But we are not free?
Dianna Williams standing in front of the mural, painted by Houston artist Anat Ronen, is on Precinct One’s Youth Education Town (YET) building at Finnigan Park in the fifth ward neighborhood.
This blog post was written by our Houston Organizing Manager, Dianna Williams (she/her). To get in touch, you can email her at dwilliams@grassrootsleadership.org.
Juneteenth (short for “June 19th”) marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people were freed. The word came two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end of slavery in the United States (as we knew it then).
And on June 17, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday.
The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, had established that all enslaved people in Confederate states in rebellion against the Union “should be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
But in reality, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t instantly free any enslaved people. The proclamation only applied to places under Confederate control and not to slave-holding border states or rebel areas already under Union control.
In Texas, slavery had continued as the state experienced no large-scale fighting or a significant presence of Union troops.
After the war ended in the spring of 1865, General Granger’s arrival in Galveston that June signaled freedom for Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people. That December, slavery in America was formally abolished with the adoption of the 13th Amendment.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for the crime, of which the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or anywhere subject to their jurisdiction.”
But we are not free?
In 2018, the Texas Department of Corrections put 151,000 of our loved ones in cages. Of those in cages, 33% were Black. Blacks are 13% of this state’s population. Currently, government-run facilities in some states don’t pay their inmates at all for their prison labor. Those states include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and yes—Texas. Slavery never ended; it just evolved.
It is inhumane and unjust to expect anyone to work in the extreme heat and cold, only to not get adequately compensated in return.
Community groups and advocates like the Coalition to Abolish Slavery Texas and Grassroots Leadership worked with legislators in 2021 to submit a proposal in the Texas Legislative Session for a constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude.
Plans are for the bill to come up again in 2023.
Let’s celebrate Juneteenth by getting involved with local and state advocacy groups, and let’s make our presence known during the 88th Texas Legislative Session and demand our voices be heard and actions are taken to remove this clause. Modern-day slavery in Texas has got to go!
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Grassroots Leadership is a Texas-based national organization that works for a more just society where prison profiteering, mass incarceration, deportation, and criminalization are things of the past. Follow us on Twitter @Grassroots_News.