
Juneteenth: A Son of Texas and His Community’s Story
Keith Allen is a member of Grace Episcopal Church Silver Spring. His family is from Barrett Station, Texas where he grew up celebrating Juneteenth with his family. He is an actuary, who also uses various platforms to advance diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Rudy Logan, Missioner of Equity and Justice, recently sat down with Keith for an interview. Keith and his ancestors’ stories shine a light on Juneteenth’s impact from 1865 to the present-illustrating the inextricable links between community, freedom and the risk of faith. Recountings of family separation, sharecropping and Black Texans creating new communities in the wake of emancipation have shaped Keith, his generation and forebears’ principles, journey and belief in a brighter future.
RL: Considering your family’s deep roots in the state of Texas, are there any known ancestors of yours who can share or who passed down oral histories around the origin of Juneteenth?
KA: Juneteenth was a really big deal for my family. And myself, obviously, for a variety of reasons. Actually, Juneteenth was probably bigger than July 4th for us. So we had parades and celebrations and just a variety of things that you may have researched…the events, the clothing, the pageantry of it all and what have you. We experienced that in my family.
And one of the things, I guess, that, you know, was pushed upon me, or at least made important to myself, was being proud of the fact that we came out of a situation where, you know, a lot of people didn’t want us to thrive. Obviously, Juneteenth for Texans meant that we finally found out that we were freed as a people as black people, and it happened in Galveston two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. You know, my personal family background goes back to sharecropping days. My grandfather was a young boy, and his parents and grandparents were still in the sharecropping phase, just starting out. They went through a time when it was difficult, and they had to find their way through the time period, especially in Texas, which is a difficult place. You know, from the stories you’ve heard, and just in general, I could tell you a bunch of stories about things that I’ve experienced, things my parents experienced, things my grandfather experienced, but I’m sure they would be similar to stories you’ve heard in the past. Me, personally, a lot of that made me who I am today. It comes from my family background. It’s a strong family; it’s a large family, and there’s a lot of support. Today, I find myself in a career that doesn’t have very many black people and that definitely does not have many black men―actuarial science. I attribute that to the work ethic that was instilled in me when I was a young boy by my parents and my grandparents, which comes from the pride of our heritage.
KA: The reality for our family was we came from a really small rural town called Raywood, Texas. It’s right in between Houston, Texas and Beaumont, Texas, about halfway in between a lot of farming, a lot of hard work, you know, there’s cotton picking going on, and there were all those things that were still going on from a slave’s perspective in that small town. My mother’s father, James-the patriarch of our family, had ten brothers and sisters, and they worked on the farm. So from that, you know, between my aunt, my mom-in their generation, there’s about 47 first cousins. From my generation, we have well over 200 cousins, so when I say I have a large family, that’s what I mean.
RL: Juneteenth is a critical moment, considering how it finally delivered the promise of freedom albeit delayed to communities in Galveston Bay, Texas and the surrounding communities. It signals good news traveling, and that good news is freedom and the journey that all entails. So, what does freedom mean to you in the context of Juneteenth?
KA: I take it back to my family’s history; as I mentioned, we started in Raywood, Texas-a rural town with a lot of farming, and then we moved to what I would call an actual town called Barrett Station. Barrett Station was formed directly from a descendant of someone who heard the news of emancipation (Juneteenth). Harrison Barrett is the namesake of this town. And his family is the family that started this town, because a slave heard from the whole Galveston report, there’s an article in the paper where they reported that slaves were free. It’s an excerpt, I forget the general’s name, I’m sure you can find it. But as soon as the slave found out about it, he walked up, he left, and started a community.
My family moved from Raywood, Texas; my grandfather moved from Raywood, Texas, and started his family in Barrett Station, because at the time, you know, we were moving out of the rural aspect of our family, you know, with the cotton…he wanted something different for his family-wanted things to be better for his children, and moved to Barrett Station, where you had the one school for all the black students, my mom went to that school. You know, that’s a generation away, that’s my mom. She then went to a historically black college for a couple of years. Texas Southern University. Juneteenth had a direct impact on my family, because we know the opportunities that it led to for us. My grandfather ended up working at the Exxon chemical plant. My mom worked at that same plant as a construction worker. She wanted better for her kids. So that allowed us to go to college, complete college, and become successful in society’s eyes.
RL: Juneteenth celebrations within your community in particular sound empowering because of the ways that they invited everyone to participate in some kind of way, whether it was to make the floats, make food, and to build community and be amongst one another. How can Juneteenth be a great departure point for people to think about the broader history of race within the United States?
KA: It was stories, stories. So everybody had a story, right? Because, you know, put yourself back in that time, you’re talking mostly 70s, 80s. So you’re coming out of the civil rights movement. Before that, you know, you had the emancipation proclamation, you know, all of the things, basically, from the 1860s, to the Civil Rights era, everybody had a story about their family history, and what Juneteenth basically meant. And they continue the story, you know, you’d hear a story about someone’s family, who when Juneteenth happened, they went to Louisiana, and tried to find their relatives, because think about it again-going back to the mindset—you’re a slave, you get free, your brothers and sisters have been on other plantations, you don’t have those relationships. For years, a lot of the time had been about people trying to find their family. And so the stories you get, were stories like that, like, such and such went to Louisiana to go find their sister, and they spent several months trying to get their family together, and then they might move back to Texas- that kind of stuff. So those kinds of stories impact you as a kid.
RL: What is it that you feel Juneteenth teaches us? What kind of lessons does it leave us with in terms of, you know, grit, resilience, struggle in fighting-taking that freedom and making justice a reality?
KA: Well, for our culture, a lot. Again, going back to what I said, with the belief, you get to that point, where Juneteenth occurs, and you start believing that things can happen. It’s very powerful. This belief is always very powerful. Talking about life, sports, anything-belief gets you so much further than being subjugated. When you’re a slave, you are told what to do, you are told how to do it, and told when to do it. I believe that, that puts you further behind than people who had the freedom to imagine how to do things, you know, believing in what they can do believing in themselves.
So from that perspective, I think for our culture, for our race, it was significant-it allowed us to flourish, if you look at what we have accomplished since that time, in sports, in business and all the different aspects of what this country offers us from economic perspective-all the achievements we were able to make since then. It’s something that this country needs to really look at and do some reflection on because you look at some of the things going on today—with people coming across the border, how they’re being mistreated and just how a certain percentage of the population thinks and treats others. You really wish they could learn from the past. doesn’t seem to me that it happens enough. So I really wish that the majority of people could interpret Juneteenth as a holiday to represent what can be done when you let people believe.
KA: I really enjoyed this. If you have any other questions further on down the road, reach out.
RL: I appreciate that. Thank you, sir. I’m sure our audience will come away from this conversation with deeper insight about Juneteenth, and how the lived experience of June 19, 1865 via our enslaved forebears has been passed down through the generations-inspiring dedication, community togetherness and belief in one’s self, their community and a liberating kind of faith, which you and your family story demonstrate.