On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

As I think of it, it’s really a very Texas move to say that something that happened in our state was of enough consequence to the entire nation that it should be celebrated nationwide.

But it is significant that Texas was the site of the tail end of the Confederate war effort. As the war had been fought to preserve slavery, celebrating Juneteenth throughout the land is a fitting way to mark the end of that effort.

The history of Juneteenth, which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.

Significantly, my wide-ranging approach to Juneteenth reveals that behind all the broad stereotypes about Texas is a story of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is the American story, told from this most American place.

This extended land mass created an early basis for the exaggeration and bragging to which residents of the state are prone. As one observer put it, “exaggeration is often considered to be an endemic low-grade infection of most Texans.”

Of great importance, as I have said in another context, the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” What that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man is part of what I hope to explore in the essays of this book.

There is just so much to misunderstand about Texas, misunderstandings that stem from a general lack of attention to, or even awareness of the state’s foundational aspects.

Austin and his Tejano (ethnic Mexicans living in Texas) partners engaged in intense lobbying to convince Mexican legislators to protect slavery as a way of ensuring the success of their colonization effort. 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.

There is no way to get around the fact that, whatever legitimate federalism-based issues were at play, slavery was a central reason Anglo-Texans wanted out of Mexico. Using unpaid labor to clear forests, plant crops, harvest them, and move them to market was the basis of their lives and wealth. As Austin perceptively noted, any individual or family who tried to do this on their own in the wilderness of East Texas would face years of toil and strife without a real prospect of success.

The choice for slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas. There is no way to do that without suggesting that the lives of African Americans, and their descendants in Texas, did not, and do not, matter.

It should come as no surprise that my teachers were not inclined to deal with all of this and likely did not know much of this story. They probably were not alone in this regard. As far as my early education went, these aspects of our state history were never fully discussed. 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 insti...

There is little wonder why the Cowboy would be picked as the most representative figure. Divorced from plantation slavery, coming from a part of the state relatively devoid of Black people, the image of the cowboy on the range quiets the noise a bit and avoids the tragic element in Texas history—the element that Juneteenth supposedly closed the door on, even as it opened another tragic phase in the state and country’s history.

The children were to be integrated, not the teaching staff. Putting Black teachers at the head of classrooms of mainly White students was never the school district’s priority.

Administrators involved in the WPA Slave Narrative Project of the 1930s, which gathered the recollections of formerly enslaved people, engaged in a concerted effort to render the speech of the interviewees into stereotypical Black dialect. As a result, the accents and speech of all the interviewees—from Virginia to Georgia to Texas—appear as if people in those very different regions spoke exactly the same way. The exaggerated dialect was supposed to signal “authenticity,” an authenticity defined by incapacity.

This displays very well the contingent nature of history, and how difficult it can be, when considering the history of a given time and place, to keep in mind that our view is colored by the knowledge of how things turned out. Writers, and consumers, of history must take great care not to import the knowledge we have into the minds of people and of circumstances in the past. That is different from recognizing points of connection between the past and the present. It is more about wishful thinking about the past.

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. As a measure of self-defense, African Americans went with that program, and forged ties based on race, making a positive out of what had been created as a negative.

The Comanches themselves were not indigenous to Texas, having come to the area from more northern regions of what we know as the United States, displacing, most often with violence, other native groups as they went. Over time, they created what has been called an “empire,” the Comancheria, that extended through parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and into northern Mexico. The picture was, indeed, bigger and more complicated than I imagined during my childhood.

In the twenty-first century, the United States has come to a point of reckoning about its past, including the story of the dispossession of Native peoples, who are still very much present. 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. The American story is, indeed, endlessly complicated.

Not that the path had to have been followed—that’s never it—but it is important to know what paths were taken, and why. That is history.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. . . . That is the basis upon which Texas and other members of the Confederacy had formulated their society.

Those hours seemed endless to me as a child, but they were actually fleeting. This ritual was fitting, and so very Texan. People of African descent, and to be honest, of some European descent, celebrating the end of slavery in Texas with dishes learned in slavery and a dish favored by ancient Mesoamerican Indians that connected Texas to its Mexican past; so much Texas history brought together for this one special day.