“Visiting Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth felt like freedom,” Smith’s father told him as they pulled into Booker T. Washington Park, the site near the historic Comanche Crossing on Lake Mexia. Smith, a native Black Texan and scholar of Black food culture, recounted the conversation in a first-person account published by The Conversation and republished by United Press International on June 19, 2026.
The park was where generations of Smith’s family joined thousands of Black Texans every June to celebrate June 19, 1865 — the day Union troops informed enslaved Africans in Texas that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and six months before the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
Long before Juneteenth became a national holiday in 2021 and a Texas state holiday in 1980, Smith wrote, the site less than 3 miles north of where enslaved people in the region first learned of their freedom was where they decided to celebrate with a feast from their harvest.
Smith’s father, 60 years after his last visit, breathlessly recited the menu from his youth: barbecue ribs, chicken, brisket, blood sausage, raccoon, armadillo, fried chicken, potato salad, beans and yellow meat watermelon, Big Red Soda, banana pudding, peach cobbler, pecan pie, white coconut cake, German chocolate cake, berry cobblers, pies and homemade ice cream.
“You can’t pinpoint how each family would prepare the foods,” Smith’s father said, “but you know you would see smoked meat for sure because that was our main tradition.”
Smith connected the smoked meat to the ritual of hog killing that was part of the rural Black experience and one of the few moments when enslaved people exercised control over their food. Potato salad, he wrote, symbolized the abundance of the harvest.
The memories extended beyond food. At the park’s large, elevated dance pavilion — the original was destroyed by a fire in the 1990s — Smith’s father recalled him and his cousins “running around it and watching the adults dance and just be free.” The scene, he said, reminded him of the Ernie Barnes painting “The Sugar Shack.”
Smith referenced historian Amilcar Shabazz’s 2004 book “Advancing Democracy,” in which Shabazz wrote: “Before Black Texans had their own history, schools, churches … they had Juneteenth. It may not have looked like much in the eyes of an arrogant world, but it was everything Black Texans had, and they each loved and cherished that day with all their heart … and most important of all, they remembered.”
On the drive out, Smith’s father recounted the 1981 tragedy at Comanche Crossing, when three Black boys known as the “Comanche Three” drowned after an accident on the lake while being transported by three police officers in a small aluminum boat. The officers survived. The circumstances of what happened that night remain unclear, Smith wrote.
While the tragedy disrupted the future of Juneteenth celebrations at the site and the number of visitors declined dramatically, Smith wrote, the memories endured. “I’m glad that I got the chance to see this place again in my lifetime,” his father said, holding back tears as Comanche Crossing disappeared in the rearview mirror.