Interspersing facts and history with anecdotal personal stories, speaker Reynauld “Rey” Smith mesmerized the audience at his lecture on Tuesday, June 13 at the Community Center as he explained the origins of the real Juneteenth in Comanche Crossing, Texas. Slavery was practiced only in the agricultural eastern section of Texas; the rest of Texas was extremely barren. Slavery in Texas grew from 58,000 enslaved people in 1850 to 183,000 in 1860, and peaked at 250,000 in 1865. June 19, 1865 is the date a Union general marched into Galveston, 200 miles to the southeast of Comanche Crossing, and announced that all the enslaved Blacks in Texas were free.
Smith grew up in this small town of Comanche Crossing and remembers the great commemorations of Juneteenth from childhood. People prepared special foods for huge gatherings. Family members returned from other parts of the country to remember the emancipation of enslaved Africans. Meanwhile, July 4th was just a day on the calendar. When Smith was 10 he looked around a Juneteenth gathering and had a revelation – there was a relative in her 90s who was old enough to have been enslaved.
Photos of early Juneteenth commemorations included a church because the events always began with a church service with people dressed in their formal attire. They were somewhat solemn, commemorating what people had gone through. Despite future problems former enslaved people faced in Texas, Juneteenth represented “Real Freedom,” said Smith. The original symbolic date of June 19th was not so much festive as religious, solemn, dignified and serious.
Today Comanche Crossing has an Emancipation Park with a beautiful huge sign as the audience at the lecture saw in a slide. The park was established in the late 19th century when formerly enslaved people bought the land to gather for Juneteenth. People continue to gather, with red being the color of the day, many drinking cans of Big Red.
Smith’s own family migrated from Texas to Oklahoma and California. As freed African Americans from Texas migrated to other parts of the country, they brought the Juneteenth commemorations with them. Oklahoma, Louisiana and California cities including San Diego, Los Angeles and Sacramento started holding Juneteenth events.
The audience was encouraged to listen to some of the oral histories of formerly enslaved Africans collected by the Federal Writers’ Project. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of formerly enslaved people. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration. Smith shared heart-wrenching memories as he quoted the words of formerly enslaved people. To access the interviews, visit loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938.
The lecture was sponsored by the Greenbelt Black History and Culture Committee, the Greenbelt Museum and Greenbelt Recreation and was filmed by Greenbelt Access Television.
Leeann Irwin is co-chair of the Greenbelt Black History and Culture Committee.
