In home of Juneteenth, the continued fight for 'absolute equality'

Trymaine Lee: How important is it that people actually come here to Galveston and step foot on this ground?

Sam Collins: Well, you know, I tell people often that they could read about Juneteenth, they could watch a documentary about Juneteenth. It’s like reading about swimming or watching a film on swimming. At some point, you have to get in the water. So, you are here in the Juneteenth water. You can’t visit those sites anywhere but Galveston where the Juneteenth story began.

Lee: Galveston is an island city in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of Texas, an hour south of Houston. The island is known for its beautiful beaches and as the site of one of the most important moments in American history.

It was here on June 19, 1865, that the 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were finally freed by General Order No. 3, declaring, quote, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

President Abraham Lincoln had issued the emancipation proclamation more than two years earlier, but with the civil war still raging, freedom came slowly to black people living in Confederate states.

After the south surrendered, the Union Army filled with black soldiers marched to west enforcing the proclamation. Texas was the last stop.

Collins: So, Granger got off the ship at the docks, came downtown into the commercial district and issues General Order No. 3.

Lee: I’m on a Freedom Walk Tour with Sam Collins, the President of Galveston’s Juneteenth Legacy Project. Our first stop is this corner where everything began.

Collins: This is one of the most historic corners in Galveston, the southwest corner of 22nd and Strand, is where Major General Gordon Granger set up his Union headquarters on June 19, 1865.

Lee: Sam has made at his mission to make sure everyone who comes to Galveston knows the story behind June 19.

Collins: The largest enslaver lived here in Galveston. And this is why Galveston was so important for the Union soldiers to come in and make the announcement here because news spread from Galveston throughout the rest of the State of Texas, so Galveston, some considered the New Orleans of Texas. It was the major port city west of New Orleans. Texas was the last Confederate state to come back.

Lee: Since that announcement, people in Galveston have been commemorating Juneteenth with family gatherings, parades, and reenactments of the reading of Order No. 3. Celebration of the holiday soon spread throughout black America, especially down south, sometimes called Jubilee Day, Black Independence Day or Emancipation Day, all with the same purpose.

Joe Biden: I wish all Americans happy Juneteenth.

Lee: And in 2021, it became a federal holiday.

Biden: And I have to say to you, I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president.

Collins: Well, think about the story of Juneteenth, we’ve been celebrating since 1865. I traced my roots here in Texas back to 1837. So prior to freedom coming, I had former enslaved individuals living here in Texas, and Galveston has been celebrating ever since. So, Juneteenth became popular in 2020, but it’s always been important to the former enslaved and their descendants here in Texas.

Lee: Is there a common misconception about Juneteenth or Galveston?

Collins: Oh, absolutely. People say the news was late. The news was not late. It was late to be enforced. It was in newspapers, it was reported, it was spread from plantation to plantation that if the Union won that the enslaved people would be free. But it wasn’t until the men with the guns showed up, the Union soldiers, many of them United States Colored Troops to enforce the emancipation proclamation.

Lee: We’re standing in front of a giant mural, illustrating that push for freedom. There, General Granger with a group of those black Union soldiers, a modern reminder that we have always fought for our own freedom.

Collins: So, we are here on the southwest corner. We have this amazing absolute equality mural, which is the bottom-line, we want absolute equality.

Lee: Absolute equality, those words are scrolled underneath the mural in an old-fashioned font, reminiscent of the declaration of independence. The phrase may sound like something you’d hear in protest today, but it was written into General Order No. 3.

Collins: The second sentence says, this involves an absolute equality. Absolute equality is not about everyone having equal results, but every human being having an equal opportunity to grow and develop into the very best self without hurdles or barriers hindering that growth or development. So, we still have things that hinder the growth and development of individuals in our society. And until we remove those, we’re not going to have absolutely quality.

Lee: Here in Galveston, nearly 160 years after General Order No. 3, the fight for absolute equality wages on. For decades, Galveston had a prosperous black middle class, and while the community declined steadily over the years, in 2000, black folks still made up about a quarter of the island’s residence. Then in 2008, disaster struck.

Archival Recording: (Inaudible) is at shore (ph).

Archival Recording: Tonight, Galveston is a soaked and shattered disaster zone.

