It was September 12, 1962, when Pres. John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University before nearly 50,000 people. By that time, America had launched but four men into space—the suborbital flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom and the nearly identical three-orbit journeys of John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. Buoyed by the success of those missions and cognizant of the danger that lay ahead, the president rearticulated his vision and reissued his challenge to reach the moon before 1970.
“We choose to go to the moon, in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
The assassination of President Kennedy, in the words of flight director Gene Kranz, turned his vision into a “quest to do it and do it in the time frame he allotted.” On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module known as Eagle, taking “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
About the Book
It was September 12, 1962, when Pres. John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University before nearly 50,000 people. By that time, America had launched but four men into space—the suborbital flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom and the nearly identical three-orbit journeys of John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. Buoyed by the success of those missions and cognizant of the danger that lay ahead, the president rearticulated his vision and reissued his challenge to reach the moon before 1970. “We choose to go to the moon, in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” The assassination of President Kennedy, in the words of flight director Gene Kranz, turned his vision into a “quest to do it and do it in the time frame he allotted.” On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module known as Eagle, taking “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 (after the Battle of Antietam), and the final proclamation on January 1, 1863 (the same day as the Battle of Galveston), they actually had a minimal immediate impact on the lives of most of the millions of the nation’s enslaved African Americans, especially the slaves in Texas. The proclamations did have a significant effect on the prosecution of the Civil War, on the political landscape and in the international community, but it was only with battlefield victories— many of them hard-fought and won by ex-slaves in uniform—that the proclamations could be enforced. Granger’s order, then, was very important in that it legally abolished slavery in Texas forever.
Austin Juneteenth Celebration, 1900
This band played at the Austin 1900 Juneteenth celebration.
Local tradition has it that on June 19, 1865—three years after the President’s Proclamation–General Granger read his order and the Emancipation Proclamation from the balcony of the home of James M. in Galveston. Other historians have suggested the order may have been issued from Granger’s headquarters on the Strand or from the United States Customhouse. Where or whether the order was read aloud, it was posted throughout Galveston and printed in newspapers in the city and throughout the state. In postwar interviews, slaves throughout Texas remembered masters calling them together to read Granger’s order and learning they were now free.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
It took time—weeks or months sometimes—for the news to reach slaves on plantations in the inland frontier. As Henry Louis Gates described in a PBS article, “When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work.“
Corpus Christi, c. 1920 Gloriously commemorating Juneteenth, Anita Blanch Mays and her royal attendants ruled this annual celebration one summer in the 1920s. Riding in the parade with Queen Anita are Dorothy Kitchen Vaughn (right) and her brother L.C. Kitchen, the children of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Kitchen. The driver is unidentified. (Courtesy of the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, Alclair Pleasant Collection.)
Still, it would take time for that freedom and equality to be fully realized. Even Granger’s order was “stated in a patronizing tone,” as one historian declared, requiring the freedmen to find work and forbidding idleness.
The day has been remembered ever since as “Juneteenth” (a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth,” also called “Emancipation Day” or “Freedom Day”). Beginning in 1866, African Americans in Galveston and throughout the state began annual celebrations of Juneteenth with church services, parades, readings of the Emancipation Proclamation and more.
El Paso – Feb. 1971
Jesse Jackson and state legislator Al Edwards, who sponsored the bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday, wave to a crowd of more than 2,000 University of Texas at El Paso students on February 15, 1971. Jackson urged the crowd to form a Rainbow Coalition of blacks and Hispanics to vote for the Democratic ticket. (Courtesy of the El Paso Herald Post.)
Riding a gaily decorated automobile down the streets of Northside is part of the fun of the 1937 Juneteenth celebration. (Courtesy of the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, John Fred’k “Doc” McGregor Photographic Collection.)
Willie Mae Branch is Miss Jolly 12 during the Juneteenth festivities in the summer of 1937. (Courtesy of the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, John Fred’k “Doc” McGregor Photographic Collection.)
