Order No. 3”:

paz tomas 09