The Ottawa City Commission meets this morning, June 18th, and one of the items on the agenda is a proclamation recognizing Juneteenth. Tomorrow…is Juneteenth. The holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when the Union General Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the country’s last enslaved people that they had been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. Even though the proclamation had passed years before. Former ECKAN Director and City Commissioner, Richard Jackson, says even after Juneteenth there was still slavery.
The 40 acres and a mule was an idea that was originated by some white and black leaders toward the end of the Civil War in order to give the freed slaves farmland from former confederate owned land as a way to support themselves….tragically though the idea died with the assassination of President Lincoln. KOFO will air the meeting this morning.
