Notes from a Native Houstonian: From Juneteenth To George Floyd

General order No. 3 of June 19, 1865, issued by General Gordon Granger to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation

The holiday Juneteenth began in Texas on June 19, 1865, when enslaved persons there learned they were officially free, more than two months after the end of the Civil War. Juneteenth became a day of celebration for African Americans in the state and spread throughout the world. African Americans bought land for parks where they could gather on Juneteenth and often named them Emancipation. In 1872, Reverend Jack Yates, a former slave, led the drive to buy ten acres for Houston’s park, which is in Houston’s historic Third Ward. It is the oldest park in Texas.

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George Floyd grew up in public housing in the Third Ward and was a basketball and football star at Jack Yates High School.

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Emancipation Park was the site of Black Lives Matter Houston protests May 29 and 30 over the death of the Third Ward’s most famous and tragic son.

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Beyoncé is from the Third Ward. So is Phylicia Rashad.

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Count Basie, B.B. King, Etta James, Lightnin’ Hopkins and many other musicians and singers performed at the historic El Dorado Ballroom across the street from the park.

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Emancipation Park used to be on Dowling Street, named for Confederate war hero Dick Dowling. The street name was changed to Emancipation Avenue on Juneteenth 2017 as part of the dedication of a new recreation building in the park designed by Perkins + Will.

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Houston was called the Magnolia City beginning in the 1870s, simply for its trees, although the name does conjure up images of antebellum Southern culture. Its nickname is now the more neutral Bayou City or H-Town or Space City or less commonly, Screwston, “after the chopped and screwed style pioneered by DJ Screw,” according to the Houston Press.

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George Floyd was a rapper in Houston in the 1990s and was known as “Big Floyd.” He occasionally rapped with DJ Screw.

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Houstonians debate the pronunciation of “bayou”—supposedly old-timers say, “Bye-oh,” and everyone else says, “Buy-you.”

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There were about 180,000 enslaved persons in the state between 1850 and 1860. Some of them accompanied their masters to the front lines of the Civil War as “body servants.”

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Scholars debate whether Texas is Southern or Western. The official campaign to make it Western began when white muckety-mucks were planning Texas Centennial observances for 1936: The Confederates had lost the war; why promote old-fashioned, bigoted losers? Why not accentuate the positive, the cowboy hero of the frontier? By that time, though, statues of Confederates dotted the state.

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In March 1960 students at Texas Southern University in Houston’s Third Ward walked a mile to a grocery store to desegregate its lunch counter. Similar African-American sit-ins around the South had resulted in violence. In Houston, store officials responded by immediately closing the grill. It reopened a few days later—with the seats of the stools removed, so that no one could sit down. The city councilman who came up with that solution later became mayor.

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After protests and meetings between black and white leaders, Houston restaurants and movie theaters were desegregated behind the scenes. Details are in Thomas R. Cole’s wonderful book, “No Color is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston.”

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Houston is the most diverse city in the country and the fourth largest in the United States.

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In late June 1917 “colored” army troops came to Houston to guard the construction of a training camp. Racial tensions were high that summer in the United States—in early July there was a gruesome and brutal riot against African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois. The Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry had never before been posted in Jim Crow territory. In Houston the men experienced police brutality, as well as the antagonism of racist streetcar conductors and construction workers. The soldiers especially objected being called “n******.” On August 23, 1917 the soldiers were due to have a watermelon party in Emancipation Park. Instead, reacting to a police assault on a corporal that day, more than one hundred soldiers rioted. Fifteen whites were killed, including four policemen, and four black soldiers died. (Numbers vary by source.) Nineteen soldiers were hanged and sixty-three were imprisoned in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

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Because Houston leaders remembered the 1917 riot, they were especially motivated to bring integration to Houston in a peaceful way.

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You could consider the Houston mutiny and riot to be part of a long stream of African-American rebellion.

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I was educated in Houston public schools (one named for a Confederate general), but I did not learn about the 1917 riot until I read Cole’s book, as an adult, in Chicago.

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An annual Rice University report on Houston and Harris County warned this year that “If too many young people of color continue to be relegated to underfunded inner-city schools, and remain unprepared to succeed in today’s global, knowledge-based economy, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for Houston.”