Cleo Washington represents the Beauty Shoppe as she participates in the Miss Juneteenth Beauty Pageant of 1937. (Courtesy of the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, John Fred’k “Doc” McGregor Photographic Collection.)
Explore the History of Juneteenth and Emancipation
Rosewood is a historically African American neighborhood on the east side of Austin. It takes its name from Rosewood Avenue, which runs through the heart of the area. Rosewood was first settled by Europeans in the late 19th century, and beginning in the 1910s, the City of Austin adopted as official policy the goal of segregating African Americans in East Austin. Rosewood has been the official home of Austin’s Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, celebration.
From slavery to freedom, to education, to achievement: these words reflect the goals of African Americans who first came as slaves with the Spanish to this part of the Texas coast. Freed by the Civil War on Juneteenth (June 19, 1865), blacks soon established an active and viable community, a significant part of which was defined by the black churches. Using photographs from individual collections African Americans in Corpus Christi reveals the history and people of Corpus Christi.
Through the voice of its people, this lively book relates the interesting and important role the Island City played during the war, including the story of the Union naval blockade, the dramatic Battle of Galveston, Unionists, dreadful epidemics of yellow fever, the surrender of Galveston as the last major port still in Confederate hands and the bondage and liberation of the island’s enslaved African Americans.
In the 19th century, Galveston shores were a gateway for immigrants to Texas and destinations beyond. Slaves, the forced immigrants, were brought to Galveston as property for sale. The largest slave trade operation in Galveston was implemented by Jean Laffite, a pirate. His slave trade business began around 1818. However, for the most part, slaves entering the port of Galveston were destined for other Texas cities and other states.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, “The Oil Capital of the World,” shone brightly at the dawn of the 20th century. Black gold oozed from Indian Territory soil, land once set aside for Native American resettlement. J. Paul Getty, Thomas Gilcrease, and Waite Phillips were among the men extracting fabulous fortunes from Oklahoma crude and living on Tulsa time.
As Tulsa’s wealth and stature grew, so, too, did its political, economic, and, in particular, race-based tensions. The formative years of this segregated city coincided with a period of marked violence against African Americans. In 1919 alone, more than two dozen race riots erupted in towns and cities throughout the country. That same year, vigilantes lynched at least 83 African Americans. The Greenwood District in Tulsa blossomed even amidst this “blacklash.” African Americans engaged one another in commerce, creating a nationally renowned hotbed of black business and entrepreneurial activity known as “Negro Wall Street.” Greenwood Avenue, just north of the Frisco Railroad tracks, became the hub of Tulsa’s original African American community. Eclectic and electric, this artery drew favorable comparisons to legendary thoroughfares such as Beale Street in Memphis and State Street in Chicago.
This parallel black city existed just beyond downtown, separated physically from white Tulsa by the Frisco tracks and psychologically by layers of social stratification. In it, African American businesspersons and professionals mingled with day laborers, musicians, and maids. African American educators molded young minds. African American clergy nurtured spirits and soothed souls. The success of the Greenwood District ran counter to the prevailing notion in that era of black inferiority. Fear and jealousy swelled over time. The economic prowess of Tulsa’s African American citizens, including home, business, and land ownership, caused increasing tension. Black World War I veterans, having tasted true freedom on foreign soil, came back to America with heightened expectations. Valor and sacrifice in battle had earned them the basic respect and human dignity so long denied at home—or so they thought. But America had not yet changed. Oklahoma had not changed. Tulsa had not changed.
This photograph depicts the smoke-filled sky over the Greenwood District. The telling caption suggests a pogrom.
Courtesy of the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.
A seemingly random encounter between two teenagers lit the fuse that set the Greenwood District alight. The alleged assault on a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page, by a 19-year-old black boy, Dick Rowland, in the elevator of a downtown building triggered unprecedented civil unrest. Deep social fissures, however, lay at the roots of the riot, which included white angst over African American prosperity, land lust, and a racially hostile climate in general.
