Families from around western Massachusetts have an historic and personal connection to the Civil War and Juneteenth, dating back to June 19th, 1865.
On that day, more than a dozen Amherst, Mass. residents from the all Black Massachusetts 54th Regiment were among the U.S. Army troops that arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform some of the last enslaved Americans — they were free.
Last Saturday, surrounded by a group of re-enactors from the Civil War's Massachusetts 54th regiment, William T. Harris read their names aloud, among them his own ancestors, buried in the historic Amherst West Cemetery, where Emily Dickinson is also buried.
Harris and his immediate family, who grew up in Greenfield and then Amherst, are descendants of five Civil War soldiers, Christopher Thompson, Thompson's son and siblings.
"We have to recognize that people made sacrifices, thousands and thousands of people, so that we can enjoy the freedoms that we have today," Harris said.
It's a privilege and a deep commitment to keep that history alive said Harris, who traveled from Texas to join dozens of area residents at the 5th annual Ancestral Bridges Juneteenth Legacy Celebration.
"We have to know where we came from because it informs our present and it helps us create our future, and so that's my big commitment for coming back every year [to Amherst] to keep their sacrifices [and] all the others who participated in this effort alive and in our conscious — and also to represent accurate history," Harris said.
By volunteering as soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, Harris said his great, great, great, great grandfather and brothers made a sacrifice as free African Americans in the hopes that others would have and their descendants would have a better life.
"I am a manifestation of their hope, I am actually living the hope they had had for their descendants and for others of African heritage," said Harris who is a scientist by training and currently the President and CEO at Space Center Houston, associated with NASA Johnson Space Center.
It's only in the last 15 years or so he and his family learned their ancestors are buried in the historic cemetery that Harris used to cut through, to get to high school.
"About a decade and a half ago when my brother and I were talking about our family ancestry, and we had oral history — it didn't make any sense," Harris said.
That started them looking at their family genealogy Harris said, and they discovered a lot of the oral history was wrong.
"So we took advantage of the fact that my [now] late grandfather Gil Roberts was still alive at the time, and he lived to 107 and was lucid, to start interviewing him and learning all of these things that he'd never told us about as we grew up," Harris said.
They knew nothing about relatives in the 54th Regiment [and the 5th Calvary], nor that many of them of his ancestors were interred in West Cemetery.
"We contacted the Department of Veterans Affairs in the area and had them recognized," Harris said, adding that Amherst College professor Robert Roemer was instrumental in getting this done.
Harris is also on the board of Ancestral Bridges, a "descendant-led living archive" documenting the Black and Afro Indigenous roots of Amherst and the Connecticut River Valley. It recently opened a visitor center in downtown Amherst.
