“The Juneteenth story is much more than one day, or one city. But this is where it started.”
From @josephinelee.bsky.social in 2024: Join us in getting to know the Galveston icon they call "Professor Juneteenth" …— Texas Observer (@texasobserver.org) June 18, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Around Galveston, Sam Collins III is better known as Professor Juneteenth.
For the past 20 years, Collins, 53, has devoted his life to educating the public about Juneteenth—the commemoration of June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger and his troops landed on the island. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Texas was then the last bastion of legal slavery. Granger read the orders freeing 250,000 enslaved Texans across Galveston, before traveling inland to proclaim freedom and the promise of “absolute equality”at plantations across Texas.
Today, Galveston is an open classroom for Juneteenth’s legacy, largely due to Collins’ efforts. He’s organized community members to get Juneteenth-related historical markers, murals, statutes, and public exhibits established. Collins worked together with Fort Worth’s Opal Lee to make Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. But he says that his work, as well as the promise of Juneteenth, is unfinished. He’s now trying to expand the story of Juneteenth’s legacy and bring it back home to Galveston with plans for an International Museum of Juneteenth in the port city. (A museum is also in the works up in Cowtown.)…
As a child, Collins attended parades and festivals in Galveston and nearby in his smaller hometown of Hitchcock. Celebrations were about family and community, but it wasn’t until he was older that Collins started learning more about the holiday’s history. In 2006, he gathered what he found and hosted his own Juneteenth celebration at the Stringfellow estate in Hitchcock, a former plantation that Collins had purchased and repurposed as a family home and space to present Black history. Six-hundred people attended that celebration.
That same year, Ronald Meyers, a Mississippi doctor who had since 1999 been championing a federal Juneteenth holiday, reached out to Collins for help. Through the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, Meyers worked with Opal Lee, who became the foremost representative of the national campaign, and Collins. Meyers died in 2018, before he saw his work realized. “He drove all across the country and sacrificed a lot of his personal resources, but his role in the movement has been forgotten,” Collins said.
It’s why Collins makes sure to mention Meyers and others who have fought for Juneteenth recognition. As early as 1879, Robert Evans, a Black state legislator from Navasota tried to get Juneteenth recognized as a state holiday. But that was two years after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and, along with it, the promises to protect the rights of Black Americans. It wouldn’t be until about a hundred years later, following the civil rights movement, that calls to fulfill the promise of “absolute equality” would be collectively renewed. Juneteenth finally became a Texas holiday in 1980.
Despite the work of Meyers, Lee, and Collins, among others, it would be the 2020 mass protests against racist police brutality that spread following the murder of George Floyd that would push the federal government to recognize Juneteenth. “That started a social movement, an uprising and awakening of consciousness. The National Juneteenth Observance Foundation had been trying to get recognition for 26 years, but no one was paying attention, until after what happened to George Floyd,” Collins said. After more than 150 years, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth bill in June 2021…
Quoting Frederick Douglass, Collins said that it’s an ongoing struggle to achieve “absolute equality,” just as it’s an ongoing struggle for Americans to reckon with their past. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground,” Douglass said at a speech in Canandaigua, New York, in 1857. “They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”
AM in NC – NO KINGS – Durham, NC (with the Durham images this time!)
rikyrah
Thank you for this post
Jackie
Great post, AL. I copied and sent to my high school aged grandsons. They won’t learn this at school.
H.E.Wolf
God bless all who worked to create this federal holiday.
cmorenc
Big tell that the Trump Admin is stubbornly determined to keep Columbus Day as celebration of Columbus arriving at San Salvador to begin ruthless exploitation of the native population rather than repurposing it as NA day, and at the same time, muffling any observation of Juneteenth except to the minimal extent that Juneteenth is a legislatively required day off for the federal workforce.
DEBG
Indeed an excellent read. Thank you for posting it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The general on the left, is that General Logan? I gather General Logan is like General Butler, a really effective abolitionist who got written out of history the Centralist who wanted to make nice with the Lost Causers.
prostratedragon
Thanks for the article, AL. I’ve shared it round and about.
