There’s more to the people of the Lone Star State than what old westerns will teach you, and that includes a history of African people in Texas, the first of whom floated on a raft to the Galveston area well over 300 years before Juneteenth. It’s more than longhorn cattle, Stetsons, cowboys, oil rigs and Native Americans. Texas, for instance, is not all desert and sagebrush. Sometimes, she says, Texas itself is an enigma to much of the rest of America, and mythology replaces facts in people’s minds. Juneteenth, she says, or June 19, 1865, “was the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas were told that slavery had ended, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed…” It was “shocking” on two levels: that slavery was over, and that Black Texans were suddenly “on an equal plane of humanity with whites…” That, she says, “was of enough consequence to the entire nation that it should be celebrated nationwide.” Our House First Time Home Buyer’s Seriesīut then she began to realize that sharing the holiday everywhere was a good thing. BOOK REVIEW: 'On Juneteenth' by Annette Gordon-Reed - The Washington Informer Close
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