In preparation for a presentation I’m giving on November 13 at Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies, I’m trying to organize here my findings so far about celebrations of Juneteenth in Houston prior to the founding of Emancipation Park in 1872.

Why This Research Now?

Juneteenth 2020 and After

Public interest in Juneteenth has grown nationally since Congress named it a national holiday in 2021, in the aftermath of protests over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police not long before Juneteenth in 2020.¹

Of course, Juneteenth had been celebrated by Black Texans—who also advocated for its official state and national recognition—for more than 150 years prior to its designation as a federal holiday.²

And in Houston, remembrances of Juneteenth centered around the Third Ward’s Emancipation Park, which was purchased by Black community leaders in 1872 and revitalized by the efforts of the Friends of Emancipation Park beginning in 2006 and the Emancipation Park Conservancy beginning in 2014.³

In the summer of 2020, Floyd’s early life in the Third Ward and attendance at Yates High School, not far from Emancipation Park, made the park a resonant space for the few hundred people who gathered there to hold one of the earliest protests and vigils for Floyd in Houston on May 26, 2020.⁴

Held in the wakes both of Floyd’s violent death and what Christina Sharpe calls the “legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity,” the 2020 vigil was only one of countless events at the park that illustrate what George Lipsitz calls the “conjuring” of “sacred space” along the Gulf Coast by Afro-diasporic communities since slavery. For Lipsitz, creative placemaking at sites like Emancipation Park and Project Row Houses connect these and similar sites to “Afro-diasporic religious traditions, [in which] spiritual forces are present in people, places, and things; they inhabit enclosed times and places.”⁵

Urban Reconstruction

Most histories of Emancipation Park begin with its purchase in 1872. But what I wanted to understand is what happened before 1872. This interest arose partly from questions particular to Houston’s history:

• Exploring where else Juneteenth had been celebrated in Houston might answer the question of why Black community leaders purchased a 10-acre plot in the Third Ward when and where they did.
• It might also reveal a wider cast of characters than the four “founders” (Richard Allen, Richard Brock, Elias Dibble, and Jack Yates) featured on four markers at the park today.
• It might uncover earlier histories of place-making and “conjuring” by recently enslaved people in Texas through observances of Juneteenth.

But these questions also connect to a recent, larger interest among scholars of Reconstruction in examining the period’s urban history, a scholarship reviewed by towers2023 and exemplifed by works like bardes2024, masur2016, green2016, nystrom2010, and fitzgerald2002.

I’m wondering if it is also possible to place Emancipation Park within a history of green space and park development in the Reconstruction city, as different groups vied for public support to create pleasure grounds like Lubbock’s Grove and the state Fair Grounds and competed for political favors connected to such development.⁶

Juneteenth Locations in Houston

My research on these questions to date, mostly detailed on my Juneteenth wiki page, has been focused on trying to pinpoint the locations of events marking the occasion in Houston before the purchase of the park in July 1872.

The Fourth Ward Grounds

While the location of the 1866 grounds is still unclear, this seems to suggest that prior to Emancipation Park, Juneteenth observances were held in the Fourth Ward.

The main location seems to have been an open grove west of the Methodist Church around a lot that was purchased from Melissa Ammerman at the end of 1868 by the trustees of the Gregory Institute, which was opened in January 1870 near “a skirt of timber” not far from Main Street.⁷ The trustees of the Institute included Richard Allen, who was later one of the trustees of Emancipation Park, and Elias Dibble, who while not appearing on the park deed in 1872 is widely remembered as playing a critical fundraising role alongside Baptist minister Jack Yates (who is also not listed on the park deed in 1872). While the Gregory Institute land was not purchased exclusively for Juneteenth celebrations, its location near Dibble’s church and its bucolic appearance made it a good spot for a Juneteenth gathering two years in a row—1869 and 1870.

The importance here of proximity to the Methodist Church also can’t be overstated, because it was a prime example of how Black property ownership during Reconstruction had formed a base of social capital and political power that the trustees of the church (which included John Sessums, also an Emancipation Park trustee) had used to influence, for example, the teachers that the Freedmen’s Bureau placed in the building rented from the church.⁸

But all of that raises the question …

Why the Move to Third Ward?

Hangman’s Grove

The chapter on Emancipation Park in yates1985, evocatively titled “The Effort to Keep Alive the Joy of Their Emancipation,” answers the question this way on p. 32:

… there comes a time of break-down in all smooth-running machinery. Why should there be any exception now? There can be brought about such state of affairs among men, although coming through legal channels, that aroused to indignation, even as of then a struggling minority group, and caused their sensibility to shudder in disgust. Something was executed on this lovely spot which gave to that location the name of ’Hanged Man’s" grove, and became the second of two chief reasons why this place was abandoned as a picnic ground. Any site where such an unpleasant scene had taken place was just too vivid for a place of enjoyment.

