Emancipation Park, Juneteenth, and a Recommitment to Freedom

“Emancipation Park is Juneteenth.”

That’s what Ramon Manning, chair of the Emancipation Park Conservancy, told me on a lazy Sunday afternoon in May 2025 at the 10-acre park in Houston’s Third Ward, a historic Black neighborhood.

Juneteenth is America’s youngest national holiday. It celebrates the day—June 19, 1865—when Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 Union troops to bring the news that the Civil War had ended and to reintegrate Texas into the Union. As part of that effort, he issued General Order No. 3, which declared:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued two years earlier, had already mandated the freedom of the roughly 250,000 enslaved people in Texas, yet enslavers there had maintained the institution in defiance of it.

The newly freed people in the state began to mark the date with annual celebrations.

How the park came to be

Black leaders in Houston sought to establish a permanent place for those celebrations. So in 1872 a group of formerly enslaved people bought a parcel of land and established the park.

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Manning and I were joined at the park by the vice chair of the conservancy, Jacqueline Bostic, a regal woman with a cloud of curly white hair and four strings of large white pearls. Bostic is also the great-granddaughter of one of the park’s four principal founders, John Henry “Jack” Yates, who she says paid the down payment on the land. As Bostic puts it, “He took x number of dollars out of his pocket to put on it to make sure that the community could get it.”

This makes Emancipation the oldest park in Houston and, Manning maintains, the oldest fully public park in Texas.

With its renovation completed in 2017, the park’s grounds now boast a cultural center and stage, recreation center, picnic area, pool, basketball and tennis courts, youth baseball field, playground, and a large lawn that can be used for events.

It sparkles. The jewel has been polished.

(Read Charles Blow’s essay A Teen Girl Recalls Juneteenth in the 1950s.)

The day I visited, the park’s lawns were speckled with white clover, and the craning seed heads of the grass tapped my shins. The soporific drone of traffic on nearby Interstate 69 filled the air as the skyline of downtown Houston loomed in the distance.

I could imagine ancestors on the same soil over a century ago, eating barbecue, singing and dancing, babies on hips and smiles on faces, standing on ground bought for them and meant for them.

I could imagine why the Third Ward became a magnet for African Americans during the Great Migration, why my own grandfather, a celebrated World War II veteran, moved there in the late 1950s, why Beyoncé’s parents moved there in the early 1980s.

Change and challenges

The gleaming park and its proximity to downtown also means that this mecca of Juneteenth is being gentrified, encircled by new townhomes that Manning jokingly refers to as the “skinny houses.”

According to a 2021 Houston Chronicle analysis of the Third Ward’s shifting demographics, its white population rose about 170 percent from 2010 to 2020 as its Black population declined. In a 2018 story the Chronicle pointed out that “in the portion of the neighborhood closest to downtown, which includes Emancipation Park, median home values increased 176 percent between 2000 and 2013, according to an analysis of census estimates.”

When I was there it was a slow day (the facilities were closed), but most of the people using the grounds—jogging, walking dogs, and riding bicycles—were white.

The shifting demographic reality of the neighborhood, combined with shifting political views on subjects including DEI and Juneteenth, has left Manning and the park struggling to maintain its mission and stay true to its founders’ vision.

Manning has a way of thinking about the park that he believes will do just that. As he puts it, “This space is more than recreation; it’s really about re-creation.” And part of that is using Juneteenth as a time to reset our collective commitment to freedom and equality. 

Manning continues, “I think it’s a phenomenal teaching opportunity about American history.”