The news was amazing.
On June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the American Civil War, Union General Gordon Granger He walked to the porch at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and declared to the residents of the state that “all slaves are free.”
Local ranchers also lamented the loss of their most prized possessions, Blacks from Texas celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth is announced with singing, dancing, and feasting. the 182,566 African Americans were enslaved in Texas They finally got their freedom.
was one of them Joshua Houston.
He served for a long time as an enslaved servant of Gen. Sam HoustonTexas’ most famous military and political leader.
Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s announcement.
It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union General Edgar M. GregoryAssistant Commissioner L Freedmen’s office in Texas.
If Juneteenth means anything, it’s at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.
But there was more, too.
The promise of freedom means there is more work to be done. Families needed to be reunited. The land must be secured. Children need education.
Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the teaching career of his son, Samuel Walker Houston.
White backlash against black political power
Within a year of Granger’s announcement, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story home in the vicinity.
He helped found the Union Church, the first black-owned institution in the city, as well as a school for freedmen to begin teaching African American children.
In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first black county commissioner, a powerful position in local government.
Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was not unique.
In the two decades following emancipation, 52 black men served in the state legislature or on state constitutional conventions.
But that number had fallen to two by 1882.
Opposition to black freedom has been an influential force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.
Armstead Barrett, an ex-slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an angry white man had responded to Granger Juniteth’s order by He rides past a reveling black woman and kills her with his sword.
In 1871, the violence continued when white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and helped three men escape. Executed editor Sam Jenkins.
Later, in the 1880s, Attacks on black elected officialstheir white political allies and black voters escalated dramatically.
In the early 20th century, changes to state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, took place effectively disenfranchised most black voters And many poor whites, too. Voter participation decreased From roughly 85% at the height of populism in Texas in 1896 to nearly 35% when the poll tax took effect in 1904.
as a result of, Robert Lloyd Smith He was the last black legislator for nearly 70 years when he ended his term in 1897.
This wall of white supremacy at the state capitol would not crack again until 1966, when Federal voting rights legislation And Supreme Court rulings invalidated charts To disenfranchise African Americans.
These changes enabled the election of black officials such as Barbara JordanShe is the first African-American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.
Like father, like son
At an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, son Joshua Houston Samuel Walker Houston Born free in a bright light Reconstruction.
Although he spent his adulthood in some of his darkest years Jim CrowHe continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. After short stints at the University of Atlanta in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and He established a school in the neighboring Galilee region.
The Houston School was named after him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington Model in Tuskegee for professional training.
The young women at the Houston School received training in home economics, sewing, and cooking, while the young men learned carpentry, carpentry, and mathematics.
By 1922, the school’s enrollment had increased to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school in East Texas. In the 1930s, the Houston school was absorbed into the Huntsville School District, and he became the district’s director of black education.
Houston encouraged practical education for black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn a narrative of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.
To this end, he joined forces with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston Normal College. Together, I led the group Texas Commission on Interracial CooperationEfforts to evaluate public textbooks in Texas during the 1930s.
In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-approved textbooks, they found that 74% of the books present a racist view of the past and of black Americans. Most exclude blacks’ scientific, literary, and civic contributions, mentioning only their economic contributions to the period of slavery before the Civil War.
Instead, the group argued that books designed for both black and white Texans needed to seize the “opportunity…for simple justice” by including black history and “fighting for the exercise” of equal civil, political, and legal rights.
White Texas Refusal to adopt a textbook The 1930s taught fundamental equality between the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and equal Texas.
But Houston and his Their white counterparts were stimulated With the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texans, requires a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.
An ongoing battle for equality
Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to Teaching restriction Systemic racism in public schools ignores the lessons and realities of the lives of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston.
The argument used to support such restrictions is that “controversial concepts” such as the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.
This kind of thinking echoes the same justification made by Texas legislators in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools should be segregated to ensure “Peace, harmony and success for schools and the good of all. “
But the opposite is true.
Indeed, banning the teaching of the dark chapters of our past creates a separate history.
Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston acknowledged, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of each other to progress toward a unified, egalitarian society.
The history of Texas is the story of the people who dedicated their lives working to advance freedom and the story of the powerful people and the forces that stood up against it.
One cannot be understood without the other.
Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the fierce realities of Jim Crow society.
The lesson of their lives, and June’s, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make it a reality.
Jeffrey L Littlejohn history professor, Sam Houston State University And Zachary Muntz Lecturer, Department of History Sam Houston State University.
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