Juneteenth Weekend Driving Tour

This year marks the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth. On June 19, 1865 Union General Gordon Granger read General Order #3 on a balcony in Galveston, TX. The order began:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

Back in February we hosted a Community Bus Tour that was a huge success! Now we want to make it available for everyone to enjoy from the comfort of their own vehicle.

Join us Juneteenth weekend (June 19-21) for a tour of West Austin African American history. The tour is developed in coordination with the collaborative project If These Walls Could Talk, where we have worked to shed light on Austin’s difficult racial history.

The tour begins at the Neill-Cochran House Museum and winds through historic sites of Wheatville and Clarksville, two of the original fifteen freedman communities established in Austin after the end of the Civil War. The tour includes access to videos for each stop that explore the history of the site and create connections between the past and present.

SITES ON THE TOUR INCLUDE

• The Neill-Cochran House Museum

• The Jacob Fontaine Building

• Pease Plantation (Woodlawn)

• Pease Park

• Charles Clark Homestead

• Elias Mays Homestead

• Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church

• Mary Smith Homestead

• Haskell House

• Pease Plantation Wall

Before or after your tour, the grounds of the Neill-Cochran House Museum will be open to you. We encourage you to bring a blanket or lawn chairs and enjoy a lovely shaded afternoon lunch. You are welcome to order a boxed lunch from Hoover’s Cooking through us, or to bring your own.

We offer this lunch in recognition of one of the myriad ways people of color showed creativity and resilience in the face of segregation – the shoebox lunch, which families would pack for long trips by car, bus, or train in the knowledge that they might not be welcomed at dining establishments on their route. Jennifer Cumberbatch has described shoebox lunches thus: “. . . the resilience and creativity of Black family members, church attendees and businesswomen was packed with love inside shoeboxes.  Their sumptuous feasts became a black traveler’s delight.  Sandwiches, hardboiled eggs, pound cake or sweet potato pie with a heap of fried chicken was the fare that nourished the body and the soul . . .  a traveler’s feast.”  Shoebox lunches were a form of resistance, a weapon against the racism exhibited in the context of Jim Crow. Packing a lunch was a way of rejecting racist exclusion. It represented resilience and antifragility, a way of saying “We will not bend, we will not break; instead, we will create.”

ADULT LUNCH $15

Fried Chicken sandwich
Potato Salad
Cowboy Beans

Parking available behind the museum, off of 23rd street. 2310 San Gabriel Street, Austin, TX 78705

For more information, please contact the museum office at 512.478.2335 or [email protected].