[Chronicles of Reasoning]
looking Back Friday, July 31, 2026
Good morning Houston;
As you should know, emancipation in East Texas arrived more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, marked by the arrival of Union troops on June 19, 1865, which led to the creation of some surprising and thriving independent Freedom Colonies.
President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but with few Union troops in Texas to enforce it, slavery continued unchecked, and that was by design.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and read General Orders No. 3, stating that all enslaved people were free, but many newly freed people faced threats of violence and initial uncertainty before leaving the plantations, but they eventually did, led by freed women.
Formerly enslaved newly created Texans established more than 500 independent rural landowning communities, known as Freedom Colonies, settled in heavily forested and isolated areas like the Big Thicket region in Deep East Texas to hunt, farm, and live safely off the land.
These self-reliant towns featured their own schools, churches, and businesses, laying down deep roots across the eastern half of the state, and while this was the game plan, others had different plans of their own.
The freed men faced a complex reality defined by land ownership, systemic oppression, and forced labor. Although they built independent communities, they faced severe political and physical backlash, and were heavily targeted by convict leasing systems.
But still, they worked hard to acquire land, moving from owning 2 percent of Texas farmland in 1870 to 31 percent by 1910, building churches and schools to secure family autonomy.
The post-emancipation Texas legislature passed restrictive laws that denied the freedmen the right to vote, hold office, or serve on juries, and if that wasn't enough, white resistance and violent groups targeted independent freedmen to break their economic and social independence.
Then these newly defined American men were disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system; from 1870 to 1912, they made up 60 percent of the Texas prison population, forced to perform brutal manual labor on railroads and plantations.
But they had a backbone; freed women in East Texas faced hard labor, harsh laws, and systemic poverty, yet they built independent communities, established schools and churches, and practiced quiet resistance through family and dignity.
Many freed women and their families stayed on farms as sharecroppers, trapped in ongoing cycles of debt and low pay, and they moved to towns in the area, often working long hours as cooks, maids, and laundresses for very little money.
Some families pooled their resources to buy land together, creating independent rural towns like Shankleville in Newton County, and all this while they helped start local churches and mutual aid groups that provided safety, support, and education.
These women wore careful clothing and claimed public spaces that served as a strong push back against Jim Crow humiliation, and when it came to family reunions, the women worked hard to find lost family members who had been split apart during the time of slavery.
Back then, both freedmen and women had a purpose that disappeared when they started migrating to the big cities, even though they had their own neighborhoods.
