The information was startling.
On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil Warfare ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and introduced to the individuals of the state that “all slaves are free.”
As native plantation house owners lamented the lack of their most precious property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Individuals in Texas had lastly received their freedom.
Considered one of them was Joshua Houston.
He had lengthy served because the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, probably the most well-known navy and political chief in Texas.
Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he discovered of Granger’s proclamation.
It was learn aloud on the native Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.
If Juneteenth meant something, it meant no less than that Joshua Houston and his household have been free.
However there was extra too.
The promise of freedom meant that extra work wanted to be accomplished. Households wanted to be reunited. Land wanted to be secured. Kids wanted to be educated.
Certainly, the unconventional promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the neighborhood activism of Joshua Houston and the academic profession of his son Samuel Walker Houston.
The violent white response to Black political energy
Inside a yr of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith store close to the Huntsville city sq. and moved his household right into a two-story home on the adjoining lot.
He helped discovered the Union Church, the primary Black-owned establishment within the metropolis, in addition to a freedmen’s faculty to start educating African American kids.
In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters against conservative Democratic rule elected Houston because the county’s first Black county commissioner, a strong place in native governance.
Regardless of this dramatic flip of occasions, Houston’s political story was hardly distinctive.
Within the 20 years following emancipation, 52 Black males served within the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.
However that quantity had fallen to 2 by 1882.
Opposition to Black freedom had been a strong power within the state’s political tradition since emancipation.
Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by driving previous a celebrating Black girl and murdering her together with his sword.
In 1871, the violence continued when the white residents of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three males who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.
Later, within the Eighteen Eighties, assaults on Black elected officers, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.
Within the early 1900s, modifications in state election legal guidelines, together with the introduction of the ballot tax, successfully disenfranchised most Black voters and plenty of poor whites as effectively. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% on the excessive tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the ballot tax grew to become efficient in 1904.
Because of this, Robert Lloyd Smith was the final Black legislator for practically 70 years when he completed his time period in 1897.
That wall of white supremacy on the state Capitol wouldn’t crack once more till 1966, when federal voting rights laws and Supreme Courtroom rulings nullified schemes to disclaim African Individuals the poll.
These modifications enabled the election of Black officers similar to Barbara Jordan, the primary African American girl to serve within the Texas Senate.
Like father, like son
On an unknown date, a number of years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free within the vivid gentle of Reconstruction.
Though he spent his maturity in a few of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and neighborhood chief. Following a brief stint at Atlanta College in Georgia and Howard College in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and based a college within the close by Galilee neighborhood.
Houston’s faculty was named for him and served as one of many first county coaching colleges for African Individuals in Texas. It enrolled college students at each stage, from first grade by means of highschool, and offered a curriculum based mostly on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee mannequin of vocational coaching.
Younger girls at Houston’s faculty obtained coaching in homemaking, stitching and cooking, whereas younger males discovered carpentry, woodworking and arithmetic.
By 1922, enrollment on the faculty had grown to 400 college students, and it was acknowledged by contemporaries because the main faculty of East Texas. Within the Thirties, Houston’s faculty was absorbed into Huntsville’s faculty district, and he grew to become the director of Black training within the county.
Houston inspired a sensible training for Black Texans, however he additionally believed that younger Texans of all races wanted to study an account of historical past that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern historical past.
Towards this finish, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations programs at Sam Houston State Academics School. Collectively, the group led the Texas Fee on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to guage Texas public faculty textbooks in the course of the Thirties.
In an evaluation of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they discovered that 74% of books introduced a racist view of the previous and of Black Individuals. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black individuals, whereas mentioning their financial contributions solely within the interval of slavery earlier than the Civil Warfare.
As an alternative, the group argued, books designed for each Black and white Texans wanted to take the “alternative … to do easy justice” by together with Black historical past and the “battle for the train” of equal civil, political and authorized rights.
White Texans refused to undertake a textbook within the Thirties that taught the basic equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it’s now extensively understood, as a missed alternative to determine a extra simply and egalitarian Texas.
However Houston and his white counterparts have been motivated by the conviction that progress, each for African Individuals and for Texas, required a extra trustworthy and progressive account of the state and its historical past.
An ongoing battle for equality
At the moment’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to limit the educating of systemic racism in public colleges ignore the teachings and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.
The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive ideas” just like the historical past of racism could make some college students really feel uncomfortable or responsible.
That form of pondering echoes the identical justification offered by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s colleges should be segregated to make sure “the peace, concord and success of the colleges and the nice of the entire.”
However the reverse is true.
In actuality, the prohibition on educating the darker chapters of our previous creates a segregated historical past.
As an alternative, as Samuel Walker Houston acknowledged, younger Texans should have a extra trustworthy account of the previous and of each other to progress right into a unified and egalitarian society.
Texas historical past is each the story of people that devoted their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of highly effective individuals and forces that stood in opposition to it.
One can’t be understood with out the opposite.
Individuals can’t recognize the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston with out analyzing the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.
The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth vacation, is that freedom is a valuable factor that requires fixed work to make actual.
This text by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Zachary Montz from Sam Houston State College was initially printed by The Dialog.
Header Picture: Joshua Houston leads a Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, in a photograph circa 1900. Photograph by Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library
