In the middle of a Missouri City neighborhood, quietly nestled between two-story homes with pools and manicured lawns, is a majestic live oak tree that stood long before the area became a suburb.
This is the Freedom Tree. Beneath its sprawling canopy, the story goes that enslaved Black people gathered to hear they were free, months after a proclamation was read aloud in Galveston on June 19, 1865 — and more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The news arrived late, but it arrived here, under this tree…