A local newspaper stoked the embers of Tulsa’s emerging firestorm. The Tulsa Tribune framed the elevator incident in black and white: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.” Authorities arrested Rowland. A white mob vowed to lynch him. A small group of African American men marched to the courthouse to protect Rowland. Upon their arrival, law enforcement authorities implored them to retreat, assuring them of the teen’s safety. They left, but the lynch talk persisted. Jarred by these persistent threats and increasingly concerned for Rowland’s safety, more African American men assembled. Several dozen strong, these men, some bearing arms, trekked to the courthouse.
Thousands of black men were interned throughout the city as the riot wound down. As a condition of their release, they were given green cards—also known as American Red Cross Refugee Cards—to be signed by a white person willing to vouch for them.
Courtesy of Dana Birkes.
White men looted downtown pawnshops for guns and ammunition before invading the Greenwood District. Some shopkeepers complied with the looters’ demands; those who resisted had their inventories forcibly removed.
Courtesy of Dana Birkes.
There, they met and verbally engaged with the throngs of white men already massed. Two men struggled over a gun. The gun discharged. Chaos erupted. Soon, thousands of weapon-wielding white men invaded the Greenwood District, seizing upon the “Negro quarter” with seismic fury. Some law enforcement officers stood idly by while others placed themselves squarely along the racial fault lines, even deputizing the white hoodlums who would set ablaze the area derogated as “Little Africa.” As flames raged and smoke billowed, roving gangs prevented firefighters from taking action. In a 16-hour span, people, property, hopes, and dreams vanished.
The Greenwood District lay in utter ruin. The State of Oklahoma declared martial law in Tulsa. The Oklahoma National Guard eventually restored order. Authorities herded African American men into internment camps around the city, ostensibly for their own protection. Camp staff released detainees only upon presentation of green cards countersigned by white guarantors.
“I got caught right in the middle of that riot. Some white mobsters were holed up in the upper floor of the Ray Rhee Flour Mill on East Archer, and they were just gunning down black people, just picking them off like they were swatting flies.”
-Otis Grandville Clark, b. February 13, 1903, d. May 21, 2012
Image courtesy of the Tulsa World
Property damage ran into the millions. Casualties numbered in the hundreds. Some African Americans fled Tulsa, never to return. Local courts failed to convict even a single white person of a crime associated with the riot. Prosecutors charged dozens of African American men with inciting it.
Even as the fires still smoldered, Greenwood District pioneers pledged to rebuild their community from the ashes. Official Tulsa leadership touted cooperation and collaboration, but hindered postriot reconstruction. The Tulsa City Commission blamed African American citizens for their own plight. City officials turned away outside donations earmarked for the rebuilding. Attorney Buck Colbert Franklin rebuffed Tulsa’s attempt to enact a more stringent fire code that would have made post-riot rebuilding cost-prohibitive for many.
Attorney Buck Colbert Franklin, right, works with colleagues in a makeshift law office to assist victims of the riot with legal claims. Franklin won a critical court decision that struck down a city ordinance that would have imposed strict rebuilding requirements in the wake of the riot. These new provisions would have made reconstruction cost-prohibitive for many African Americans. Franklin is the father of the late eminent historian, Dr. John Hope Franklin.
Image Courtesy of the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.
In the midst of the devastation, white allies surfaced. First Presbyterian Church and Holy Family Cathedral helped shelter and feed fleeing victims of the racial violence. The American Red Cross, heralded as “Angels of Mercy,” offered medical care, food, shelter, and clothing, and even established tent cities for the hordes left homeless by the riot.
African Americans shouldered their share of the load, too. Spears, Franklin & Chappelle litigated claims against the City of Tulsa and insurance companies and made urgent appeals to African Americans nationwide for assistance. Black builders secured lumber and supplies from surrounding states so reconstruction could commence. Entrepreneurs vowed to reestablish their businesses. Black churches rallied their parishioners. For Tulsa’s early African American denizens, the Greenwood District was much more than a business venue. It was home. Their determination and persistence ensured the survival of the community they knew and loved.
