GALVESTON, Texas — As a blazing sun rises over Galveston Island on the Texas coast, Sam Collins stands on the spot where history happened 157 years ago.and Strand where Gen. Gordon Granger set up his Union headquarters," says Collins, co-chair of the Juneteenth Legacy Project and unofficial tourism ambassador of Juneteenth in Galveston.
The edifice occupied by Union officers is long gone. Now it's a parking lot that looks onto a large mural depicting Juneteenth history and surrounded by ocean-themed gift shops, an Irish pub, and a store that sells toe rings. "That event was like lightning striking," says Edward T. Cotham, Jr, Texas Civil War historian and author of"There is not a natural freedom date for the whole country. Enslaved people were freed at massively different times. But in Texas, the Union army shows up. Now it's over. I think that's why enslaved people seized on that order."
"It was not a piece of paper that freed enslaved people of Texas," he says."It was the men with the guns. These were the Union soldiers, many of them United States Colored Troops, that showed up and told the plantation owners and enslavers, 'You have to stop. These people are free.
Gillins says when she went away to Howard University in 1969, the Juneteenth celebrations were larger and more public in Washington D.C. than they had been in Galveston. It was around 1979, when Texas declared Juneteenth a state holiday, that Galveston began celebrating it in a big way.
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