Nobody thinks about Halloween in March. The Fourth of July is a distant memory by Christmas. But Juneteenth, America’s newest national holiday as of last year, won’t fade quite so easily into the background.

Not if Galveston Historical Foundation has anything to say about it, anyway. Last month — on Juneteenth, actually — GHF opened “And Still We Rise: Galveston’s Juneteenth Story” in the former carriage house of Ashton Villa. The National Juneteenth Museum may be headed for Fort Worth, but this year-round exhibit makes it clear that, first and foremost, Juneteenth belongs to Galveston.

“I see it as an educational tool,” says Tommie Boudreaux, chair of GHF’s African American Heritage Committee. “I think that (for) those who have heard stories, we hope that we can clarify some things for them. We're with a historical organization that’s going do the research, and not going to present anything unless [we] have documentation to support it.”

Ashton Villa, built in 1859 for the family of banker/hardware merchant James Brown, has a rather curious relationship with Juneteenth. Legend holds it’s one of the locations where General Orders No. 3 — which informed all those enslaved in Texas of their freedom by stating, in part, “this involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves” — was read aloud by Union army soldiers on June 19, 1865.

However, no direct evidence exists linking Juneteenth with Ashton Villa in those days. Instead, the order was read a block or two up Broadway at Reedy Chapel and at army headquarters on the Strand. In the last century, though, the historic mansion became the site of an annual prayer breakfast and celebration hosted by late Texas state legislator Al Edwards, who in 1979 sponsored a bill declaring Juneteenth an official state holiday. Today a statue of Edwards known as “The Legislator” stands outside the carriage house.

“And Still I Rise” was developed by the New Zealand-based Gibson Group, which also created GHF’s “Ship to Shore” exhibit. Inside, large maps and murals frame the space while the sounds of clanking chains and the spiritual “Motherless Child” set the scene. One interactive timeline tells of the slave trade and Civil War through daguerrotypes, runaway-slave bulletins, and auction-house advertisements; another juxtaposes the horrors of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era with achievements of notable Black Galvestonians such as Jack Johnson, T.D. Armstrong, and Jessie McGuire Dent.

但最直接影响的一部分exhibit pushes all this history straight into the present. GHF sat down with more than a dozen people, all of them BOIs (local-speak for born on the island), for a series of brief video interviews in which they reflect on things like whether they celebrated Juneteenth as a child, how they observe it as an adult, and whether they find celebrating strange at a time when the idea of “absolute equality” seems ever more far-fetched.

The interviewees, varying in age but all of them Black, recall Juneteenth barbecues, hay rides on West Beach, church services, and parades. Not all of them remember celebrating, though. Boudreaux says she didn’t realize Galveston was the birthplace of Juneteenth until she was an adult. Brandon Edwards, one of the younger interviewees, only learned about it when his high-school ROTC class was asked to participate in a reenactment.

An older man named Manuel Thomas cuts straight to the heart of the holiday’s bittersweet nature. On one hand it’s a day of celebration, he says, “but at the same time, what is wrong with a man that would hinder another man from knowing that he was free, and to keep that man and abuse that man for two whole years?”

According to Candace Lamb, another interviewee, “It does feel strange, but we can’t move forward without celebrating that piece of history,” she says. “That piece of history is what got us where we are here today, [what] has pushed us forward to be able to continue to fight in the push for total equality.”

The final question asks what the interviewees would say to visitors to the exhibit. “They can see why we want to tell the story: because it is a Galveston story,” Boudreaux says in hers.

Indeed, even as Juneteenth’s national profile continues to rise, “And Still I Rise” reveals just how profoundly that day in 1865 has shaped Galveston for generations.

“It’s not just going to the beach,” adds yet another interviewee, Winifred Langham “You’re going to learn something.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.