Courtesy Juneteenth Museum
On this the second Juneteenth national holiday, we celebrate the news last week that plans for the National Juneteenth Museum have taken a big leap forward with officials showing off an artist’s rendering of the planned 50,000-square-foot complex.
Officials hope to break ground on the $70 million project at Evans Avenue and Rosedale Street next year, with the doors opening on Juneteenth 2025.
The building will replace the smaller, more modest museum Opal Lee, the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” has operated on that site for two decades. The new museum, it is hoped, will also act as a catalyst for economic growth in the historic South Side neighborhood.
"Seeing the national museum moving forward is a dream fulfilled,” says Lee, the Nobel Peace Prize nominee. “I've had a little Juneteenth Museum in that very spot for almost 20 years, and to see it become a central place for discussion, collaboration, and learning seems to be the providential next step — from my walking campaign to Washington, D.C., the petition, and having Juneteenth declared a federal holiday. It's mind-boggling, but I'm glad to see it all come to pass.”
The development will include a business incubator to promote Black entrepreneurship, a food hall featuring local vendors serving culturally Black cuisine, and a performance space and theater.
The architects on the project are Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, and KAI Enterprises, an African American-owned firm based in North Texas.
Visual rendering of the future Juneteenth Museum
Plano-based Frito-Lay North America got the project off the ground with a seed money donation. The public can make charitable donations through the National Juneteenth Museum’s website.
“Our hope is that this building will become a gateway to the Historic Southside community of Fort Worth while serving as a national and global destination," says Douglass Alligood, a partner with Bjarke Ingels Group. "Juneteenth is not only American history — it is world history. As a black architect, this project is one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”
Part of the history that will be told here is that of the arrival of Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston on June 19, 1865. He brought with him General Order No. 3, which declared that in accordance with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 21/2 years earlier, all slaves were free.
The 13th Amendment was ratified months later.
Just north of the development, the city has already undertaken the development of the $13.2 million Evans & Rosedale Urban Village, which will include apartments and townhomes.
Lee has dedicated her life to making Juneteenth a national holiday. In 2016, she launched the walk from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., walking 2.5 miles a day, symbolizing the 21/2 years it took for slaves in Texas to learn they were free on June 19, 1865. Last summer, she was a central focus of the ceremony in which President Biden signed into law the bill making Juneteenth the 11th national federal holiday.
The museum design will embrace “the local African American experience–at-large through motifs and symbolic touchpoints inspired by the gabled rooftops that define the Historic Southside neighborhood and the nova star, meaning ‘new star.’"
“The nova star represents a new chapter for the African Americans looking ahead toward a more just future,” a press release says. “At the center of the publicly accessible courtyard, a ‘five point’ star engraved in gold not only represents Texas, the last state to adopt and acknowledge the freedom of African American slaves — the star nods to the American flag’s 50 stars, representing the freedom of African Americans across the country.”
