Calendar photo caption: After surviving enslavement and the Civil War, Harry and Eliza Stephens and their five children pose for a portrait in 1866. (G. Gable/Gilman Collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art)
On June 19, 1865, more than two months after the Civil War ended and two years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in states that were in rebellion, Union soldiers arrived in Texas to tell 250,000 enslaved people that they were free.
Enslavers in the states where the proclamation applied avoided emancipation by forcibly moving more than 150,000 enslaved Black people to Texas between 1862 and 1865. Elvira Boles, a formerly enslaved woman, lost her baby during the journey to Texas from Mississippi. "We was free and didn' know it," she said. After the June 19 announcement, Ms. Boles's enslaver just "turned us loose in [the] world, without a penny."
It was not uncommon for enslavers to abandon formerly enslaved people with no resources. In some Texas counties, enslavers hid the announcement for nearly a year until the Army reached the entire state. Some enslavers killed Black people rather than allow them to be free.
Black people were often punished for leaving their enslavers after learning of their freedom. In fact, the Juneteenth order paved the way for Black Codes, laws that made it a crime for a Black person to leave a plantation or change employers without permission and criminalized standing, walking, and talking with other Black people in public. "The freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages," the order read, adding that "they will not be supported in idleness, either there or elsewhere."
On June 19, 1866, formerly enslaved people in Galveston first celebrated the Juneteenth holiday. Not until 2021, after 155 years of racial terror, segregation, and injustice, was Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday.
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