WTFGhost
In Germany, they did right by their horrible past. The confronted it, said “this is a humiliating stain on our country’s history, and we will bury the causes, and celebrate our liberation from that horrible time!”
We never did. In fact, even today, people think that the wrong side won the civil war, by which they mean, they were okay with chattel slavery. You know what chattel slavery is? “My cuz, here, he likes little girls. You must have a young slave he can have sex with!” *THAT* is what chattel slavery is – watching your daughter be pulled away to become a sex toy for some pedophile.
Oh, that’s not all of it; it was wrong to eff an animal, but they found no problem with raping slaves. I mean, seriously, a mare was probably safer from being raped than a slave. Of course, that doesn’t include the back-breaking work, paid for with some food, and a shelter that does violence to both the word, and the occupants. Don’t forget, this was also in the South, where ordinary people didn’t want to live, because of the godawful summer heat, but slaves would be worked to death if the overseer wasn’t doctor enough to know who was actually sick from heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
But we don’t want to call it a national shame, and reject it totally. Not even today, 160 years later! If it’s not clear, it’s why I throw rape into the mix of slavery right away, so people can’t stammer and stutter that maybe it was okay, because, because, hominahominahomina.
Ocotillo
Oh Texas, the only state to take up arms and fight for the right to have slavery twice. One of the primary motivations of the Texas revolution was Santa Anna abolished slavery in Mexico in 1829.
Of course, Texas joined the confederacy in the War between the States.
As the Juneteenth story reveals, Texas held on to the slaves even after the Emancipation.
JML
local mayor made a nice statement about Juneteenth, immediately got attacked by the MAGA crowd with racial and homophobic slurs (mayor is white)…and then a white lady decided to weigh in and declare the Juneteenth was disrespectful to Native Americans over welcoming union troops to the state.
Oy. The internet is a sewer.
Except here.
cain
@WTFGhost:
Great comment. Indeed, the Germans understood what they were about and confronting it as something immoral is what we never did. In fact, we gave these insurrectionists grace instead of treating them as they should have been. This just shows that everyone was ok back then with slavery from an economic point of view. We have always been assholes. This is why Germany’s Nazi Party took so much of their inspiration from us. Yay us.
I fully believe that the Trump administration with their congressional allies will try to remove Juneteenth as a holiday because a) it’s the racist thing to do b) it was an accomplishment of Biden.
cain
@Ocotillo: Yet we must “remember the Alamo”
cain
Speaking of interesting reads, check out this one:
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/the-aba-declares-war
The entire Trump administration is being sued by the American Bar Association. Shots fired, folks! No more standing on the sidelines. Pages of people being sued at once.
cmorenc
OT, but today working out at the N Raleigh Y, I ran into a guy wearing a black D.O.G.E. Logo shirt, which also had the white-imprinted flag logo on it that is often used by more RW folks as a pet symbol. He didn’t fit the usual age profile of DOGE termites gnawing indiscriminately through the framework of the federal government – he was a white-haired guy apx 70 yo +/-. He was busy on an extended treadmill wearing headphones, so I didn’t get a chance to ask him to confirm that’s what the T-shirt meant, but OTOH who’d wear a T-shirt prominently displaying D.O.G.E. in these times if it meant anything else than that? Who knew? DOGE has a black t-shirt uniform.
Leto
On Juneteenth, she celebrates the role quilts may have played in Underground Railroad
Edith Edmunds, who is 99 years old, the art of quilt making is inextricably linked to the Black struggle for freedom. That’s why she plans to be sewing Thursday on Juneteenth.
Belafon
@WTFGhost:
I think people tend to skip over the important step: The world forced them and Japan to confront their past at the point of a gun.
Can we do it without being forced?
Edited
Baud
@JML:
Nominated.
@Belafon:
I do sometimes wonder about the alternate history where Hitler offers Europe holocaust services rather than seeking territorial expansion. It’s not like the victims of the Holocaust were well loved in other places.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The general on the left is Gordon Granger. Granger is best known for coming to Geoerge Thomas’s aid during the battle of Chickamauga.
