Malice Begets Malice

On June 19, 1865, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas, and General Gordon Granger’s order informed the people of Texas that enslaved people were free. The order’s language promised “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” between formerly enslaved people and former enslavers. That sentence is worth sitting with, because it shows both the enormity of what was being announced and the depth of what this country would go on to fight over, undermine, and betray.¹

The simplest version of the story is that enslaved people in Texas “finally got the news.” That is true, but incomplete. The Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect in 1863, but it could not enforce itself in places still under Confederate control. In Texas, Union military presence had been too weak to make emancipation real until after the war’s effective end, and in some places the news was delayed, ignored, or deliberately hidden by enslavers trying to preserve slavery.²

It is also important not to tell this history as if enslaved Black people were simply waiting passively for freedom to arrive. News of emancipation moved through rumor, Black newspapers, abolitionist papers, churches, informal networks, and Union soldiers carrying copies of the proclamation as they moved through the South. Many enslaved people ran toward Union lines, withheld labor, offered their services, searched for family, and acted on the knowledge that the war was tied to their liberation.³

That is why Juneteenth matters as more than a date. It is about the difference between freedom being declared and freedom being made real. It is about people who had already been legally promised freedom still being held in bondage. It is about Black people who ran, organized, fought, reunited families, built schools, pushed for land, created communities, and kept celebrating even when the country kept trying to narrow what freedom would mean.⁴

As a reporter, I think a lot about what gets softened when history is retold too neatly. Juneteenth is a celebration, yes. It is cookouts, music, church services, family reunions, red food and drink, public readings, memory, and joy.⁵ But it is also what historian Clint Smith describes as a “both/and”: mourning the fact that freedom was kept from enslaved people after it had already been promised, while also celebrating the end of one of the most terrible institutions this country ever built.⁶

So, belatedly: Happy Juneteenth.

And may we tell the story plainly enough to honor both the grief and the joy.

¹ “Juneteenth,” Wikipedia, accessed June 20, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth.

² National Park Service, “Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom,” last updated March 29, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/articles/juneteenth-origins.htm; National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth,” Smithsonian Institution, accessed June 20, 2026, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth.

³ Scott Neuman, “Juneteenth: How News of the Emancipation Proclamation Spread Through the South,” NPR, June 19, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/06/19/nx-s1-5861779/juneteenth-emancipation-proclamation-lincoln-slavery-civil-war.

⁴ National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth”; William Tecumseh Sherman, “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, January 16, 1865, Orders and Circulars, ser. 44, Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, National Archives.

⁵ “Juneteenth,” Wikipedia.