Article June 18, 2001 Issue

Juneteenth: a celebration of freedom

African Americans in Texas didn't learn about their freedom until two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

Sentinel staff

Reading about President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, you might assume that people who'd been enslaved in the American South knew immediately that they were free on January 1, 1863, when the Proclamation took effect. You might assume that they had access to the kind of instant news we have.

In reality, it took quite a while for the news to filter out to people. And not all of them were able to claim their freedom immediately. Slave owners hid the information or twisted it so that their slaves were afraid to leave. Some slaves honestly didn't know where else to go or how to find employment. With the nation still in civil war, travel wasn't easy or safe.

So it's not surprising that African Americans in Texas didn't learn about their freedom until two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In fact, it wasn't until Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed in Galveston on June 19, 1865, that people learned not just that the Civil War had ended but also that all slaves had been set free.

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