06/19/2026
In honor of Juneteenth, an ODHS employee and member of our African American Management Council (AAMC) Employee Resource Group (ERG) (who wishes to remain anonymous for social media) shared their family's story with us. Cremonia and her family's legacy are a powerful reminder of the importance of Juneteenth:
Juneteenth is a holiday intimately linked with slavery. Many people don't know exactly what it represents; that included me until a few years ago. Juneteenth commemorates the arrival of Union troops in Texas to enforce the end of slavery - two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War. To me, it exemplifies the reality that while slavery had ended on paper, it had not necessarily ended in practice.
Many people think of Juneteenth as the end of slavery in the United States. Pockets of the country continued systems of captivity and forced labor long after emancipation. My great-great-grandmother, Cremonia, was a testament to that. As far as she was concerned, she was born into conditions indistinguishable from slavery in 1900. The news was out, but even more than forty years after emancipation was enforced in Texas, Cremonia, her parents, and her eleven siblings were still treated as property rather than people.
It wasn't until 1908, during the federal investigations and prosecutions of peonage operations in Mississippi, that Cremonia and her family were finally freed. By that time, the Department of Justice (DOJ) had begun prosecuting people who continued to hold Black families in forced labor through debt bo***ge and peonage. As for Cremonia’s family, the man who had once enslaved them continued to hold them in captivity after emancipation. He was eventually jailed because of the DOJ’s investigation, and the family received a small settlement.
By 1920, Cremonia had begun her own family with her husband, William. While she did not pursue a particular career herself, she stressed the importance of education.
All three of her daughters went on to become college graduates and teachers. Today, Cremonia is the direct ancestor of approximately 60 descendants, the vast majority of whom are college graduates.
What I love most about Cremonia's journey is that I had the opportunity to hear her stories firsthand. I lived with her, my mother, and great-grandparents, for about four years before she passed away at the age of 96, when I was six years old. Those stories transformed Juneteenth from a historical event into something deeply personal.
While Juneteenth did not directly mark my family's freedom, it remains deeply meaningful to me because it symbolizes a larger truth: slavery was not ended without heavy resistance, and freedom was not immediately realized for everyone.
This year's Juneteenth carries additional significance for me. It also marks 100 years since Oregon voters repealed the state's Black exclusion clause, removing from its constitution a provision that said people like me did not belong here. Today, Oregon is a state I have come to love dearly.
