On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that all slaves are free.

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Grangers Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Grangers proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmens Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Grangers proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmens school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the countys first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houstons political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the states constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the states political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Grangers Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houstons son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his fathers work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houstons school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washingtons Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houstons school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houstons school was absorbed into Huntsvilles school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperations effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the opportunity to do simple justice by including Black history and the struggle for the exercise of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Todays legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houstons lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that divisive concepts like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the states schools must be segregated to ensure the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

Jeffrey L. Littlejohn is Professor of History, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz is Lecturer, History Department, Sam Houston State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It centered around Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan challenging a medical expertDr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicineto enter a debate about vaccines on his show. That came in response to Hotez sharing a Vice article from Friday entitled Spotify Has Stopped Even Sort of Trying to Stem Joe Rogans Vaccine Misinformation. 

The Vice article came after a Rogan episode the day prior featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, political scion, andlike Roganhigh-profile vaccine skeptic. Despite his political party, U.S. conservatives have taken a shine to Kennedy, who wrote a 2021 book entitled The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Hes also frequently deplored the war in Ukraine, calling it a money laundering racket for military contractors on the podcast.

Rogan tweeted on Saturday evening, Peter, if you claim what RFKjr is saying is misinformation I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if youre willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.

Joe, you have my cell, my email, Im always willing to speak with you, replied Hotez, who wrote the 2018 book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachels Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.

Twitter owner Musk then tweeted, Hes afraid of a public debate, because he knows hes wrong. 

Hotez replied, Seriously Elon? This is monstrous. 200,000 Americans needlessly perished (including 40,000 Texans, our neighbors) because they were victims of antivaccine disinformation during our awful Covid delta/BA.1 waves in 2021-22. Please dont do this

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman unexpectedly joined in, tweeting, I will add $150,000 to @joerogans wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic. 

Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tweeted about the invitation: No medical professional should ever agree to do this. Never. It elevates the conspiracy guy, demeans the medical professional, and will only convince the kooks out there that RFK is right because a real doctor took the time to debate him.

Rogan replied, That would be a great suggestion if you could assure that the industry you were representing wasnt completely captured by heartless monsters who have a history of some of the biggest criminal fines in human history because their deception has cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. It would be a great suggestion if the industry you were defending didnt occasionally look at human beings as an opportunity to generate insane wealth regardless of the tragic consequences. 

At this point, Cuban, whose Cost Plus Drugs aims to lower the cost of generic drugs, weighed in: 

Way to talk in generalities Joe. Not saying there arent a lot of f***ed up things about pharma. Thats why we created Cost Plus Drugs. But to ignore that the same industry has saved who knows how many lives is bullshit and you know it. Its also disrespectful to all the doctors, researchers and medical professionals that dedicate their lives to saving lives, like Dr Hotez and the 800k plus doctors in the country that believe vaccines save lives.

He then laid into Musk as well, contending that Rogan and Musks Twitter are the mainstream online media and your platforms have become everything supposedly wrong with MSM [mainstream media].

He added, You are driven by self interest. Just like the MSM always has been accused of. And you both have earned that right. You busted your asses to be great at what you do and earned all you have accomplished. But dont lie to yourselves and all of us and tell us you are different. You arent.