You can help tell the story of freedom in Fort Worth’s Juneteenth Museum. Here’s how.
The National Juneteenth Museum is looking for help from the community to supply artifacts to tell the story of Juneteenth and the African American experience.
The National Juneteenth Museum, in collaboration with the University of North Texas Special Collections, will hold a History Harvest from noon to 4 p.m. July 6 at Ella Mae Shamblee Library, 1062 Evans Ave.
The event is an opportunity for people to share a variety of artifacts ranging from letters, family photos, birth certificates, marriage licenses, clothing, audio and video recordings of family, artwork, maps, awards, cookbooks and more.
Documents will be scanned so people can keep their treasured artifacts.
Lauren Cross is the curator for the National Juneteenth Museum and an assistant professor at the University of North Texas.
Cross and museum staff are looking for artifacts ranging from the 18th century anti-slavery movement to the present day. She says the items collected will help tell the stories of enslaved people, their journeys to freedom, and why Juneteenth matters.
Cross says she wants to educate the public about who enslaved people were.
“For people who have learned about who those enslaved ancestors were in their families, it’s not an abstract figure, it’s actually a person, a person with a name, a person with a story,” Cross said. “So we want people to share those stories so we can preserve them.”
The History Harvest can be an opportunity for people of any race or ethnicity to provide artifacts, the story behind them and how they tell a larger story about the journey freedom.
Cross and the Juneteenth Museum plan to have similar events in other cities as part of a long-term commitment, Cross says. The intent is to have a rotating archive of new content and stories.
Currently, the museum has a few donated artifacts such as African art, photos from Juneteenth celebrations around the country, a Miss Juneteenth robe, and a book called “Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom” by Dr. Charles Taylor, which inspired Ronald V. Myers Sr. to advocate for Juneteenth to be a federal holiday in the ‘90s.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed more than two years earlier.
Juneteenth became a state holiday in 1980. In Fort Worth, more than 30,000 people attended a Juneteenth celebration in 1975 in Sycamore Park that was organized by advocates such as Opal Lee.
Lee, considered the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” has worked years to make Juneteenth a national holiday. She symbolically walked 1,400 miles from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in 2016 to bring attention to the importance of the Juneteenth holiday. In 2021, Lee, who lives in Fort Worth, was in attendance when President Joe Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
The museum, which has yet to be constructed, will be at Evans Avenue and Rosedale Street in the Historic Southside neighborhood. The museum’s goal is to raise $70 million, with donations now standing at more than $34 million.
The museum is expected to open in 2026.
