![]() “It was a promise that we were supposed to get land,” says Boyd-Pates. Unfortunately, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that same year, the order was reversed by Andrew Johnson and the land that was promised to those thousands of formerly enslaved Black families was given back to the white landowners. Stanton and said they wanted massive land redistribution after slavery, otherwise known as ‘40 acres and a mule’. Frazier and 19 other Black ministers met with Union General William T. Amos Brown, vice-chair of the Task Force charged with figuring out what those reparations should be, and he emphasized to me that in 1865 Garrison Frazier was the one who led the call to have land as a reparation for slavery. Now, more than a century and a half after slavery officially ended, California could be the first state to give reparations to its Black American citizens. Juneteenth is a celebration of joy and freedom from slavery, but Black folks, including in this liberal paradise, have not been given what they’ve been due for years. “Women have had difficulty in having gloves and shoes fitted at the stores, the hotels do not welcome colored people, the restaurants are not for all that hunger,” Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s The Crisis Magazine during a visit in 1913. The struggles that Black people faced even in what was known as a naturally beautiful “liberal paradise.” Du Bois once described the Black population living in this city as “energetic” and “without a doubt the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States.” But L.A. Sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. They left Arkansas and Louisiana to escape the harsh racism of the south. That’s around the time my own paternal family moved to South L.A. But the 1940s witnessed the biggest wave of migration of Black southerners to L.A. was considered the largest of any urban area in the West, at around 7,500 people. “They were refugees, to be very frank, and were seeking to escape the Jim Crow era, and laws and Black codes that they had seen all of their lives since the abolition of enslavement and so they just fled to greener pastures,” Boyd-Pates says. This area became known as the heart of Black Los Angeles. Black residential neighborhoods began to take shape south of downtown L.A., which is now known as Central Avenue. primarily from Texas, New Orleans and Atlanta. He told me that between the late 1800s and into the 1900s, Black migrants came to L.A. Tyree Boyd-Pates is a historian and the associate curator of Western History at the Autry Museum of the American West. ![]() One of the places many Texans – and other southerners – migrated to was Los Angeles. Black people wanted refuge so they went North and West. After all, the federal troops told the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas they were indeed free two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.īut of course, after a brief stint of reconstruction to integrate 4 million newly-freed people into the United States, there came the backlash: The Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws and the Ku Klux Klan. Now, before I delve any deeper into that, I do want to get something straight: Juneteenth is first and foremost a Black Texan holiday. ![]() In a couple of days, I and so many other Black Americans around the country will be celebrating an important holiday: Juneteenth.
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