Further research reveals that the grove around the Gregory Institute grounds acquired the name Hangman's Grove after the judicial executions there of two (apparently unrelated) Black men by the county: Sam Johnson in 1868 and Jake Johnson in August 1870.

At this second hanging, Sandy Parker (one of the Gregory Institute trustees and a minister at Antioch Baptist Church) ministered to the condemned man and also agreed to care for Johnson’s orphaned daughter.

It is telling that the next year’s Juneteenth took place somewhere else and never returned to the original site.

Growing Opposition

If this was the “second” reason for the relocation of Juneteenth celebrations after 1870, the other appears to be in the next paragraph:

From the very start a little opposition had been shown, which became even more noticeable as time passed, and particularly was it clear now that a few of those residing in the vicinity were openly opposed to this location being used further as a picnic ground by the colored people. The extent of the information available as to why dissatisfaction arose is that the complaints at their very worst were only apologetical annoyances. Those responsible for these annual affairs began thinking that the best thing to do, however, was to seek something more permanent—something that they might some day call their own.

This account continues by saying that Lubbock's Grove in Frost Town was first considered, a site “strikingly noticeable for its natural beauty in a setting of green trees, their branches reaching outward and upward, with tops majestically outlined by the blue sky above.” But it was seen as too distant from places where Black Houstonians lived “for streets were then in bad condition and conveyances poor.” That’s when Richard Allen located the acreage that was purchased: “it was trees that swayed the decision now, at Jack Yates’ suggestion,” because the new site also had plenty of shade.

The Yates biography does not go into greater detail about the local opposition to the site. But it may be significant that in May 1871, the second annual State Fair opened at an elaborate 80-acre site called the Fair Grounds that was located a little farther out on Main Street past the Gregory Institute.

The State Fair association was dominated by Conservative Democrats and opponents of military Reconstruction. But in 1871, it appears that Sandy Parker and other Black community leaders were able to secure the Fair Grounds for two days for Juneteenth celebrations. And that same year, Black entrepreneurs Frank Vance and Taylor Burke (an Emancipation Park trustee) had also secured (segregated) vendor stands at the State Fair in May.

This points to a unique window of opportunity created by:

• Public investment in green spaces, including purchases of State Fair bonds by the city in order to enable the development of the park ground.
• Republican control of the City Council and appointment of the first Black aldermen beginning in August 1870, not long after Jake Johnson execution; among those who served as aldermen in the next few years were Emancipation Park trustees Richard Brock, Taylor Burke, and Johnson Rice.
• Republicans could argue that because the State Fair was a corporation chartered by the state, it had to be open to equitable use by all.
• This all was occurring at a moment of enhanced national agitation around Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill extending protection from racial discrimination to places of public amusement like fair grounds and parks, as well as hotels, trains, restaurants, and theaters.

I’m still trying to figure out all the intricacies of this moment, but it’s clear the window closed rapidly after a hotly contested Congressional election in Houston at the end of 1871 and the first open election of city officers at end of 1872. Interest in developing street car lines from the central business district to the Fair Grounds also began in this period.

Reconstruction debates over control of municipal government and urban development, as well as over “social equality” and segregation, may help to explain the local white uproar noted in yates1985 over the continued meetings of the Black community on its Fourth Ward grounds or at the Fair Grounds.

Where to Now?

As my understanding of the history of Juneteenth in Houston before Emancipation Park takes shape, I’m also trying to think through how this story connects to larger questions and the stories of Reconstruction and the afterlives of slavery writ large.

The move from the original location (after it became known as a Hangman's Grove) makes me think of Kidada Williams’s work on coming to terms with the trauma of Reconstruction violence (in this case, state-legitimate violence carried out by a white sheriff who was, in general, a Republican sympathizer) and its lingering impacts on Black communities and families (thinking here of Johnson’s daughter entrusted to Sandy Parker).

I’m also thinking about Jennifer James’s work on ecomelancholia and the connections between what Sharpe calls “wake work” and sacred space-making in shaded groves and green spaces. In this sense the vigil for George Floyd is connected spiritually and spatially with the “haunting” of the original grove by Johnson’s execution. But these thoughts need further development.⁹

Then there’s also the question of urban military Reconstruction and how control of the City Council and decisions made during these years shaped the future development of southern cities in ways that continue to ramify today.

Arguably, the selection of the site of the Fair Grounds—and the removal of Juneteenth celebrations and (eventually) the Gregory Institute from that central Main Street line of city development—worked to segregate what had still been a more racially heterogeneous Fourth Ward. Did the Fair Grounds accelerate the scattering of the Black community into the Fourth and Third Wards in much the same way that the highway system later cleaved Freedmen’s Town in two? This argument, also, needs further elaboration and thought as I work on this.

Hopefully the presentation of these scattered findings to CAAAS colleagues next week will give me some helpful feedback about future directions for the research.