"The warnings mandated by the Supreme Court in Miranda have been part of the fabric of law enforcement interactions with the public for more than 60 years."
The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.
The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.
The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.
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| photo credit:urluko |
Texas representatives in the 117th Congress took more money from gun rights groups than lawmakers in any other state, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.
Senators and House members representing Texas have received more than $14 million in contributions from gun rights interests over the course of their careers, with much of that coming from the National Rifle Association.
Texas also ranks second among the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets for state-level lobbying by gun rights groups with more than $3 million in spending from 2015 through 2021. During that period, the NRA spent more on state-level lobbying in Texas than any other state in the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets with over $2.5 million in spending.
The influence gun rights groups exert in Texas is also evident in grassroots organizing and advocacy efforts spearheaded by the NRA.
