Despite its recent designation as a federal holiday, Juneteenth has a long history with Black Texans.
As municipalities, businesses and nonprofits offer a host of events, local historian Ed Gray said it’s important to remember why these celebrations are happening in the first place.
“We have traditionally in Dallas … whitewashed history to exclude Black people,” Gray, 62, said.
Now in its 159th year of celebration, Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, commemorates the day some of the last enslaved people in Texas were freed. Union Army Major Gen. Gordon Granger read an order from the federal government officially proclaiming all enslaved people free. The June 19, 1865, order marked the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln Jan. 1, 1863.
Juneteenth celebrations in Dallas over the past few years have included parties, community service, history sessions sponsored by Remembering Black Dallas, among others, and the annual walk of Opal Lee, the “grandmother of Juneteenth.”
For Gray, a member of two nonprofits that seek to document and preserve the city’s Black history, the holiday is just as much about celebrating freedom as it is about the continuous fight toward equality.
A brutal history
In Dallas, the holiday marking freedom is tainted by a brutal local history.
Texas is the state with the third-highest number of lynchings in the country, with records noting 339 extrajudicial lynchings of Black people in the state from 1885 to 1942, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
For African Americans historically, Gray said, “true judicial hearings [happened] on the streets.”
In 1910, a Black man named Allen Brooks was lynched in Dallas after being accused of raping a young white girl. On the day he was set for trial, a white mob threw him from a second-story window at the Dallas County Courthouse and dragged him down the street for six blocks to Akard and Main where he was hung from the Elks Arch telephone pole, Gray said.
The site of Brooks’ lynching is now Pegasus Plaza.
“In the 1920s and ’30s, the largest Klan chapter in the United States of America was in Dallas, Texas,” he said. “The second largest being in Fort Worth.”
The Dallas chapter of the KKK had 13,000 members at its height in the early 1920s — the largest membership in the U.S. per capita.
Gray noted that there was also a large Klan chapter in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood that is now predominantly Black.
The site of Brooks’ lynching blended in with the rest of the downtown landscape for 111 years until the nonprofit organizations Remembering Black Dallas and Dallas County Justice Initiative placed a historical marker at the location.
Remembering Black Dallas was founded in 2015 by the late Dr. George Keaton, a local historian and co-founder of the Dallas County Justice Initiative along with Gray.
“One of the most touching moments I’ve ever had was when I found one of the descendants of Allen Brooks and brought her to the site of where her great-grandfather was lynched,” Gray said. “She did not know her great-grandfather was lynched until she read about it in a book, and the only picture she has of her great-grandfather’s being hung.”
For Gray, the importance of the Dallas County Justice Initiative is “to make sure that people don’t forget our past, so we don’t be doomed to repeat it.”
‘A Black holiday for Black freedom’
Juneteenth was not recognized as a federal holiday until 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. Gray noted that the federal government’s recognition of the holiday came one year after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer, leading to the large-scale mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
“From my time in Dallas,” said Gray, who’s lived his whole life in the city, “Juneteenth has always been the Black holiday for Black freedom, and it’s been always celebrated in the community … it’s not a new thing.
“It’s become new because America has embraced it as a new holiday.”
Gray said that Juneteenth is perceived as a Black holiday but that America will truly begin to lean into its celebration “when they can find a way … to make a commercial aspect.”
Some have welcomed the opportunity and exposure Juneteenth could bring to Black businesses and issues but Gray warned of the dangers potential marketization poses to the preservation of Black joy in celebrating the holiday.
He lamented the possibility of the holiday becomes “sanitized.”
“And that’s what’s going to end up happening with Juneteenth,” Gray said. “America will cross over to Juneteenth, and will take the spiritual aspect out of it for African Americans, and some people will not even care.”
This Juneteenth, Gray hopes that Dallas residents will engage with their local Black history and familiarize themselves with the legacy of the holiday, and why it matters to North Texas’ Black community.
“Juneteenth should be just like what they say about Martin Luther King’s birthday: Not a day off, but a day on,” he said. “We can’t rest on the fact that someone read a proclamation in Galveston Bay without looking forward to the future and realizing that … what has happened before in the past can happen now in a different way.”
Correction: The site of Allen Brooks’ lynching in downtown Dallas is now Pegasus Plaza. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said it was Pegasus Park, a 23-acre life sciences campus and biotech hub.
Juneteenth through the years
