For more than forty years Emancipation Park was a private enterprise run by people who had been enslaved. Houston's Black community held Juneteenth in different places until 1872, when church members led by Richard Allen and the ministers Jack Yates and Elias Dibble raised money for ground of their own. On July 10, 1872, Sarah J. and Marshall C. Wellborn, heirs of William Wellborn, sold ten acres for $800. The deed names nine trustees of the "Colored People of Harris County known as the Festival Association": Allen, Richard Brock, Frank Keeland, John Sessums, Johnson Rice, Taylor Burke, Daniel Riley, John Graham and Tillman Bush. Yates and Dibble are not among them, though historians credit both with the purchase.
Paying for the land
The land came with annual payments. The trustees solicited contributions, sold concession rights at Juneteenth and rented the grounds to carnivals. Former neighbors remembered a six-foot fence, a racetrack around the edge, two dance floors, a stable and a tavern, and a park open to the public on only a few holidays. In 1883 the Festival Association chartered the Colored Emancipation Park Association, and in 1893 a court vested the title in it after the surviving original trustees declined to recognize it.
The association had expected a public park to be exempt from property tax. Because it earned income, it was taxed. In 1912 it paid the city $322.50 and fell behind on county and state bills. In 1913 it borrowed $3,000 at 10 percent from Judge Harris Masterson, the same year the Wellborn heirs went to court claiming the deed void because it granted the land in perpetuity. Its lawyer advised that a park for public use was in law a charity, and the land did not revert. A widow, Mollie Baker, lent $1,000 in 1915.
The gift of 1916
Records show most of the loans were repaid within weeks in the spring of 1916, and the park passed to the City of Houston. Most accounts date the gift to 1916; one gives 1929. A 1936 essay by a student at Houston College for Negroes says the park board and an advisory committee asked the city to take it, "at which time the mortgage was lifted." Whether the city paid the debts is unclear. In 1922 Houston segregated its parks, and until 1940 Emancipation Park was the only public park open to Black Houstonians. It held band concerts, movies, parades and, from 1909, the De-Ro-Loc Carnival, begun after the white No-Tsu-Oh festival stopped admitting Black visitors.
Letting go and coming back
Public Works Administration money built a recreation center, pool and bathhouse, designed by William Ward Watkin, in 1938 and 1939. Juneteenth declined during the Second World War, revived briefly in 1950, faded as the civil rights movement grew and returned in the early 1970s. The Juneteenth Blues Festival began at the park in 1974, and the park was rededicated in 1975 after $300,000 in Model Cities work. Houston named it a protected landmark in 2007, and a $33.6 million rebuilding reopened it in 2017.
Emancipation Park stands at 3018 Dowling Street, now Emancipation Avenue, and its state marker, The Legacy of Emancipation Park, names all nine trustees. Jack Yates's house stands in Sam Houston Park.