First Juneteenth celebration was held in Houston, Rice scholar says

State Watch First Juneteenth celebration was held in Houston, Rice scholar says Comments: by Cora Neas - 06/19/26 12:25 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Cora Neas - 06/19/26 12:25 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Juneteenth began in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Major General Gordon Granger issued a general order enforcing the emancipation of enslaved people from Texas’ slave masters.

But recently published research in the Journal of Texas History revealed the first anniversary celebration to mark Juneteenth was held in Houston in 1866—not Galveston.

It comes from Caleb McDaniel, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities at Rice University, who told KXAN he uncovered this while reviewing research notes from the 1930s.

“Researchers with the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal were tasked with writing new histories of cities like Houston and states like Texas,” he said, “[Their notes] contain a transcription of this article from the Houston Daily Evening Star from 1866 talking about the Freedman Celebration.”

The WPA researchers never published this discovery, according to McDaniel. That newspaper was also never microfilmed or digitized, and the only remaining physical copies were in the Texas State Archive.

(Courtesy University of North Texas Libraries)

The newspaper is now available via the University of North Texas Library’s “Portal to Texas History.” It is, of course, a product of its time; an edition published five days prior described a pro-Confederate parade as “painfully beautiful and touching.”

Still, McDaniels noted the June 19, 1866, article provides an early insight into post-war Black political life. Several community leaders are named in it: Elias Dibble, the founding minister of Trinity United Methodist Church, and Baptist minister Sandy Parker. Dibble and Parker were part of a group that later bought Emancipation Park in Houston.

“I think it’s significant that we know the names of some of the people who led this effort,” he said. “Given the context in Houston in the summer of 1866, claiming public space in that way was very much a political assertion of the community’s belief in equal rights and their effort to secure those rights for themselves and future generations.”

According to the Star’s reporting, it was a “most beautiful feast” attended by “at least 3,000 or 4,000 people.”

“They paraded through the main street of town to a grove on the outskirts of town where they enjoyed a bountiful dinner, the article says, and continued to celebrate,” McDaniels said.

“Be it said to their great credit, of all the vast assemblies that we have had the pleasure of meeting with in life, we have never met with one of this bulk, where there was so much harmony, unanimity of feeling and sentiment,” the article says.

The Star’s reporter, unfortunately, missed the speeches held that day. They did report on the parade, food and dancing, calling it “the most novel, yet most harmonious meeting.”

“May each returning anniversary of their freedom find them better prepared to enjoy its blessings, appreciate its privileges, and discharge its responsibilities, and learn that ‘Humble toil and heavenward duty…These will form the perfect man,'” wrote the Star, quoting writer and Thanksgiving lobbyist Sarah Josepha Hale.

The paper had a paternalistic slant towards the recently freed, as McDaniel explains on his blog.

“It’s a holiday about remembering the past,” he told KXAN. “But it’s also very much a holiday about the present and the future, and I think when you study this first Houston event that comes through really clearly that this was about a struggle for equality, as well as a celebration of freedom.”

While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, involuntary servitude still exists today. People convicted of a crime can still be made to work in the U.S. penal system. Illegal slavery also remains pervasive; according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, Texas ranked second in the U.S. for the most cases identified in 2024.

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