Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, the day Union soldiers told enslaved people in Texas they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. President Biden made it a federal holiday.

There was a march in this small town from a church to the park downtown. The name on one of the signs, William Burns, was that of a young Black man who was lynched here in 1907. He allegedly shot and killed a police officer. Residents broke him out of jail and murdered him. Though I suspected there would be some race-related history in this town, I was shocked to learn of this lynching.