Archival Recording: These waves are coming in so fast.

Archival Recording: Hurricane Ike --

Archival Recording: What a scene there in Galveston, Texas.

Archival Recording: We are in an emergency response mode.

Lee: But black Galvestonians were hit especially hard. And between 2000 and 2010, the black population plummeted by 37%. Then, as the city began to rebuild its tourism industry after the storm, investors began flocking to the island.

Collins: Gentrification is a real problem here on the island, in which individuals are losing property or have lost properties specifically after Hurricane Ike in 2008. Many of the people were moved off the island to the mainland. Many families lost their homes that were not able to repair their homes.

Lee: And during the pandemic, this trend exploded.

June Pulliam: I remember black families living in many of the homes in my neighborhood that now you see are obviously short-term rentals. So, it has changed the black community significantly.

Lee: Today, the city is 16% black, and people are fighting to preserve what’s left.

Pulliam: I am certainly hopeful that my children and future grandchildren maybe will still have a connection here as the birthplace of Juneteenth because that’s important. It did not happen elsewhere. It happened here.

Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is “Into America.” Today, we go to the birthplace of Juneteenth, where our celebration of hard fought freedom took shape, and ask the question what will it take for the black folks here to have absolute equality?

After my tour with Sam, I pay a visit to June Pulliam. So, first of all, I absolutely love these. I mean, I see this gentleman with this suit on and this beautiful beard. Who is this?

Pulliam: This is my great-great-grandfather, Horace Scull. Horace Scull is really kind of where our story begins of our family coming to Galveston. He came here in 1865, the same year as Juneteenth.

Lee: Wow. Miss Pulliam lives in a home that’s been in her family since 1900. As she shows me photos of her ancestors, she tells me that she knows from family documents passed down through the generations that her great, great-grandparents were enslaved just across the bay when General Granger issued General Order No. 3.

June Pulliam: The two of them and their two children were emancipated in 1865. When those freedom soldiers came, including all the thousands of U.S. Colored Troops, as I’m sure you know, and they decided that Galveston was the place to be.

And with them was a 5-year-old son, Ralph Albert Scull. This is him on the steps of the house that you’re in right now. This picture was taken in approximately 1908.

A year ago, I was asked to present the story to school children as young as kindergartners. And one of the things that got me to thinking about was Ralph Albert Scull as a 5-year-old child caused me to use more of my imagination of just, how do you deal with one day, your parents say, “Hey, we can go, and we’re going across that water over there, and go to Galveston”? I cannot imagine it.

And the amazing thing is to just know what all kinds of obstacles they must have dealt with when they got here. And yet, Horace Scull, my great-grandfather, built houses not only for his own family but for other just-emancipated black people here in Galveston. A couple of those houses are still standing today as a matter of fact from the 1800s.

Lee: When I read, “Island of Color,” it seemed like a robust culture, like black folks had community and culture on this island.

June Pulliam: There was so much happening. Galveston, you have to remember, had been a much more significant city. My mother says, for example, that when she was going to school in the 30s and 40s, there were black children who didn’t even live in Galveston who had someone to drive them to Galveston so that they could attend central high school because they didn’t yet have high schools for black students on the mainland and et cetera. And many people came here. This was a mecca of culture. Many well-known musicians came through Galveston and et cetera. So, it was the center.

Lee: I think about these early generations after emancipation who were going on to start families and build institutions and build wealth, and I can imagine that Juneteenth must have been special in this place given what freedom meant for folks who were forging out on their own for the first time and creating community and creating institutions.

June Pulliam: Exactly. And what’s exciting to know is that both of these men, my great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather were involved in some of those Juneteenth celebrations.

There are small news clippings we have found that will show that Juneteenth, da-da-da, is coming up, and here’s the committee and here’s the chair and the vice chair and the la-da la-da and their names are listed there in the 1880s and 1890s. So, they were involved in those celebrations.

We also know the first Juneteenth celebration took place at their church, Reedy Chapel A.M.E. Church, where they worshiped and celebrated. And my family’s been very involved in these Juneteenth celebrations for many years going back to the last century.

Lee: What was it like when you were coming up celebrating Juneteenth as a little girl?

