Galveston Island is a central location in Black history, since it was on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston that General Gordon Granger read out General Order Number 3 to the assembled crowd on June 19th, 1865, which announced that “all slaves are free.” Smith utilizes the location, which he visits during the island’s Juneteenth celebrations, as a springboard from which to discuss the complicated history of emancipation and its celebration. 

Smith emphasizes that General Granger’s famous announcement occurred two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation officially freeing all slaves held in the Confederacy and over two months after Robert Lee’s surrender, which marked the end of the war. Although all white slaveholders were informed that it was now illegal to own slaves, they almost unanimously conspired to keep this news from the slaves themselves. This meant that some Black Americans were still enslaved for months and years following General Order Number 3, an occurrence that was especially common in rural and isolated communities. 

Indeed, without Union officials and soldiers there to enforce emancipation, many slaveholders considered previous slaves who attempted to leave their properties as “runaways,” and many former slaves were killed while trying to exercise their new right to freedom and paid labor. Smith also recounts how there was little to no economic, political, or social support offered to those who had previously been held in bondage and how this forced many to continue living and working on plantations since they had no viable alternative.

This bloody and uneven transition out of emancipation is often overlooked in American history, as is how the post-war Reconstruction efforts quickly gave way to the Jim Crow laws designed to terrorize the Black community. During these years, Smith records how Juneteenth was often a melancholy reminder of a promise unfulfilled—a promise of freedom, equality, and liberty from white tyranny. Due to the atmosphere of the South in this period, where the KKK ran rampant and lynchings were all too common, Juneteenth celebrations were forced to become small, private affairs rather than the public commemorations they had been in the wake of the war.

Interestingly, Galveston Island, the same place where the freedom of all Texan slaves was announced in 1865, also became the place where Juneteenth began to make its public resurgence during the civil rights movement of the 1970s. In 1979, Texan legislator Al Edwards Sr. managed to pass House Bill 1016, which made Juneteenth an official state holiday. This landmark piece of legislation—the first public holiday memorializing Black history—paved the way for a revival of Juneteenth in the national consciousness, as well as paving the way for other national holidays like Martin Luther King Jr. Day (first celebrated in 198).

Smith quotes Frederick Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech in 1852, in which Douglass asserts that “the blessings in which [white people], this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed [by all . . . Fourth July is yours, not mine.” This statement echoes the epigraph of the chapter, which heralds Juneteenth as “our Independence Day.”

Analysis

The structure and content of this chapter strongly parallels the previous chapter on Blandford Cemetery and the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Memorial Day celebrations. By drawing this comparison, Smith highlights how although the Confederates ultimately lost the Civil War, and how their descendants feel as though ancestors do not receive the same recognition as their Union counterparts, the outcome of the war had a minimal impact on the white community. White people’s superiority within the racial caste system, although temporarily threatened by Reconstruction ideology, was swiftly reinforced through the introduction of the Jim Crow laws.