Emancipation Park: Four Freedmen, Eight Hundred Dollars, Eighteen Seventy-Two

Seven years after General Order Number Three was read in Galveston, four men who had been enslaved pooled their savings and bought a park.

The men were Reverend Jack Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and Elias Dibble. Each contributed two hundred dollars of wages they had earned as free men. Together they raised eight hundred dollars, enough to purchase ten acres in Houston's Third Ward, and in eighteen seventy-two they established Emancipation Park: the oldest surviving Juneteenth park in the United States. The park was built specifically as a place where the Black community of Houston could gather to celebrate June nineteenth each year, because they were excluded from public parks that white Houstonians used without restriction.

The park still exists at its original location at thirty eighteen Dowling Street in the Third Ward. It sat there through the decades when Juneteenth was an exclusively Black tradition, observed in a city that otherwise did not acknowledge it. It sat there through the civil rights era, through the busing fights of the nineteen seventies, through the crack epidemic that hollowed out the Third Ward in the eighties and nineties. It sat there when George Floyd grew up three blocks away in Cuney Homes, the public housing project on Emancipation Avenue. It was still there the summer that Floyd was killed in Minneapolis and the streets outside it filled with people who had walked from Cuney Homes and from Texas Southern University and from every direction of the ward he came from.

Reverend Jack Yates went on to co-found Houston's First Baptist Church, a congregation that became one of the anchors of Black civic life in the city. His name is now on the high school three blocks from the park, the school where George Floyd played basketball. The ten acres those four men bought with eight hundred dollars in eighteen seventy-two form the geographic and spiritual center of a history that is still being written.