At a Juneteenth sleepover, campers commune with ancestors

On June 12, a week before Juneteenth, a multigenerational group of about three dozen people doused themselves in bug spray and listened to Ahmad Ward as part of an unusual celebration of the federal holiday. On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to liberate the enslaved people of the state more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. At Mitchelville, freed people were building a town for themselves even before Abraham Lincoln’s decree. According to the nonprofit that runs the park, the site was the first self-governing...