Unveiling the Shocking Truth: The Surprising Release of Joshua Houston – General Sam Houston’s Slave on June 1st!

On June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the US Civil War, Union General Gordon Granger stepped onto the balcony of the Ashton Mansion in Galveston, Texas, and proclaimed to the state’s population that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most prized property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s June 19th announcement with song, dance and feast. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as an enslaved servant General Sam Houstonthe best-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read at the local Methodist church in Huntsville, Texas Union General Edgar M. Gregorythe Deputy Commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it at least meant Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more.

The promise of freedom meant more work had to be done. Families had to be reunited. Land had to be secured. Children had to be raised.

Indeed, Juneteenth’s radical promise is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son, Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white response to black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had opened a forge near Huntsville’s town square and was moving his family into a two-story home on the adjacent property.

He helped found the Union Church, the first black-run institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African-American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first black county commissioner, an influential position in local government.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political history was by no means unique.

In the two decades following Emancipation, 52 black men served in state legislatures or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But by 1882 that number had dropped to two.

Resistance to black freedom has been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since Emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an angry white man had responded to Granger’s Juniteenth order He rides past a celebrating black woman and murders her with his sword.

In 1871, violence continued when white Huntsville citizens stormed the county courthouse and helped three men escape Lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, Attacks on black elected officialsher white political allies and black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 20th century, state electoral laws were effectively changed, including the introduction of the poll tax disenfranchised most black voters and also many poor white people. Voter turnout declined from about 85% at the height of Texas populism in 1896 to about 35% when the poll tax went into effect in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last black legislator for almost 70 years, when he ended his term in 1897.

This wall of white supremacy in the state Capitol was not to be broken until 1966 Federal Voting Rights Legislation And Supreme Court judgments nullified schemes Denying African Americans the right to vote.

These changes allowed black officials to be elected such as Barbara Jordanthe first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son was born Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light reconstruction.

Though he spent his adulthood through some of its darkest years Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. After brief stints at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, DC, Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby municipality of Galilee.

The school in Houston was named for him and served as one of the first district schools for African Americans in Texas. Students of all levels were enrolled, from first grade through high school, and a curriculum based on this was provided Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at the Houston school received training in home economics, sewing, and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking, and mathematics.

By 1922 the school had grown to 400 enrolled students and was recognized by its contemporaries as the premier school in East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was incorporated into the Huntsville School District and he became the director of black education for the county.

Houston encouraged practical education for black Texans, but also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn a narrative of history distinct from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

To this end, he joined forces with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who created courses in race relations at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial CooperationAttempting to rate Texas public school textbooks in the 1930s.

Analyzing racist attitudes in government-approved textbooks, they found that 74% of the books presented a racist view of the past and of black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary, and civic contributions of blacks and mentioned their economic contributions only during the pre-Civil War period of slavery.

Instead, the group argued, books aimed at both black and white Texans must seize the “opportunity to simply administer justice” by presenting the history of black people and the “struggle to exercise” equal bourgeois, include political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to take on a textbook in the 1930s that taught basic racial equality, or Reconstruction as it is commonly understood today was presented as a missed opportunity to create a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white colleagues were motivated by believing that progress for both African Americans and Texas required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing struggle for equality

Today’s Legislative Efforts in Texas and Elsewhere limit teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the teachings and realities presented by the lives of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston.

The argument in support of such limitations is that “divisive concepts” such as the history of racism may cause some students to feel uneasy or guilty.

This line of thinking echoes the same justification offered by Texas legislators in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure thatthe peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the ban on teaching the darker chapters of our past leads to a separate history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of each other in order to rise to a more unified and egalitarian society.

The story of Texas is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to promoting freedom and the story of powerful people and forces who stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the achievements of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the sinister realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of her life and the holiday of June 19 is that freedom is something precious that requires constant work to achieve.

Jeffrey L Littlejohn is a professor of history Sam Houston State University And Zachary Montz is a lecturer in the history department, Sam Houston State University.

This article was republished by The conversation under a Creative Commons license. read this original article.