Earliest known broadsides promoting Juneteenth acquired by SMU library

Prior to the discovery of these broadsides, the earliest known broadside commemorating the holiday was dated 1903.

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, to announce that all enslaved people were free. Historians say Texas celebrations began as early 1866.

These broadsides came from a recently discovered scrapbook that focuses on the life of William Leonard, a Corpus Christi Black business owner, journalist and community leader. He was president of the Corpus Christi Progressive Union, which was “organized for the intellectual up-building of the race. Under his leadership, the union hosted a range of political and educational events that fostered community engagement."

The Rees-Jones Collection, made up of thousands of rare books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, works of art, printed ephemera and other materials documenting the peoples, cultures, environments and lived experience of the American West, will be housed in SMU’s Rees-Jones Library of the American West – a three-story, 81,500-square-foot facility under construction on the north edge of the SMU campus.

The Rees-Jones Collection’s exceptional strengths in the pre-1901 West will complement SMU’s DeGolyer Library’s deep Western Americana holdings from the same period, while DeGolyer’s expansive 20th-century collections in women’s history, Mexican history, business history, photography and literature will broaden opportunities for research across later periods and related fields of inquiry. Together, the collections will provide scholars, students and educators with a rich research environment for examining the American West across time and space.