The news was startling.
On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”
As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.
One of them was Joshua Houston.
He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.
Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.
It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.
If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.
Joshua Houston and his family in October 1898. Courtesy of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library, Huntsville, Texas
But there was more too.
The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.
Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.
The Violent White Reaction to Black Political Power
Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.
He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating 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 governance.
Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.
In
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