JUNETEENTH

It is no exaggeration to say that Black fighters won the Civil War. After Frederick Douglass convinced Congress to accept Blacks into the army and navy, by the end of the war 179,000 had joined. A common theme in the campaign to recruit Black soldiers and sailors to fight for freedom in the Civil War was “We knew what we were fighting for.” by Howard Isaac Williams  On June 19, 1865, Union Gen. Gordon Granger and his army entered Galveston, Texas, and put President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation into effect, freeing the enslaved people of that state. On the previous June 2, also in Galveston, Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had surrendered the last Confederate force still fighting in the Civil War (1861-1865), marking the end of a cataclysmic conflict that had cost at least 618,000 American lives, more than in any other American war.* When the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in Galveston – 900 days after it was issued on New Years Day 1863 and 65 days after the assassination of its author – Black Texans responded to the liberation with jubilation. In the following years, this celebration was repeated throughout Texas and has come to be called “Juneteenth.” As...