June Pulliam: Well, actually, things had kind of slowed down by the time I was growing up.

Lee: By the 1960s, there weren’t as many big Juneteenth events on the island. Some celebrations had moved to the mainland. Plus, as the years went by, people felt further removed from the holiday.

Around the same time, the shipping jobs that had been the lifeblood of the middle class were drying up. And over the next few decades, the black population steadily declined.

Do you think we’ve gotten to that place where we have absolute equality in Galveston?

June Pulliam: No.

Lee: No?

June Pulliam: No.

Lee: No with no little chuckle there.

June Pulliam: Is it better than it was in 1865? Certainly, yes. There are some strides that some things, some gains that have been maintained. Sadly, I guess, for a variety of reading, socioeconomic realities have hit this island. When Hurricane Ike came and destroyed so much of Galveston in 2008, that made a big dent in the black population.

Archival Recording: Massive waves of water. As Hurricane Ike churned toward Texas, in Galveston, a city being battered.

Archival Recording: I think people need to understand what we’re talking about here. This isn’t rising water. This is a tsunami. This is a surge, a wall of water that’s 20-feet high.

Lee: Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston on September 13, 2008, and devastated the island.

Archival Recording: This was a whole community and it’s nothing but pilings, and there is one home straight ahead of us, and that’s there, but it’s nothing.

Archival Recording: Gulf waters swallowed chunks of the island.

Archival Recording: It’s bad, it’s devastating, heartbreaking.

Archival Recording: And recovery, a long way off.

Anthony Griffin: The swarm came in. They announced that we had to relocate.

Lee: Anthony P. Griffin is a retired attorney, who’s been living on the island on and off for about 50 years. He remembers fling as the storm rolled in.

Griffin: Galveston black population is underemployed, unemployed, and those folks had to move to other cities.

Lee: Galveston’s population took a big hit after the storm. Between 2000 and 2010, the city lost 17% of its people, but the black community bore the brunt of this loss. In that decade, the number of black residents plummeted 37%.

A big reason for that was the dissolution of public housing. The storm badly damaged three public housing apartment buildings, where most of the residents were black. Galveston decided to tear them down, and the city lost 569 units of housing.

Griffin: And they told the residents, you all need to find somewhere else to live.

Lee: The Galveston Housing Authority promised they’d rebuild those units so that people could come back, and even got $100 million from the federal government to make that happen, but some people were glad to see the public housing gone and fought the effort to rebuild.

David Stanowski: We feel that the Galveston has far more than its fair share of public housing. And we feel that that --

Lee: For years, David Stanowski led the mostly white anti-public housing efforts in Galveston. This is him from a community debate on Houston’s PBS channel in November of 2010.

Stanowski: Public housing puts a great burden on the city services, police, fire, EMS, and the school system.

Archival Recording: David, is the assumption that if there isn’t public housing rebuilt in those areas that people who cannot afford housing will just leave the island? Is that what your group is supporting, hoping for?

Stanowski: Well, we would support the remedy to offer low-income minorities, better opportunities in more suburban areas where there are better schools, lower crime. And we feel that that’s the best way to handle this is to build some public housing in League City, Friendswood, Dickinson and places like that, and offer these people the opportunity to move to those areas.

Lee: Stanowski was successful. In 2012, the city elected a mayor who opposed public housing. Anthony P. Griffin compared the situation to post-Katrina New Orleans.

Griffin: They then made a policy decision. They were not going to rebuild those housing authority. They did what New Orleans did. After the hurricane hit New Orleans, federal dollars came in. They wouldn’t spend the federal dollars for the intended beneficiaries. And Galveston patterned that. You know, hurricanes were similar. They moved all the minority population out. If you look at the demographic numbers, those numbers have gone down.

Lee: Folks advocating for public housing like the local NAACP chapter didn’t give up. Eventually, the Obama administration threatened to pull Galveston’s federal relief dollars if they didn’t rebuild. By 2015, the city had built almost 200 units of public housing all within mixed income apartment buildings. But it was too late. People had already started new lives elsewhere. And although the city continues to build more units, only a tiny fraction of the original public housing residents have moved back.

