How Some Slave Owners Tried to Keep Slavery Alive After Juneteenth
There were plenty of places in Texas where there was no freedom on Juneteenth. We must nevertheless celebrate the date for it set in motion eventual freedom from the cutthroat slave owners. But, lets us look at the real historical record, keeping it real every year by knowing facts.
The Bob Lee Gang
A gang of white supremacist criminals, known as the Bob Lee Gang roamed Texas after the Civil War forcing Black people back into slavery even after the war and after the passage of the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery. But they cared nothing about the law or emancipation. In various Texas counties, slaveowners often hanged or shot any slave from seeking freedom a year after the Civil war was over and beyond. Plantations became death camps and this is why I have maintained the idea that every slave owner should have been executed or jailed.
‘I Will Not Obey, If I’m Not Paid’
Slave owners wanted to be compensated for losing their slaves at gunpoint, and if the government was not going to pay them, they refused to obey the emancipation order or the 13th Amendment. According to Dr. Gerald Horne, one slave owner woman kept an “African American woman chained to her room to bar her escape and continued to enslave her well after this official date of slavery’s end.”
This slave owner woman should have been executed. Many Black people remained enslaved after the war ended, even all the way up to the 1900s. The slave owners came up with a trick plan that would force the formally enslaved to sign “labor contracts” or be shot to death if they did not comply.
Wealthiest Slave Owners were Cherokee
Slavey continued to exist in Texas years after the so-called emancipation and the 13th Amendment. The Choctaw native tribe refused to obey an end to slavery and kept Blacks enslaved even after the war. In fact, and unknown to many, some of the wealthiest slave owners were Cherokee. The slaveowners had to be forced to free Blacks at Galveston Island and many refused to do so at the point of a gun.
If you think Mississippi is a horrid racist place, and it was, Texas has Mississippi beat. Slavery continued slavery later than any other state in the Union. When slave owners were defeated, they tried to set up an “Old Virginia” plantation in Mexico, but that plot was defeated after Mexico removed the French occupation. The idea of an “Old Virginia” was made into a racist song in 1880 and was called “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.” It was sung by an Uncle Tom boot licking minstrel, and some modern-day fools still sing this old white supremacist song.
“Texas is a White Man’s Government”
Texas governor A. J. Hamilton was quoted as saying in 1866, “It is a favorite phrase of many that this [Texas] is a white man’s government. I thank God that this is a white Man’s government and I humbly trust that the time will never come when it shall cease to be so.” Here are the roots of the extreme racist that has governed the ignorant minds of Texans for generations. It makes sense that they want us to forget the real history of Texas.
All the while, as Blacks tried to assert their freedom, racist whites burned Freedman Bureau schools. N.C. Kendall, a former racist Confederate, was quoted as saying that the Freedman Bureau was the, “Greatest humbug that has ever been forced upon the American people.” The Freedman Bureau was associated with Black Union soldiers and hence racist Texans burned all of these Black schools to the ground. Texas, “Oh My” is right?
Read Next: James Talarico Courts Hispanic Border Voters Who Shifted Toward GOP
