By: Roy Douglas Malonson
The Reverend C. Anderson Davis was a leader who saved one of America’s most important holidays from being forgotten. Today, people all over the United States celebrate Juneteenth on June 19th. They have parades, play music, and
eat delicious food to remember the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas finally found out they were free. But holidays do not just stay alive on their own. In the 1970s, Juneteenth was almost completely forgotten by the public. Reverend Davis was the man who stepped up, brought the holiday back to life, and built the foundation for it to become a national celebration.
To understand why Reverend Davis is so important, you have to look at what was happening to Juneteenth fifty years ago. By the late 1960s, many people had stopped celebrating it. Schools did not teach students about what happened in Galveston, Texas, in 1865. Cities did not plan big events for it, and younger generations did not really know much about the day. It looked like Juneteenth might disappear forever.
Reverend Davis refused to let that happen. He was a minister and a civil rights leader who moved to Houston, Texas, in 1969 to
work for the NAACP, which is an organization that fights for equal rights. He believed that if you do not know where you came from, you cannot know where you are going. He knew that Juneteenth was not just a fun party; it was a deeply important part of American history that needed to be protected.
In 1973, Reverend Davis became the leader of a group called the National Emancipation Association. This group had one big goal: to bring Juneteenth back into the spotlight. Reverend Davis started knocking on doors, talking to community leaders, and organizing people. Just one year later, in 1974, he did something amazing. He organized a giant modern Juneteenth Freedom Festival at a big theater in Houston. He also started a massive Juneteenth parade down the city streets. Thousands of people showed up. For many families, it was the first time in years they had celebrated Juneteenth out in the open. Reverend Davis proved to everyone that the spirit of the holiday was still alive and well.
But Reverend Davis did not just want a one-day party. He wanted the government to officially recognize June 19th as a holiday so it would be respected forever. To do this, he sat down and wrote a formal proclamation.
It explained exactly why Juneteenth mattered and why the state of Texas needed to make it an official holiday. He used his words like a tool to build a legal argument for freedom.
A few years later, a Texas lawmaker named State Representative Al Edwards wanted to pass a law to make Juneteenth a state holiday. When he wrote the bill to present to the other lawmakers, he used the exact ideas and almost the exact same words that Reverend Davis had written in his proclamation. Because of Reverend Davis’s hard work, the law passed in 1979, and Texas became the very first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday. Even though Representative Edwards got a lot of the credit on television, it was Reverend Davis who had written the blueprint behind the scenes.
Reverend Davis also understood that true freedom meant more than just having a day off from work or school. He knew that for Black communities to thrive, they needed to be strong financially. So, through his association, he helped start a special bank called the NEA Credit Union. This bank gave loans to minority-owned businesses and scholarships to students who wanted to go to college but could not afford it. He wanted to make sure that the freedom celebrated on Juneteenth was real economic freedom that could change people’s lives for the better.
Today, we often hear about other famous heroes when we talk about Juneteenth, like Opal Lee, the amazing woman who walked to Washington, D.C., to help make it a federal holiday in 2021. But we must always remember the leaders who kept the tradition alive when it was unpopular and ignored.
The Reverend C. Anderson Davis is the “Godfather of Juneteenth.” He did the hard, quiet work of rescuing a piece of history from being erased. Every time Americans gather to celebrate freedom on the nineteenth of June, they are enjoying the fruits of the seeds that Reverend Davis planted decades ago. Al Edwards and Opal Lee will continue on the next June 19th edition.