Archival Recording: And we’re now a richer city, we are a whiter city. The land has increased three or fourfold, and there’s a whole group of folks that had to go other places to survive.

Lee: Between 2010 and 2020, the black population in Galveston held steady for the most part. But in the last few years, there’s been a new trend that as people like Anthony and June worried about the future of this historic black community here in the birthplace of Juneteenth.

As June Pulliam and I sit on her front porch on the same steps where her ancestors posed for photos more than a century ago, I pulled up a map of Airbnb’s in her neighborhood. We’re two blocks from the ocean, near a long stretch of popular beaches and restaurants, and it shows --

Speaking of short-term rentals, I want to show you something here. We did a little bit of a research and we pulled up your neighborhood. And those are all the rentals in a radius, a few block radius of where we sit right now.

June Pulliam: Isn’t that something? Yes, I’m not surprised.

Lee: I’ mean they’re --

June Pulliam: They’re everywhere.

Lee: -- 288, 399, 244. They’re literally everywhere.

June Pulliam: Everywhere.

Lee: How does that change the complexion literally and figuratively of a neighborhood?

June Pulliam: If you used to have a sense of people knowing their neighbors, first of all, that’s almost impossible when most of your neighbors are just people who come and stay for a couple of days for a weekend getaway.

The sense of community has changed. And it was a neighborhood in which I knew most of the people as a child. My parents grew up in the same neighborhood. My mother grew up at this house here, my father at another house just blocks away since his family also has been here generations going back to the 1880s.

So, there was a familiarity, and with the familiarity comes a degree of comfort and a sense of security that people will look out for one another, that they will care about what’s happening to each other. And unfortunately, that is greatly diminishing.

Lee: Is there pressure for black families to sell? If you’re just a working class black family, you may have held on your property for a long time. Is there pressure to now sell?

June Pulliam: If you had any idea how many offers I get, I get people asking me to sell my house by text messages, I get emails, I get mailed things. One time, someone just came and actually knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to sell. I was like, “No.”

Lee: Was it no or was it a no?

June Pulliam: Well, I was nice. I’m on camera so I’m going to say it a nice way. Some of them are rather persistent. The text messages are the ones that bother me the most because you’re not expecting to get text messages with people asking about buying a home.

So, I know that the market must be very hot that so many people were trying to buy. My home is a very modest home. But I’m sure that if I were having financial distress, you know, it would be easy to succumb to that because it is constant.

Lee: Home prices have been rising in Galveston for years. Then during the pandemic lockdown, as people in the Houston area and beyond flocked to the seaside, the market took off. Between 2019 and 2021, the median price of a home on the island shot up by 65%. During that same time, a local housing advocacy organization found that the number of short-term rentals like Airbnb and Vrbo went up 125%.

The city has passed more regulation and taxes on short-term rentals, but residents say, the damage is done. According to census data, the island lost more black residents between 2020 and 2022 than the whole decade before. Anthony P. Griffin, the retired lawyer and longtime Galveston resident, is looking to change that.

Griffin: That’s pretty much taking time (ph).

Lee: Mister Griffin and I are standing on a grassy vacant lot, just one of the properties he’s purchased over the years in this historically-black neighborhood. It’s about 9:30 in the morning, but the day is already heating up as long-billed seabirds hopped around the grass, Mister Griffin is picking up trash and clearing palm fronds, doing his best to keep the area tidy. We moved to a bit of shade behind a one-storey brick building so he can tell me more about the neighborhood’s past.

Griffin: There were hotels, there was a barbecue place, there was -- used to be a Busy Bee cab company was over here (ph). The van parked. You know, there were businesses all up in this area. But the significance of this land is probably the last bulkhead of the African American community.

Lee: Mister Griffin has seen that when the black population declines, so to do the jobs, the businesses end the culture.

Griffin: I think that if you look at Galveston, Texas, you can’t name 10 businesses. Think about that.

Lee: Ten black-owned businesses?

Griffin: Ten.

Lee: Not long ago, there were dozens of black-owned businesses around the island, seamstresses, bakeries, cleaners, and barber shops. But one by one, they’ve slowly shut their doors.

Just recently, the last black barbecue pitmaster in Galveston has announced his closing shop. Mister Griffin has watched these folks leave and he wants to reverse the trend. So, he’s buying up this land.

