Juneteenth books by various authors

The park shelter has been reserved. You’ve told everyone where to be and what to bring (Grandma’s favorite dessert!) and someone will set up games to occupy the kids. Your whole family celebrates Juneteenth, so maybe it’s time to bring these two great books to your jubilee… If you sometimes feel like you’re always the last to know, then read “Galveston’s Juneteenth Story: And Still We Rise” by Tommie Boudreaux, Alice Gatson, Jami Durham and W. Dwayne Jones (The History Press, $24.99). Because sometimes, you are the last. Some sixty years before the end of the Civil War, Britain and the U.S. both “banned the international trade of enslaved people…” Slavery still existed, of course, and “Galveston [Texas] was known as the largest slave market west of New Orleans…” Roughly a thousand people were enslaved there, and “many more… passed through the city’s slave trading houses.” It’s estimated that “thousands” also tried to escape slavery through Galveston and Brownsville, over the Rio Grande to Mexico. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation proclamation on September 22, 1862. The Civil War ended in April 1865. On June 19 of that same year – two months after wars’ end – Black Texans finally learned...