YEAR: 1865Juneteenth
The last enslaved Africans in Texas were set free not by declaration of their freedom, but by the arms of the Union military, who fought loyalists and recalcitrant slave masters who sought to eke out every last drop of labor from their slaves, despite the results of the war. Black freedom was won through persistent struggle against slave masters to the very end – all paper declarations and proclamations of freedom aside.
It is simply a myth that enslaved Africans were unaware of their freedom and were simply ignorant of the declarations. As a formerly enslaved man, Felix Haywood said at the time “We knowed what was goin’ on in [the war] all the time…We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves.” The ending of slavery was not something to be decreed or proclaimed; freedom had to be seized from the clutches of the defeated slavocracy by Black people acting as agents of their own liberation.
