Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery, will live again this week as the Slavery and Civil War Museum celebrates its grand opening.

The festivities begin with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m. Wednesday, which also happens to be June 19. That’s the date, in 1865, that word officially reached slaves in Texas that they had been freed.

“Juneteenth is celebrated all over the world,” said museum director Vickie Donaldson. “Several Southern states observe a state holiday on that date. Selma is just now getting around to celebrating with the rest of the world.”

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, a collectibles fair will be held. Visitors to the museum are encouraged to bring any period artifacts or writings from the time of the Civil War to have them authenticated free of charge.

The Juneteenth Film Festival will begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday. The festival will feature films that deal with both slavery and with the Civil War. The film festival will continue Saturday from noon until 9 p.m.

“We’ll probably show ‘Glory’ and ‘Amistad’ to begin with,” Donaldson said. “We thought about showing ‘Roots,’ but I don’t think anybody’s going to sit through seven hours of anything.”

Also Saturday will be an open air flea market from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the first annual Juneteenth Festival from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The festival will include games for children, outdoor vendors and food.

Donaldson emphasized that the museum is very much a work in progress. While a number of exhibits will be in place for its grand opening, plans are for others to be added on a continuing basis.

“What we want to do is to present a balanced picture of what slavery was, both to the victims and to those who benefited,” she explained. “Really, though, what we want to do is tell the truth.”

As an example, she points to an exhibit by John Jones, an artist from Virginia. Confederate currency often depicted scenes that dealt with various aspects of slavery. Jones has taken actual specimens of Confederate currency and enlarged those background scenes. The idyllic scenes show blacks engaged in such benevolent pursuits as driving a mule-drawn wagon, fishing and lounging contentedly against the side of a bale of cotton – cotton that blacks were forced to pick under the threat of the lash.

“If you didn’t know any better,” snorted Donaldson, “you’d think blacks enjoyed being slaves.”

By juxtaposing exhibits about slavery alongside those dealing with the Civil War, Donaldson said the museum hopes to document how slavery could be made palatable in a culture which openly asserted that all men are created equal. It was only by downplaying the human horrors of slavery and by simultaneously dehumanizing blacks as a people, she argued, that such a contradiction could be allowed to exist in the first place.

Said Donaldson, “Slavery and the Civil War co-existed, and the museum wants to present a picture of those two dynamics co-existing from the point of view of the North, the South and the slave.”

Donaldson said she fervently hopes that the museum sparks a healthy debate about the effects of slavery and its legacy in American society even today.

“The primary purpose of any museum,” she said, “should be to present a perspective. The perspective of this museum, hopefully, will be to show that the end of slavery was the spark that ignited the human rights movement as we know it today – from the Emancipation Proclamation to the women’s rights movement on down to the voting rights movement and on and on.

“All of those movements share one thing in common, and that is an overriding concern with the basic human rights of the person.”