For various reasons Granger got on Ulysses Grant’s wrong side during the subsequent Chattanooga Campaign, and was sidelined for a while. Later, General Canby employed Granger for the campsign against Mobile, and then sent Granger to Galveston to preside over the surrender of Confederate Texas.
John “Black Jack” Logan represented a House district in southern Illinois before the Civil War. Logan became a prominent “War Democrat” and served as general under Grant and then Sherman for most of the war.
opiejeanne
@Leto: Uh, no. The quilts leading to freedom is a great story that has been debunked, but I wouldn’t tell Edith that and hurt her feeltings.
WTFGhost
@cain: That is something I pondered. Every attorney in the Trump administration who has faced a court order, and disregarded it, is in clear violation of the law, and where the eff was the bar administration, in at least subtly mentioning that the law must be followed?
It’s one reason why Trump (no JD) is worse than Vance (who displays his JD instead of a name – anyone else want to see Mr. Howell disrespect “a *Yale* man” to Vance’s face, but, alas…?
Where was I? Right! Vance must respect a court order, or risk disbarment.
Trump can always play stupid, and say “I didn’t understand my attorneys to be telling me I can’t do that,” and try to get another bite at the illegal apple. An actual attorney isn’t allowed to say that, because they can’t blame an intermediary.
Josie
It’s ironic that Texas is where Juneteenth originated while, even as we speak, Republicans in the state are gearing up to create an even worse racial gerrymander than the one we suffer under now. Anglos make up barely 40% of the Texas population, yet Republicans own 25 of 38 congressional seats. You do the math.
cmorenc
@cmorenc: update on older dude with DOGE t-shirt – ran into him later in the Y locker room and he confirmed that yep- that’s a DOGE t-shirt he is wearing.
Maybe we should have NO KINGS t-shirts.
Jay
@Belafon:
Technically no. In both the French, British, American and Soviet Zones of Occupation, mid-level and low level Nazi’s were restored to office as it was the “fastest and easiest way to restore order”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
Leto
@opiejeanne:
AWOL
@Belafon: Japan confronted its past??? News to me and millions of raped women.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Belafon: What he said, and add
WW2 and the NAZIs were a direct result of World War I, and nobody in the West has dealt with WWI.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Geminid: Thanks!
AWOL
@Jay: Guy watches too many Tarantino flicks. I’ve worked with nazi’s children. The nazis were resettled in the US with free housing to work in our military.
Geminid
@Josie: When I heard that Austin Republicans want to a new map, I wondered if they were going on offense and trying for more seats, or playing defense and trying to limit losses. Gerrymanders can break down over time, and Texas Republicans might be worrying that their last one is breaking down.
That happened in 2018, when Libby Fletcher and Colin Allred flipped districts the Republicans thought were safe when they drew them seven years before.
Josie
@Geminid:
From what I read, it was the White House that was pushing Texas Republicans to add to their congressional seats. It’s also possible that they see losses coming. Who knows? I hope it backfires on them in some way.
Anne Laurie
“Debunked” is kind of a loaded term. I think it’s possible there’s truth to both narratives: Quite possibly / probably local communities used quilts (& other ‘humble, unnoteworthy’) methods to signal refugees from slavery… but the signals would only have been shared as ‘field gossip’, never coming to the attention of the people writing the Official Narratives. On the other hand, it’s comforting for us today (white folks as well as Black) to tell stories about unknown heroes helping the resistance by stitching quilts to help guide refugees to freedom.
Heck, a hundred years from now, historians (assuming there are such) may be debating ‘the truth’ of the various long-lost-to-internet-rot ‘blawg posts’ and ‘blooskii threads’ promoting the crucial 2025 No Kings protests!…
Dorothy A. Winsor
Have people seen this?
Archon
By not properly reckoning with the aftermath of the civil war and reconstruction the United States laid the seeds of its eventual demise.
BellyCat
Go Uncle Joe!!!