Today is not only Father’s Day, it is also June Day, the day that brought freedom to the last of all enslaved people in the United States. It is also our most recent federal holiday. That the two of them agree has a personal meaning for our Mark Whitaker:
June celebrations have already begun this weekend in Galveston, Texas, the city where the party has its roots. It was 157 years ago today, June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger went from the docks in downtown Galveston to reading General Order No. 3, which stated that “all slaves are free. absolute equality of personal rights and property rights between former masters and slaves “.
But it wasn’t until two years later that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
I have my own personal connection to this story. This is the grave of my great-grandfather, Frank Whitaker, who was born a slave in Texas in 1853.
Mark Whitaker at the grave of his great-grandfather, Frank Whitaker, who was enslaved from birth in Texas in 1853 to the age of 11. CBS News
My great-grandfather was 11 years old when he was released in June.
Frank Whitaker is buried next to his wife, Della, and one of his daughters, Julia, who died when she was just one year old. The gravestones are in a small, well-kept, all-black cemetery on a dirt road on the outskirts of Jewett City, halfway between Houston and Dallas.
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An hour later, in Waco, I first met my second cousin, Bernice Bryant.
“I only recently became aware of this part of the family,” Mark said.
“Me too!” said Bernice.
“So we’re figuring it out after all this time.”
Frank Whitaker was also Bryant’s great-grandfather, and she met him as a child when he was 80 and lost his sight. “I saw him once,” she said. “He was blind. And he was very angry, because he went to cry. Because he was blind and he didn’t see us.”
I sat down with Bernice; his daughter, Angela Tyler; and Tyler’s son, John Bible.
Angela Tyler, Bernice Bryant and John Bible. CBS News
For previous generations, Juneteenth did not change much. John said, “You had slaves who were freed, but they really had nowhere to go. They didn’t leave with a mule and land, nothing like that.”
“They were still shop windows,” Angela said. “They didn’t venture right away. They waited and for years.” But they could not buy or own their land.
My great-grandfather stayed close to the land, but he was able to get some education. In the decades following Juneteenth, Frank Whitaker became a parking lot on white-owned land outside of Jewett. Most of her 13 children never left the area. But my grandfather, C. Sylvester Whitaker, Sr., emigrated north to Pittsburgh and became a funeral director.
Before he died, he left this memory: “My father, a former slave, was highly respected by all who knew him. He became an excellent statistician and historian. Anyone who wanted to know anything about the Leon County’s story would go to my father. He wrote many articles for the Jewett Messenger, the village newspaper. “
Even in Bernice’s generation, many of Frank Whitaker’s Texas descendants harvested crops. As children, they all worked in the fields with their parents, picking and cutting cotton.
And then Juneteenth was just one more day in the field. They could not take a day off. “You could eat,” Bernice laughed. “And then we had lunch and went back to the field!”
Now, Juneteenth has spread from Texas to a national holiday. And my newly found relatives have also come a long way. Angela is the director of a daycare center, where Bernice also works. And John is the president and CEO of Cen-Tex’s African-American Chamber of Commerce, which promotes black businesses. Help organize Waco Juneteenth’s celebration.
I asked Angela, “What should Juneteenth represent?”
“I think it should be a time to look back and see where we’re coming from, and then celebrate where we are now, where we’re trying to get to,” he replied.
John said: “Being a federal holiday allows everyone to understand that there is a second Independence Day, a true Independence Day in America, where everyone, you know, is entitled to opportunities and freedoms. That’s really a “Independence Day. It’s not just for blacks, it’s for the United States.”
Juneteenth is certainly about freedom. But for me, this year is also a family affair.
Saying Grace to the extended family. CBS News
Story produced by Alan Golds. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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