June Teenth
Today, June 19th, is better known in the south as June Teenth.
I was born in Texas but it was not until I was an adult that I ever heard about the holiday. And my family was as racially progressive as anyone could be in the fourties and fifties. It was simply something that was ignored by white folks. Every black in the south, and particularly Texas, knew however.
On the 19th of June 1865, thirty months after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it was read for the first time in Galvaston, Texas. For the first time - belatedly - the blacks in Texas learned they were no longer slaves.
Questions --- so many questions remain.
I was born in Texas but it was not until I was an adult that I ever heard about the holiday. And my family was as racially progressive as anyone could be in the fourties and fifties. It was simply something that was ignored by white folks. Every black in the south, and particularly Texas, knew however.
On the 19th of June 1865, thirty months after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it was read for the first time in Galvaston, Texas. For the first time - belatedly - the blacks in Texas learned they were no longer slaves.
Questions --- so many questions remain.
posted by John Stone at 4:54 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home