This c. 1923 group photograph was taken from the Frisco Railroad tracks at Boston Avenue in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. The dramatic and rapid post-riot rebuilding of the Greenwood District in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds speaks to the human spirit of Tulsa’s early African American pioneers.
Courtesy of the Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society.
Tulsa’s African American community proved remarkably resilient. In 1925, just four years removed from the riot, the community hosted the annual conference of the National Negro Business League.
By the early 1940s, scores of businesses once again called the Greenwood District home. Integration, urban renewal, a new business climate, and the aging of the early Greenwood District pioneers precipitated a pronounced economic decline beginning in the 1960s. The emergence of the Greenwood Cultural Center in 1983 signaled a new beginning.
The story of the Greenwood District speaks to the triumph of the human spirit. Now, a new chapter has begun. The Greenwood District, that black entrepreneurial center of old, has long since faded. In its stead is a new incarnation: an emerging arts, cultural, educational, and entertainment complex. This book explores, principally through pictures, the four central phases in the life of Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District: its roots, riot, regeneration, and renaissance.
ABOUT THE BOOK: In the early 1900s, an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit brought national renown to Tulsa’s historic African American community, the Greenwood District. This “Negro Wall Street” bustled with commercial activity. In 1921, jealously, land lust, and racism swelled in sectors of white Tulsa, and white rioters seized upon what some derogated as “Little Africa,” leaving death and destruction in their wake. In an astounding resurrection, the community rose from the ashes of what was dubbed the Tulsa Race Riot with renewed vitality and splendor, peaking in the 1940s. In the succeeding decades, changed social and economic conditions sparked a prodigious downward spiral. Today’s Greenwood District bears little resemblance to the black business mecca of yore. Instead, it has become part of something larger: an anchor to a rejuvenated arts, entertainment, educational, and cultural hub abutting downtown Tulsa.
On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When it was issued on January 1, 1863, it effectively abolished slavery, freeing over three million enslaved African Americans. Sadly, word of it reached Texas nearly two years later, when General Gordon Granger read “General Order No. 3” aloud publicly in the port city Galveston on June 19, 1865.
The anniversary of this day quickly became known as “Juneteenth” for African Americans throughout Texas. Celebrating the new holiday was difficult in cities like nearby, segregated Houston, where no parks allowed African Americans to congregate. In 1872, Houston clergyman Reverend Jack Yates led a fundraising effort to buy ten acres of land as a home for Juneteenth celebrations, naming the site Emancipation Park.
General Order, No. 3 stating the emancipation of slaves, June 19, 1865. This was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
In late 2019, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D) and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R) authored a bill for a federal study of the Emancipation Trail, a proposed 51-mile route from Galveston to Houston. The path would mark the journey by black families sharing the news that all of the enslaved people of Texas were freed. And like the existing Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail, this new route would highlight historic landmarks from Galveston to Houston, including the former Osterman Building in Galveston, where Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in 1865, the Reedy Chapel African American Methodist church, the 1867 settlement in Texas City, the Butler Longhorn Museum in League City, Olivewood Cemetery, the African American Library at the Gregory School in Houston’s historic Freedmen’s Town, the Rev. Ned Pullum and Emma Eddy Pullum House, Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, and ending at Emancipation Park.
“This Emancipation Trail will become only the second in the history of the United States to commemorate the history of African Americans. It will provide enhanced knowledge about the historic announcement by Captain Granger that the slaves were free. I am excited that we were able to secure this legislation in a very short period of time which now establishes the first historic trail solely within the boundaries of the State of Texas. This will be a great asset for the citizens of the State of Texas and I am delighted to have introduced this bill in the House and very pleased that Senator Cornyn joined me by introducing it in the Senate.” — Rep. Jackson Lee
Osterman Building
Following the end of the Civil War, Union troops arrived in Galveston. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger read the order publicly from their headquarters in the Osterman building, now in the historic district known as The Strand.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” — General Gordon Granger, General Order No. 3”
The Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church
In 1848, the Methodist Episcopal Church South established this African American church, and in 1866 the church was deeded to newly freed slaves, becoming the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Texas. Later named in honor of its first pastor the Rev. Houston Reedy of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It also holds the distinction of surviving the hurricane of 1900.
