WaPo: “In 1903, a Black man walked into an office in a small town in Texas, seeking any news about whether slavery had ended.
The earnest inquiry from the man, who had been forced to labor without pay, came more than 38 years after Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island, Tex., with more than 2,000 federal soldiers to deliver the belated news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Texas. Word of the end of bondage for the more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state arrived on June 19, 1865 — two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation….
But the announcement on June 19, 1865, did not end slavery in Texas. The barbaric institution continued in other forms and by other names, according to historians.
“There was almost universal agreement from statements of enslaved people that many Texas slaveowners held off making the announcement,” said historian C.R. Gibbs. “They wanted another crop.”
Many Black Texans didn’t receive the news until 1866. “Slaveowners resorted to tricks. They delayed. They postponed. This was money,” said Gibbs, author of “Black, Copper & Bright: The District of Columbia’s Black Civil War Regiment.” “They wanted to continue to get every last drop of sweat from slavery.”..
After Granger’s order, the Union Army literally had to march across Texas to enforce the order and free enslaved Black people. In some cases, enslavers killed enslaved Black people rather than allow them their freedom.”