Not Just a Holiday
There’s more to the National Juneteenth Museum than just scholarship and presence.
Lauren Cross remembers growing up learning about her formerly enslaved ancestors and wanting to know more. Executive strategist of Fort Worth’s forthcoming National Juneteenth Museum (2026), Cross hopes the place will spark that curiosity in visitors and help them preserve their family histories.
The holiday Juneteenth was established to acknowledge the fact that even though the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted in 1863, not all slaves in the United States were freed at that time. It took two and a half more years for freedom to reach enslaved people in Texas by way of 2,000 Union troops arriving in Galveston Bay on June 19, 1865.
President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a national holiday in 2021, thanks to the efforts of multiple activists, including Opal Lee, who walked from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in 2016 to raise awareness for Juneteenth to be recognized on the federal level.
The National Juneteenth Museum will be in Fort Worth’s historic Southside neighborhood at the corner of Rosedale Street and Evans Avenue. This area is especially significant for the museum because Lee operated a Juneteenth museum there since 2005 and the location was home to the first Black millionaire in Fort Worth, William Madison McDonald, or Gooseneck Bill.