How the Civil Rights Movement Revived Juneteenth Celebrations

On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops, many of them Black, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and ensure that enslaved people were freed. Texas was the last Confederate holdout of the Civil War, giving June 19 broader significance as the effective end of slavery in the United States.

African Americans in Texas were quick to commemorate the anniversary of their freedom. As early as 1866, Emancipation Day events were held in communities across the state and grew in popularity in the years after Granger and his troops arrived in Galveston. Yet, the holiday we now know as Juneteenth might have faded away if not for the activists and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement a century after the end of slavery.

Not yet known as Juneteenth, Emancipation Day celebrations in 1866 started out partially as a military holiday, commemorating the defeat of enslavers in the Civil War, explains Thanayi Jackson, director of the history graduate program at California Polytechnic State University. This reflected the reality of what made freedom possible for formerly enslaved people.

Although Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation famously outlawed slavery in the Confederacy, the wartime measure didn’t free anyone immediately, and it didn’t apply to slaveholding states that remained in the Union. “What it does mean is that now every time the Union Army wins somewhere in the South, they can implement freedom,” Jackson says.

As the Union gained ground, freedpeople began celebrating local Emancipation Days on the anniversaries of federal troops’ arrival in their communities. Some celebrated on January 1, the day Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. In Texas, celebrations took place on June 19, the day General Granger issued General Orders No. 3, announcing the end of slavery in the state.

The earliest Emancipation Day observances might have involved military reunions and veterans dressed in uniform. Other traditions included readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, freedpeople sharing stories, prayer, dancing, food and red soda water.

Freedpeople also began buying land, known as emancipation grounds, specifically for these grassroots celebrations. In 1872, a group of Black community leaders purchased 10 acres in Houston and called it Emancipation Park. What’s now Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia, Texas, became a celebration site in 1898, and another Emancipation Park was established in Austin in 1907.

June 19 Emancipation Days spread beyond Texas as Black Americans migrated across the country. Independent observances were held in parts of Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as Alabama, Florida and even California. But soon, broader social forces threatened to erase the tradition altogether.

As legalized segregation spread across the United States in the late 19th century, public observance of Emancipation Day became more difficult and, in some places, even dangerous. Jim Crow laws prevented Black Americans from celebrating in parks or public meeting spaces where they had once gathered, explains Alliah Agostini, author of The Juneteenth Story and The Juneteenth Cookbook.

In many places, Black people faced hostility, had property destroyed or were even lynched for openly celebrating their freedom, forcing celebrations to move to remote areas or stop altogether. In Austin, local festivities were disrupted when the city seized land purchased for Emancipation Park in 1938 and built a housing project on the site.

Segregated Southern schools also eroded awareness of Juneteenth among students. Some children learned about General Granger’s arrival in Galveston, but lesson plans rarely connected the historical event to the commemorative festivities it had inspired, explains Sehila Mota Casper, executive director and co-founder of Latinos in Heritage Conservation.

On June 19, 1968, more than 50,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t to celebrate Juneteenth, however. Civil rights activists and leaders had gathered for Solidarity Day, a rally that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign.

For the event’s organizers, the date was no accident. Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy and others sought to link the Poor People’s Campaign fight for economic justice and the broader goals of the Civil Rights Movement to the emancipation of formerly enslaved people and Juneteenth’s celebration of liberty. That day, speeches highlighted similarities between the struggle for emancipation and the ongoing fight for civil rights.

“This was the first time many of the tens of thousands of attendees, who came from all around the country, would learn about what had primarily been a Texan emancipation holiday,” Agostini says. It inspired attendees to begin celebrating Juneteenth, known as the nation’s second Independence Day, in their local communities.

“The big breakthrough was because the Civil Rights Movement was such a national movement,” Casper says. “[The] conversation wasn’t just being held in a region, like what used to be Confederate states.”

Telephones, newspapers and news broadcasts also helped spread the word. Prominent Black-owned publications began calling the day Juneteenth, a combination of “June” and “19th,” in the mid-20th century. The term first appeared in Ebony magazine in 1963 and in Jet magazine in 1975. Jackson says this suggests the June celebration date was gaining national prominence.

Largely due to the work of civil rights activists, Texas became the first to celebrate Juneteenth as a state holiday in 1980. State Representative Al Edwards, a lifelong activist, authored the legislation that made it happen. “Individuals that were really pushing for civil rights during that time…continu[ed] to tell that story [of Juneteenth] all the way up until it was recognized,” Casper says.

Fittingly, it was a Texan who was instrumental in making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Activist Opal Lee, known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” campaigned for decades. At 88, she began walking in symbolic 2.5-mile increments, representing the time it took for freedom to reach Texas after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. In 2016, she even planned to walk 1,400 miles from Texas to Washington, D.C., to deliver more than 1.5 million signatures supporting the holiday to Congress.

Finally, in 2021, in the wake of the racial reckoning of 2020 and renewed calls from Black Lives Matter activists, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. Lee was present when President Joe Biden signed the bill establishing Juneteenth National Independence Day into law.