Juneteenth, Commemoration & Celebration

My family and our complicated history of slavery and freedom

Today I commemorate Juneteenth, the delayed but momentous arrival of emancipation in Texas on June 19, 1865—over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It marks the end of race-based chattel slavery in America and specifically honors those (primarily from West Africa) who were brought to America by force, sold into generational bondage, and treated as property.

For my family, this history is not abstract, nor uncomplicated. My great-grandfather Tapley Ashworth (1807–1859) is the last male in my lineage to publicly identify as a person of African descent. This is documented in many records from the Republic and State of Texas and carefully chronicled in Jason A. Gillmer’s Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821–1871.

Tapley’s son, Andrew Ashworth (my 2^nd GGF), is the first known ancestor to be publicly designated as “Redbone”—a term used to describe those of mixed European, African, and Indigenous ancestry. His story, recorded in several 19th-century newspapers, is tragically marked by his murder, and subsequent trials and incarceration of his nephew Archie held responsible for the crime. Note: Full story in Chapter 2 of Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music.

My ancestral connection to the founding of America and to the African experience within it comes through the women. Tapley’s mother, Keziah Dial (1768–1820), was the great-granddaughter (est. 2x) of John and Isabell Dial (Daule/Doll), “Negro” servants of Arthur Jordan in colonial Virginia. On March 10, 1669, they purchased their freedom (still possible before slavery hardened into a permanent, race-based institution). Their act is recorded in Surry County County Records (see Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina. Vol I).

This documented moment helps explain why our Ashworth surname eventually appears in records associated with families of Free People of Color (FPOC) in early America and up to Juneteenth.

And yet, this history carries deep contradiction. Though free themselves, my 3rd GGF, Tapley, and his brothers, well-known Black cattle ranchers in antebellum Texas, participated in the enslavement of other Black men and women. The late historian Carter G. Woodson, who documented some members of my family, suggested that such acts might have been cultural assimilation. Or, possibly, a form of mercy: one Black person enslaving another to shield them from harsher conditions under white enslavers (see Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830).

No one knows their intentions. But our family holds both the tragedy and the possibility that some of those enslaved did in fact meet their freedom, perhaps before or on Juneteenth.

I also remember that for my free Black Texas ancestors, emancipation offered the possibility of a life without the looming threat of re-enslavement and constant harrassment. Several Ashworth men died defending this hope for their families. Many other Ashworth women and men were driven across the Sabine River into Louisiana, resettling in the Singer and Mystic areas, where my own grandfather Lee Jackson Ashworth and grandmother Ella Nora Baggett were later born.

Our family then and now is a mosaic of heritage. It is beautiful, complicated, and rich with sorrow and strength. On this Juneteenth, we hope to honor one another’s stories and individual ancestral journeys, both here in America and across the world—in such places as Scotland, Ireland, England, Sweden, Germany, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Cameroon, and the Congo.

In that spirit, I invite you to join us. Let’s build one another up in love, committed to truth, justice, and continual reconciliation and restoration. Each of us, in a personal and cosmic sense, is deeply valued and loved. Let’s make this truth evident everywhere and in everything.

On this Juneteenth let’s honor the resilience, culture, and contributions of Black Americans past and present. Their remarkable story is inseparable from the story of America. Join us in daily recommitting to justice, equity, and the dignity of all.

Our family continues to hope for and work towards a full and irreversible freedom for all, what Jesus called the kingdom come. But not a kingdom of empire, power, and subjugation. But instead, a perfect Juneteenth in the healing of the world, a complete reconciliation, a glorious freedom, the absence of tears, the presence of love eternal, unchanging.