On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Despite the formal surrender, the Confederate army had continued to fight on in Texas until mid-May. It was only after they finally surrendered that Major General Gordon Granger, while at his headquarters in Galveston, prepared General Order Number 3, announcing the end of legalized slavery in the state.

Granger’s order did not end slavery in the country. That did not happen officially until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the necessary number of states.

the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.”

When slavery in Texas was mentioned, it was presented as an unfortunate event that was to be acknowledged but quickly passed over. There was no sense of the institution’s centrality. Slavery was done. There was no point in dwelling on the past. Texas was all about the future, about what came next—the next cattle drive, the next oil well, the next space flight directed by NASA’s Mission Control in Houston.

Except, we did dwell on the past. We were exhorted to “Remember the Alamo” and to “Remember Goliad,” famous events in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico.

No other state brings together so many disparate and defining characteristics all in one—a state that shares a border with a foreign nation, a state with a long history of disputes between Europeans and an indigenous population and between Anglo-Europeans and people of Spanish origin, a state that had existed as an independent nation, that had plantation-based slavery and legalized Jim Crow.

Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.

Black people in the United States, even ones in our area, were demanding changes to the way things were done in society. Their challenges were meeting with success nationally with the passage of legislation and court decisions that dismantled de jure segregation. It must have appeared that the floodgates were opening, and all the old verities that had held southern society in place would be swept away.

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

White males had, since the days of slavery, arrogated to themselves the right to have access to all types of women in society, while strictly prohibiting Black males access to White women, on many occasions becoming murderous about that stricture.

Becoming educated was an act of resistance. The classroom was a site of that resistance.

Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in.

The story of Africans in St. Augustine is rich, as there is documentation of their presence and lives in surviving parish records and historical accounts of the conflicts that arose between enslaved people and their Spanish captors and between the Spanish and the English who fought over the territory for decades.

In 1735 the Spanish governor chartered a settlement for enslaved Africans who escaped from the English colonies and made it to St. Augustine. The only condition for protection was that the new residents adopt Catholicism and swear allegiance to the Spanish king. The settlement of free Blacks existed until the Spanish sold Florida to the United States in 1817.

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.

Even though the Spanish “lost” Texas and Florida, Estebanico and the Spanish-speaking Blacks of St. Augustine should be seen as a part of the origin story of African Americans.

“Six Flags,” my mind fills in “Over Texas” and I have to resist the temptation to explain why “Six Flags.” The six flags refer to the six flags of the countries that flew over

Texas in history: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States of America.

Frankly, that the people who were doing the forcing were also the people who had held Black people in slavery deepened my sympathy, seeing in my mind that there should have been an affinity between Blacks and Indigenous people in those times.

It would be years before I learned that the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—had enslaved Black people, that some Native people held (and hold) the same racist attitude

toward Black people that many Whites do. There was no “natural” alliance.

But that is because I had imbibed the racial thinking of my times, which had largely been imposed by Europeans—creating people called “white” and categories of people who were “nonwhite” for purposes of deciding what rights people had and how they could be treated or mistreated.

After removing them from their land, preventing them from becoming a threat, Americans often claimed to admire the special virtues of Native peoples, who were supposed to possess a unique spirit. They named towns after them, states, later sports franchises.

This was almost a half-hearted confession that what had happened was wrong. That didn’t mean the land would be given back to them, of course.

My father insisted that this policing went on, that my White friends could know the right thing to do—even want to do it—but could not bring themselves to do it because they feared losing the love, esteem, and support of their community.

Dartmouth, a school started in 1769 to educate Native Americans,

At the same time where appropriate, 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.

What are we then to make of Black Texans, who may feel the “twoness” Du Bois described when thinking about their status as Americans, but also have to confront the same double consciousness when considering their place in Texas. This may be yet another instance of making Texas

They welcomed Kennedy’s violent death because they violently disagreed with his politics. The idea of violence as a solution to a problem has plagued humankind from the beginning.

In the new republic, only Whites were welcome.

SEC. 9. All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude:provided, The said slave shall be thebona-fideproperty of the person so holding said slave as aforesaid. Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall congress have power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave or slaves without the consent of congress, unless he or she shall send his or her slave or slaves without the limits of the republic.

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; and the importation or admission of Africans or negroes into this republic, excepting from the United ...

Still, there is no escaping the fact that 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. That is not a presumptively “feel good” statement. Communities can be held together by positive myths and legends or negative ones.

But one thing that has changed greatly in Texas from my childhood up until now is the determination

to bring people of color into the Texas narrative as much as possible.

The chief difficulty lies in how people of color can be fit into the legends and myths about Texas when the actual historical experiences of Indians, Blacks, and Mexicans wreak havoc with those legends and myths.

the stark reality is that the interests of the men most credited with envisioning Texas and bringing it into being were most often antithetical to the interests of people of color who occupied the same space and time with them.

Angry Confederate soldiers lashed out after their defeat. Some engaged in rioting and

looting.

General Order No. 3 had a powerful effect in Texas. The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Some African Americans in Galveston, and likely other residents, already knew the gist of the general order prior to June 19. Galveston, the largest city in Texas, was a port through which most of the cotton picked and processed in the state was shipped out to the world. Port cities are perfect vehicles for transmission of information to people of all degrees of literacy. Two days before General Granger arrived on the island, Black men working on the wharves began to shout in exaltation. When asked what they were celebrating, they replied, because they were free.

Whites in Texas were incensed by what had transpired, so much so that some reacted violently to Blacks’ displays of joy at emancipation. In one town, dozens of newly freed enslaved people were whipped for celebrating.

Announcing the end of slavery would have been shocking enough. Stating that the former enslaved would now live in Texas on an equal plane of humanity with whites was on a different order of magnitude of shocking.

The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was 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. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.

Gregory noted, with seeming surprise, that black Texans, in the face of this hostility, went about the business of making new lives in the state, when they could have, in some places, unleashed carnage on their former enslavers. They, like freed people throughout the South, focused on other things: solemnizing their marriages keeping away from the violence of Whites, trying to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery, working, and, very happily, taking advantage of the schools the Bureau created. Adults sat in classrooms with children, all eager to learn to read and write.

The overall failure of Reconstruction to fulfill the promise of a South remade with Black southerners participating as equal citizens in the region is well known.

event that transformed Galveston Island in 1901, the catastrophic hurricane that killed as many as 12,000 people and is still considered the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

The city was determined to rebuild quickly after the destruction. It did so, in part, by inviting large numbers of immigrants to come to work in the city. In sum, Galveston was, for Texas, progressive and cosmopolitan.