On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

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 had been signed,

December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified

A good number of the Americans who would want to settle on land in this area would hardly want to clear and work that land themselves.

They expected to have enslaved people do the clearing and planting,

Things could have been different. 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...

lives of African Americans, and their descendants in Texas, did not...

For many years, Blacks

have had their stories written out of history.

What is the morality that would say that the oppressors’ version of historical events should naturally take precedence over the knowledge of the oppressed?

It would certainly take longer than the nearly twenty-five years separating White’s murder-without-consequence from my entering Anderson Elementary to erase the culture created during postslavery

I could see into the other area, and noted how much larger and better appointed it was, with a bigger variety of magazines.

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.

People who had been figures of authority were put in charge of dispensing books and doing other administrative tasks that took them away from contact with Black students,...

Officer Bryant was actually charged and brought to trial, though he was eventually acquitted.

limiting the imaginative possibilities of Blackness—what could be done by people in that skin.

To be sure, the institution of slavery itself circumscribed the actions of enslaved African Americans, but it never destroyed their personhood.

They did not become a separate species by the experience ...

All of the feelings, talents, failings, strengths and weaknesses—all the states and qualities that exist in...

Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

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.

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

Land taken from Native peoples in Texas was then cleared by enslaved people, who were then put to work planting, tending, and harvesting crops.

There could be first-class citizenship and second-class citizenship in the American republic.

Would the Black character be good for Black people, or bad for Black people?

No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the republic

The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. . .

found Texas the most difficult of all the regions under the Bureau’s jurisdiction, its White citizens the most resistant to efforts to effect changes in the position of Blacks in the state.