On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

“Juneteenth.” June 19, 1865, shortened to “Juneteenth,” was the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas were told that slavery had ended, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation

General Gordon Granger, while at his headquarters in Galveston, prepared General Order Number 3,

Austin told everyone who would listen that, without slavery, the Anglo colonies would never fully succeed and Americans who came to Texas would surely be poor for the rest of their lives.

The Mexican government continued to nod toward ending slavery, while the Anglos and their supporters kept resisting.

Texans successfully rebelled against Mexico and set up the Republic of Texas in 1836. With this move, the right to enslave was secured,

As one could ask about the states’ rights argument—states’ rights to do what?—I

whatever legitimate federalism-based issues were at play, slavery was a central reason Anglo-Texans wanted out of Mexico.

William Faulkner famously wrote, in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The tyranny of ideas about “the archive,” or what constitutes the official record, all too often, has buried their knowledge

such people were operating under an oppression that deliberately prevented them from creating parts of the archive or making official records.

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable.

people who had been specifically denied the chance to be educated, and then having their enslavement, or second-class status, justified by, among other things, their lack of education.

What has been much less considered is the effect that integration had on the Black teachers who were in Black schools when the changes initially came.

The children were to be integrated, not the teaching staff.

things had not changed as much as some may have thought, and that integration was more about Blacks coming to Whites rather than a mutual engagement.

White children, overwhelmingly, kept White teachers, and did not go to schools explicitly named for Black people.

Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self;

Africans were all over the world, doing different things, having all kinds of experiences. Blackness does not equal inherent incapacity and natural limitation.

There is no reason for the people taken from Africa to define themselves strictly by the categories their captors created.

the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—had enslaved Black people,

the English desire for Indian slaves who could be sold to the West Indies spurred the market in human beings,

Native peoples are now being asked to come to grips with their relationship to African Americans, the descendants of people whom they enslaved, and with whom, in some cases, they share a bloodline.

No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the republic without the consent of congress;

Enslavers could not free the people they enslaved without permission.

Race is right there in the documents—official and personal.

we humans seem to need myths and legends as well as history. They appear to be an easy way to knit groups of people into a community.

Indeed, by the twentieth century, the “yellow girl” had disappeared, replaced by the “yellow rose,” a nonracial phrase that appeared in a later stanza in the original song. Of course, “darkey” was out, too.

People want the individuals from the past they admire to be “right” on the question of race—no matter how wrong they actually were—so

what we would consider to be “right” on the question of race, which, at a minimum, requires believing in the equal humanity of African Americans.

After stating “all slaves are free,” the order continues: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

the Texas Republic. While it copied the form of the American Declaration, as noted, it left out the language of equality.

one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves.

We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment