Juneteenth: General Order No. 3, Emancipation Park and Opal Lee's Walk

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Exactly 900 days passed between the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect on January 1, 1863, and June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with about 2,000 federal troops. This episode explains the delay. The proclamation applied only to states in rebellion and depended on the Union Army to enforce it, and Texas was remote and barely occupied. Slaveholders refugeed thousands of enslaved people west to escape advancing troops, swelling the enslaved population of Texas to an estimated 250,000. Granger's General Order No. 3 declared absolute equality of rights but told freed people to stay and work for wages.

The episode follows the first Jubilee Day in 1866, the land purchases that gave communities their own places to gather, and the holiday's decline as Depression-era factory work replaced farm labor. The Texas State Fair kept it alive from 1936 to 1951, the Second Great Migration carried it west and north, and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign revived it. State representative Al Edwards made it a Texas holiday in 1980, and on June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act with Opal Lee present.

• The story of Granger reading the order from the Ashton Villa balcony is a myth; copies were posted on buildings including Reedy Chapel AME Church.
• In 1872, Houston's Black leaders pooled $1,000 to buy 10 acres that became Emancipation Park.
• Ben Haith designed the Juneteenth flag in 1997 in red, white and blue to assert that African American history is American history.
• At 89, Opal Lee set out from Fort Worth toward Washington, walking two and a half miles in each city to mark the two and a half years enslaved Texans waited.
• Slavery stayed legal in Delaware and Kentucky until the 13th Amendment in December 1865, and in the Cherokee and Choctaw nations until treaties in 1866.