-This is Hannah, who was purchased in the deep woods
holding a mulatto baby at the age of 14 with a sign
that said "for sale" around her neck.
-Why did she have the "for sale" sign on?
-She was being sold,
possibly because she had been raped by a white master
who caused her to have a mulatto baby,
and maybe his wife didn't want her anymore.
And when the Washington West family was attempting
to cross the Mississippi from Tennessee to Texas,
and Mary Wilhour West got down out of the wagon
and told her husband, "I want you to buy that girl."
And he took up a collection among the travelers,
the wagon-train travelers, to purchase Hannah in 1854
and settled in Sweet Home.
This is my great-great-grandmother.
-Do you know where they were on June 19, 1865?
-Yes, they were in Sweet Home, Texas.
-Naomi Carrier celebrates Juneteenth
because it's the day her great-great-grandmother,
along with 300,000 other enslaved Black Texans,
learned that they were free.
-The day of the jubilee they speak of,
"The day we gonna cross back over into Jordan,
the day we're gonna fly away,"
so they were anticipating freedom,
and they knew that a logical outcome of the Civil War
could mean freedom for African-American slaves,
whether they knew when it happened or not.
-Juneteenth has taken on this kind of symbolic reverence
as the day that the Emancipation Proclamation
finally got to Texas.
But in reality, the Emancipation Proclamation
didn't actually end slavery, and neither did the Civil War.
People did.
-Juneteenth happened two years after the Emancipation
Proclamation that was scheduled to begin on January 1,
1863 by Abraham Lincoln, but in Texas,
the enslaved people were not allowed
to practice their freedom until June 19, 1865.
And people will say, "Well, maybe they didn't
get the news in time.
Well, why were they late?"
They were late specifically
because the planters needed to get another crop in the ground,
and they did do that by Juneteenth.
In fact, Abraham Lincoln had already been assassinated
by the time the slaves in Texas were freed.
-Yes, people in Texas knew about the Emancipation Proclamation.
They just didn't enact it.
They considered themselves a confederacy.
-The Emancipation Proclamation was more about war strategy
than about freeing slaves.
It was written during the Civil War
and only applied to a subset of states
that seceded from the Union,
but the mere mention of emancipation
coupled with the invitation to join the Army
motivated almost 200,000 Black soldiers to join the Union
and fight for their freedom on behalf of the Union,
which forced equality to the forefront of the conversation.
But Texas didn't care about that
and wasn't interested in seceding.
-The final vestiges of slavery were ended on June 19, 1865,
but to what extent were they ended?
Did he just come up and say "Hi, everybody, we're here,
slavery's over"?
-Hank Theory is a former board member
of the Galveston Historical Foundation.
He showed me how General Gordon Granger
ended slavery in Texas with the help
of 2,000 Union soldiers right here in Galveston.
-Of course, everyone knew, by the sheer number of troops,
the Port of Galveston had been captured.
The majority of cotton from all the plantations in Texas
came through this channel, this port.
It made Galveston one of the wealthiest cities in Texas.
The fact that all cotton coming through the Galveston Port
was quarter-mastered to Union control
basically meant it was over.
The way the story is told,
they left from this ship channel --
roughly this general area -- into downtown Galveston,
where they entered the intersection
of 22nd Street and the Strand.
And that is when they began to issue their orders.
-The day that General Gordon Granger came
and delivered the announcement,
and he didn't read the Emancipation Proclamation,
he only read General Order No 3.
-General Order No 3 doesn't have any caveats or clauses,
like the Emancipation Proclamation,
and it doesn't just say that the enslaved people here are free.
It says that they're equal.
-What other document in American history discusses or references
freed slaves as equal to their slave owners?
You'd have to look long and hard to find it.
It's applicable on June 19, 1865.
It's applicable on June 19, 2020.
It's the same message.
-It's that clarity of language about the value of Black life
that makes Juneteenth emancipation day.
But our ability to live up to that ideal as a nation
is best measured in the days, weeks, and years that followed.
Gordon Granger makes this announcement.
What can newly freed people do at this point?
-Was it tough? Yeah, of course it was.
-And so when that particular announcement came,
slaves in Galveston and all through Texas City, League City,
other small towns and cities coming north from Galveston
begin to leave a place
where they felt there was no opportunity.
They began to seek freedom.
-When Black people were freed, they got nothing.
You got no wagon, no horses, no land, no tools,
and, most of all, no education.
You're looking at a Confederacy that doesn't want to yield
and accept defeat, the military who doesn't
really have any real affinity for Black people.
We're just ex-military.
And then you're looking at the freed people
who have to protect themselves from the awful violence
that was prevalent against them at the end of the Civil War.
In some ways, it might've been just like running away
on the Underground Railroad.
-And that was a trail of emancipation.
-Earlier this year,
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee co-authored a bill
to start the process of making the Emancipation Trail
a national park, documenting the pit stops, grave sites,
neighborhoods, and towns where newly freed Black slaves,
against unimaginable odds, made a way for themselves.
-To tell the story of these freed
slaves as they made their way
through all those small cities into Freedmen's town,
Independence Heights, the first African-American city,
and then to Emancipation Park, right in Third Ward.
-Watching the death of George Floyd,
a Third Ward native, sparked nationwide
ire over how we value Black lives as Americans.
People who've never questioned whether or not our country
is living up to the ideals that Gordon Granger spelled out
on Juneteenth are questioning it now.
And for Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee,
the Emancipation Trail is part of the answer.
Why is it important that the Emancipation Trail
be memorialized that way?
-You know, I think the nation needs to cry.
I think we need to weep.
This looms very large in not our healing, but our transformation.
It is crucial that we leap into another era
because the one thing that we're trying to cling to
is freedom and human decency
and to be treated in a way that our life journey
is not filled with human indecencies,
and that Black lives not only matter --
yes, they matter.
We have to get others to know that --
but that they are valued.
Because if you don't value a life, you can take the life.
So Black lives matter and should be valued.