Juneteenth and Emancipation in Texas

The Emancipation Proclamation had applied to Confederate Texas from 1863, but slavery continued there while the war and weak federal enforcement prevented freedom from being secured. News, military authority and the willingness of slaveholders to comply were uneven.

After Union forces arrived in Galveston, Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 on 19 June 1865. The date became Juneteenth, a long-standing African American commemoration of emancipation, family reunion and the unfinished struggle for equal citizenship.

Come Juneteenth centres on a fictional slaveholding family that conceals emancipation from an enslaved young woman. Its tragedy turns the delay between legal freedom and enforced freedom into a moral crisis within an intimate household.