The Baptist who made Juneteenth a holiday
In the summer of 1865, the good news of freedom finally came to more than 250,000 slaves in Texas. Union troops gathered in the city of Galveston and read a general’s order to the public: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
The order, issued on June 19, was a watershed moment for Black Texans. They should have been freed two years earlier, under the Emancipation Proclamation. But Texas, a Confederate stronghold, refused to recognize that decree until the tail end of the Civil War, when Union troops arrived carrying the handwritten order. Those enslaved celebrated their Freedom Day as “Juneteenth,” and the unofficial holiday was passed down from generation to generation.
More than a century later, Albert Ely Edwards, a Baptist minister and a Texas state legislator who was a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, pushed for Texas to recognize the importance of that June day. While serving in the Texas House of Representatives in 1979, Edwards, just a year into his new political career, advocated for a bill that sought to make Juneteenth a state holiday. The effort succeeded, setting the precedent for the federal holiday we now celebrate. But it required much endurance, and there’s something we can learn from that history today.
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Edwards, who died in 2020, saw the Juneteenth bill test his perseverance, political savviness, willingness to compromise, and ability to bring together a coalition (in a predominantly white legislative body) that favored creating the holiday.
The initial outreach was hard. In an interview with the nonprofit organization the HistoryMakers, Edwards bemoaned, “When I would go to white legislators with my flow chart to check off who I had and who I didn’t have, my first time around, they all said no.”
Some legislators told him they would lose their seats if they voted for a Black holiday or said it would cause division. Others had more practical reasons: It was going to cost the state money, and state employees already had too many holidays. But after some back-room negotiations, compromises, and seven rewrites, the bill passed and Juneteenth was officially recognized as a state holiday in 1980.
Edwards’s endurance through the process was shaped by his family’s faith, which had prevailed through slavery, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement.
The Edwards family were natives of Texas who had long celebrated Juneteenth. Every year, families in their Houston neighborhood would dig a hole in the ground, put wood and coal inside, and drape it with a screen for a holiday barbecue. Edwards, who grew up during segregation, also remembers June 19 being the only day that a local amusement park would allow Black people to enter. He and his siblings would spend most of the day there, spending the nickels, quarters, and dimes they had saved up for the rare occasion.
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After the Civil War, many slaves in Texas and elsewhere saw their freedom as an answered prayer and a fulfillment of prophecy. In Mary Livermore’s _My Story of the War_, the suffragist writer cites an enslaved woman known as Aunt Aggy, who declared in her prayers during slavery that bondage was not the final destiny of Black people in America. “There’s a day a-comin,” Aunt Aggy said. “Oh, Lord! Roll on the chariots, and give the black people rest and peace.”
Rest and peace did come at the end of the war and during the short-lived period of Reconstruction. For the first time in the South, Black and white people were equals under the law. African Americans became office holders and a major voting force, particularly in states like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The future seemed bright. But due to growing white supremacist violence, the removal of federal troops from the South, and waning political interest about preserving equal rights, this era did not last.
The end of Reconstruction gave way to the rise of Jim Crow. After federal troops left the South, former Confederates regained political power and reestablished the antebellum racial hierarchy sans slavery. This setup was held in place by violence, most often by the ubiquitous mob practice of lynching. In the decades it was most prevalent, thousands of African Americans were killed in the South through extrajudicial methods, either by hangings, shootings, burnings, drownings, dismemberment, or other means.
During this time, Edwards’s family planted a church in Houston to bring light into the darkness. Edwards said the congregation was called the South Main Baptist Church and was initially “headed up” by his maternal grandmother and then pastored by his paternal grandfather, Redick. He handed down the church to Edwards’s father, Eldridge, who pastored the congregation during the early 20th century.
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Eldridge Edwards typified the central role Black pastors played in those days. He helped ensure the community’s practical needs were met by getting streets paved, ditches cleaned, and improving neighborhoods with no drainage system. He also aimed to protect his people’s political rights and monitored local elections as a precinct judge. Sometimes, he would stay all night to count votes, and Albert or his siblings would ferry him food the next day. What was more important than the practical things was what Eldridge exhibited: a self-respect that would not bow down to white supremacy.
“I just got a lot from him,” Edwards said.
When Albert Edwards went to college at Texas Southern University, he participated in student-led civil rights demonstrations. He joined marches and sit-ins and advocated for equal rights. When he pushed for the Juneteenth holiday more than a decade later, he saw it as an opportunity for Americans to learn about Black history and for Black youth to foster the type of self-respect his dad had.
All of that, however, doesn’t mean Edwards didn’t have flaws. He had a mixed record on abortion,supporting some pro-life legislation but opposing some as well.
That said, he accomplished something great in bringing Juneteenth’s recognition out of the silos of Black acknowledgement alone and doing so decades ago in the Deep South. What is even more amazing is the faith community we see in his story. Theirs is a testimony of what happens when the Black church refuses to draw back in despondency during dark periods, and how a faith that endures eventually produces fruit that will bless the world around us.
Jessica Janvier is an academic whose focus crosses the intersections of African American religious history and church history. She teaches at Meachum School of Haymanot and works in the Intercultural Studies Department at Columbia International University.