The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing
In 1981 three Black teenagers drowned while in law enforcement custody during a Juneteenth gathering at Lake Mexia. Four decades later, Texas’s proudest Emancipation Day celebration still hasn’t recovered.
Lake Mexia, seen from Booker T. Washington Park, known locally as Comanche Crossing, on April 21, 2021.
Photograph by Michael Starghill
Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after news of the end of slavery reached Texas.