We’re sharing this photograph to honor Juneteenth National Independence Day, America’s newest federal holiday. Although this photo was taken more than seventy years after the Civil War, the legacy of wealth built on the labor of enslaved people in the southern states was still evident. The system of sharecropping and tenant farming that emerged after emancipation kept many poor farm families of every race in a cycle of perpetual poverty.

The Juneteenth holiday commemorates an event in Galveston, 250 miles southeast of Kaufman County, when Union General Gordon Granger read publicly “General Orders, Number 3” to an assembled crowd on June 19, 1865. He was belatedly announcing a Presidential Proclamation that “…all slaves are free.” Beginning the following year, celebration of June 19^th became an annual rite among Black residents of Texas and eventually other parts of the U.S. In recent decades, Juneteenth celebrations have commemorated the complex history of emancipation and advancements in civil rights.