Freedmen’s Town
This African American community in Houston’s Fourth Ward was settled by freed slaves in the late 1860s. A former thriving neighborhood of twenty-eight blocks with more than four hundred black-owned businesses, it slowly lost its distinctiveness and strength when projects such as the whites-only San Felipe Courts were built by the city’s Housing Authority on one-quarter of taken land, or when the Pierce Elevated freeway cut through its eastern border. Following desegregation, the African American community itself left for better neighborhoods, leaving older renters behind. In 1976, the National Park Service recognized forty blocks as a National Historic District, but with little implied protection. In 2009, the Houston Public Library opened the African American Library at the Gregory School, and Houston Independent School District opened the Carnegie Vanguard High School in 2012. Freedmen’s Town was once commonly known as “the Mother Ward” and “Houston’s Harlem.”
Emancipation Park
The City of Houston acquired it in 1916, and in a racially segregated city, Emancipation Park was the only municipal park African Americans could use. In 1939, the Works Progress Administration built a community center building, swimming pool, and bathhouse in Emancipation Park. Suffering from years of inconsistent support, Emancipation Park developed a plan for redevelopment with support from local public and private groups. The comprehensive $35 million upgrades included a new recreation center, renovation of the existing community center and bathhouse, a new swimming pool, reconfigured parking, a playground, a walking trail, tennis and basketball courts, and a ball field.
Coast to coast, every community has a history of pushing against the status quo and challenging the historical norms for a better life. Be it racism and systemic oppression to the right to vote, representation, and demonstrations against the threat of authoritarian rule, these images show us that demonstrations and civil dissent are truly as American as apple pie.
During the last few months, public health experts have called for a massive, moonshot-style response to the coronavirus — a new “Apollo program.”
The original push to put Americans on the moon was sprawling, speedy, expensive, and ultimately successful. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” John F. Kennedy said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
One of the things that made the Apollo program hard was designing and building the lunar modules or LMs — the actual spacecraft that would take Americans to the moon.
Here are some rare images that show how challenging these machines were to build — and that remind us how Americans have done things like this before and can do them again.
The campus of the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, in Bethpage, Long Island, contained a clean room (the dark building in the center), where three LMs could be built at once. The building in front of it contained the ACE (Automatic Checkout Equipment) Room, where the LM’s testing was run. In the lower-left is the Cold Flow Test Site, where the valves and tubing in the LM’s propulsion and cooling systems were tested with nitrogen and glycol under pressure. Image sourced from Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module.As the pressure and the schedule for building the LMs on time was extraordinary, the various managers of each vehicle met every day to go over any problems or delays that needed to be resolved. All meetings were conducted while standing so that no one would get too comfortable. Image sourced from Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module.As equipment was steadily being installed inside the LM, work also progressed on the exterior. The ascent stage has now been covered with its aluminized Mylar thermal blanketing, and the thin skins are being secured over it. The descent stage’s landing gear outriggers have also been covered with shielding. Image sourced from Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module.Inside the LMs, the primary navigation and guidance readouts, flight computer keyboard, propulsion control, reaction control, environmental control, and flight control and stabilization panels were either shared or duplicated at both stations. In the upper center is the alignment optical telescope, used for navigation and docking. In the lower center is the primary guidance computer keyboard. Image sourced from Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module.After returning from the Cold Flow Test Site, the nearly complete LM stages were remated in the clean room one last time. The final systems could now be tested and the landing gear fitted. Image sourced from Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module.
