Juneteenth in D.C. Looks Back to Civil War, Forward to Lincoln

By Edward Epstein

Washington, D.C.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The African American Civil War Memorial and Museum marked Juneteenth today by reading aloud the names of thousands of U.S. Colored Troops who brought freedom to Texas on June 19, 1865, and by disclosing plans to unveil a moving new statue of Abraham Lincoln in September.

The war memorial, maintained by the National Park Service, is the largest of its kind in the world, listing 209,145 names of African-American men who served in the federal forces during the Civil War. The museum, just across Vermont Avenue from the memorial, has been closed for several years for reconstruction, expansion and modernization. That work is finally nearing completion.

The first step in the reopening process will be the Monday, September 22 dedication of a statue of a seated Lincoln signing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Frank Smith, the museum's executive director, chose September 22 with a purpose. On that date in 1862, Lincoln signed the preliminary proclamation freeing all slaves held in Confederate states on January 1, 1863, unless the states in rebellion returned to the union by that date. None did, of course.

The statue, now under a blue tarp (shown to the left) on the side of the museum, will occupy a place of honor at the reopened 16,000-square-foot museum's front door. Unlike the memorial on federal property, the museum will be run by a non-profit organization. The reopening is scheduled for another symbolic date, this November 11, Veterans Day.

The names of the soldiers read out today were the 6,000 men of four U.S Colored Troop regiments -- the 20th, 28th, 29th and 30th -- who had fought in several battles before ending up in Galveston, Texas, under Gen. Gordon Granger and bringing the enslaved population the delayed news that the Civil War was over and that they were free.

Freedom was an abstraction to the few thousand slaves still toiling in Galveston, isolated in southern Texas. Then it came like a bolt out of the blue, Smith told a crowd of a few hundred people at today's event.

"Freedom didn't mean much to them until they saw there were 6,000 of these Colored Troops and then they said, 'Ooo-wee,' who are these people? They couldn't believe it."

The Lincoln Group is helping plan public events for the September 22 statue unveiling and the November 11 museum reopening. Several other groups are pitching in. Stay tuned to this space for more details.

Photos by Ed Epstein