So, what is the exact plan for this land? You want to develop it, but what does that look like in your mind?

Griffin: The house over there, I want to put a bookstore bakery. We want to put commercial development there, place a hotel on the other side of the street. We own three or four lots on the other side. It’s for mixed use development, commercial development, trying to attract people of color and tell the story what’s been lost and started getting people to migrate back to the island.

Lee: We’re just a few blocks from downtown where the cruise ships dock, offloading tourists who have filled the restaurants and bars. I mean this pretty prime real estate.

Griffin: These houses just got built within the last three to four years, these two houses. And everybody’s trying to cash out on it. So, they move in, they get a good deal, and then they come in and they’re going to sell high --

Lee: Yes.

Griffin: -- and make money.

Lee: And that’s’ squeezing out folks who can’t afford it.

Griffin: Yes.

Lee: It’s squeezing them out.

Griffin: Yes, they probably squeeze them out.

Lee: Mister Griffin has gotten lots of offers on his land, but he’s not interested in selling to the highest bidder. He wants a partner or investors who share his vision for a rejuvenated black community in Galveston.

Griffin: I want to bring back black folks having some economic influence on the island where we have a vested interest in the game, which we should have all over the country.

Lee: In terms of history, Galveston is the birthplace of Juneteenth, the celebration of final freedom, this push for absolute equality. And I wonder if black folks today can have absolute equality and freedom if they don’t have land.

Griffin: No. And if you don’t have economic opportunity, if you don’t own land, if you’re not able to participate fully in the American dream, you don’t give me the opportunity to participate in the American dream. While you give other people the opportunity, that’s essentially what this is all about. And you can’t ever have absolutely equality if you -- if you don’t own anything.

Lee: Back with June Pulliam on her front porch, this porch steeped in the history of black Galveston. I asked her, “What’s at stake if black families continue to be pushed off the island, this birthplace of Juneteenth?”

Pulliam: Wow. I guess what’s at stake is just the preservation of this very important history. I believe our history is not just important to us here in Galveston, it’s important to the whole country.

Juneteenth is American history. Juneteenth is a marker in time when our country began to move in the direction of getting it right, of putting in place what they wrote down in 1776. And for that and many other reasons, I think all Americans should consider this to be their holiday because it was a move in the direction of, let’s do what we’re saying we’re going to do.

Lee: Toward the end of our conversation, a special guest.

June Pulliam: I’d like to introduce my daughter Janae who just --

Lee: Yes.

June Pulliam: -- got home from work.

Lee: Hello, Janae.

Janae Pulliam: Hi.

June Pulliam: This is the one I was telling some of you as a communication specialist.

Lee: And so, what’s it like to be on this front porch knowing how generations of your family had stood in these very footsteps? What does it feel like?

Janae Pulliam: Do you want to answer or me?

June Pulliam: I like you to answer that question.

Janae Pulliam: Oh, gosh. It is a huge honor. A lot of black families don’t have something to still look at to know that they were here. A lot of people feel like they’re starting over. They’re just now digging back.

And so, I’m really grateful that because of the people who came before us who knew it was going to be important, that not only did they build the house to last, they don’t build houses like this anymore, but that they built a history that we can keep coming back to and keep digging up, like that’s beyond a blessing. It helps ground you in where you are today.

Lee: Black Galveston may be smaller than it once was, but people like Sam Collins, Anthony P. Griffin, Miss Pulliam and her daughter Janae are still holding on to the promise of absolute equality ingrained in this annual celebration of Juneteenth, a promise that isn’t just about a single day on the calendar or this one city.

They’re holding tight to this land, and the community it’s nourished in order to ensure that this small island off the coast of Texas can remain a beacon of freedom to all of us for years to come.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using the handle @intoamericapod or you can tweet me, @TrymaineLee, my full name. And to send us an email, the address is intoamerica@nbcuni.com. That was intoamerica@nbc and the letters U-N-I.com.

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“Into America” is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our Executive Producer is Aisha Turner. This week’s episode also featured production help from Jerry Hatton (ph), Michael Hunting (ph), Peter Shaw, and Andy Viganez (ph).

I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday.