Retention List Stories

Story Twenty-One: Slave Narratives on Juneteenth

Recap: In 2022, twenty-four Minnesota libraries joined together in a commitment to retain over a half-million print books which are scarcely-held in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota Shared Print Collection. Here is one of the stories from the Winona State share of the collection.

Winona State has forty-two volumes of the largest collection of US slave narratives published, but they are not on our retention list; however, a more obscure volume of slave narratives specifically from Texas is on our list. The holiday Juneteenth memorializes the day in 1865 when a quarter million enslaved persons in the state of Texas, which had been the last bastion for slavery at the end of the American Civil War, were declared free by the U.S. Army.

Murphy, Lawrence R., and Ronnie C. Tyler. The Slave Narratives of Texas. Encino Press, 1974.