You can read it in a book! In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared more than three million slaves living in the Confederate states to be free. More than two years would pass, however, before the news reached African Americans living in Texas. It was not until Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, that the state’s residents finally learned that slavery had been abolished. The former slaves immediately began to celebrate with prayer, feasting, song, and dance.
The following year, on June 19, the first official Juneteenth celebrations took place in Texas. The original observances included prayer meetings and the singing of spirituals, and celebrants wore new clothes as a way of representing their newfound freedom. Within a few years, African Americans in other states were celebrating the day as well, making it an annual tradition. Celebrations have continued across the United States into the 21st century and typically include prayer and religious services, speeches, educational events, family gatherings and picnics, and festivals with music, food, and dancing.
Juneteenth became a state holiday in Texas in 1980, and a number of other states subsequently followed suit. In 2021, Juneteenth was made a federal holiday. The day is also celebrated outside the United States, being used by organizations in a number of countries to recognize the end of slavery and to honor the culture and achievements of African Americans.
The University of St. Thomas Libraries compiled the following reading list to help the community learn more about the history of Juneteenth, American slavery and emancipation.
The Long Emancipation : The Demise of Slavery in the United States
Author Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.
Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration
Edward T. Cotham, Jr. looks at how Juneteenth has become part of the national conversation about race, slavery, and how Americans understand, acknowledge, and explain what has been called the national “original sin.” But, why Juneteenth? Where did this celebration come from? What is the origin story? What are the facts and legends around this important day in the nation’s history?
Born in slavery in Maryland in 1817, Frederick Douglass escaped from servitude 20 years later. This autobiography tells the story of how he then joined the ranks of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and John Brown, and devoted a long and fruitful life to the winning of freedom for his people.
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
In 1998, The New Press published Remembering Slavery, a book-and-tape set by Marc Favreau and Ira Berlin that offered a startling first-person history of slavery. Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers’ Project, the astonishing audiotapes made available the only known recordings of people who actually experienced enslavement – recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this set.
Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction
In Forever Free, Eric Foner overturns numerous assumptions growing out of the traditional understanding of the period, which is based almost exclusively on white sources and shaped by (often unconscious) racism. He presents the period as a time of determination, especially on the part of recently emancipated black Americans, to put into effect the principles of equal rights and citizenship for all.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family (30th anniversary ed.)
One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, Roots galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial, social and cultural dialogue that hadn’t been seen since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book by Alex Haley sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America’s past.
To Raise Up a Nation: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and the Making of a Free Country
Drawing on decades of research, and demonstrating remarkable command of a great range of primary sources, William S. King has written an important history of African Americans’ own contributions and points of cross-racial cooperation to end slavery in America. Beginning with the Civil War along the border of Kansas and Missouri, the author traces the life of John Brown and the personal support for his ideas from elite New England businessmen, intellectuals such as Emerson and Thoreau, and African Americans, including his confidant, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman.
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman’s fight for justice and reparations. Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood’s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. This book by W. Caleb McDaniel recounts that story.
Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the 19th century, Black and white, slave and free. The Black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery’s abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child – freedom’s child – offered up the possibility that Blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Raising Freedom’s Child by Mary Niall Mitchell illustrates how intensely the image of the Black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era.
Up From Slavery: Booker T. Washington
Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). Born in a Virginia slave hut, Washington rose from a slave child during the Civil War to worldwide recognition for his many accomplishments, becoming the most influential spokesman for African Americans of his day. In this eloquently written book, Washington describes his impoverished childhood and youth as a child in bondage, and the difficulties he faced in his unrelenting struggle for an education. These challenges helped propel him into a dedicated obsession with the Hampton Institute until he achieved being enrolled there as a student. He covers his early teaching assignments and his work establishing vocational schools, including his selection in 1881 as the head of the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, designed to help Black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful and marketable skills to help them find jobs and pull themselves up as a race. Reflecting on the generosity of teachers and philanthropists who helped educate Blacks and Native Americans, Washington describes his efforts to instill manners, health and a feeling of dignity to students. His educational philosophy of education as the best route to advancement stressed combining academic subjects with learning a trade, believing that the integration of practical subjects helped reassure the white community as to the usefulness of educating Black people. Washington disapproved of civil-rights agitation, thereby facing the opposition of many Black intellectuals. Yet today, he’s regarded as a major figure in the struggle for equal rights, who furthered the cause and worked tirelessly to educate and unite African Americans.
Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery
Envisioning Emancipation, by Barbara Krauthamer and Deborah Willis, illustrates what freedom looked like for Black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of Black families and workers in the American South.
