On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

PREFACE

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, and just over two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

The essays that follow do not strive to present a chronological narrative of the place where Juneteenth was born. They are, instead, designed to provide a context for an event that has become increasingly important in the life of the American nation. It’s a look at history through the medium of personal memoir, a Texan’s view of the long road to Juneteenth, the events surrounding the date itself, what happened afterward, and how all of this shaped life in Texas, my family’s life, and my own.

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.

CHAPTER 1 “This, Then, Is Texas”

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.

CHAPTER 2 A Texas Town

For many years, Blacks like the ones in Conroe and Livingston—all over the country, really—have had their stories written out of history. The tyranny of ideas about “the archive,” or what constitutes the official record, all too often, has buried their knowledge and rendered it suspect. This is so despite the fact that it is well known that such people were operating under an oppression that deliberately prevented them from creating parts of the archive or making official records. What is the morality that would say that the oppressors’ version of historical events should naturally take precedence over the knowledge of the oppressed? How could any judgment created by the people who watched Dude Cochran shoot Bob White in the back of the head and let him walk away with no consequences, or who planned and gathered at a picnic to watch a man be murdered, be presented as neutral and credible?

The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers.

Patriarchy, which is not only about the subjugation of women but about competition between males, is so central to this story. 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.

The effects of integration on schoolchildren, Black and White, has received a great amount of attention over the years. 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. Many of them, including in my town, were taken out of the classroom. The children were to be integrated, not the teaching staff.

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, depriving those students of daily role models.

In downtown Conroe, on a wall that used to have an old advertisment for soda that I thought clever, is a mural of me and, in a nearby park, a bust.

I should look this up

CHAPTER 3 Origin Stories: Africans in Texas

It’s a safe bet that most people in the United States, when they think of it, believe that Black people first appeared in North America in 1619. The story of the “20. and odd negroes” that John Rolfe announced, in matter of fact fashion, to have arrived in Virginia that year is often taken as the beginning of what we might call “Black America”—from that twenty, to 4 million—by the time of Emancipation in 1865—to nearly 40 million today.

There is also a version of this attitude about Plymouth versus Jamestown in the origin story of African Americans. I remember hearing in school, probably because I was in Texas, stray references to a man of African descent—a “Negro”—named Esteban (Estebanico), who was in what would become Texas during the time of Spanish exploration. Interestingly enough, he arrived in the area of the future Galveston, where General Granger would proclaim the end of slavery in Texas over three hundred years later.

I hadn’t been told that other people of African descent—some enslaved, some not—arrived with the Spanish when they came to the Americas. Whether enslaved or free, these people were disconnected from the institution of plantation slavery that developed in Texas three centuries later, the institution that helped define my ancestors’ circumstances.

CHAPTER 4 People of the Past and the Present

Six Flags Over Texas!

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. I have no idea if it’s the same way now, but the original park had sections that depicted Texas’s time under each particular flag, a conceit that would make less sense as the franchise expanded to places outside of Texas that had no similar multinational history.

CHAPTER 5 Remember the Alamo

What has it meant (what does it mean) for Blacks to claim Americanness while substantial numbers of their fellow Americans reject the idea that Blacks can be true Americans?

Whatever we may think about their bravery, valor, and commitment, 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. To have Blacks, in particular, acting in concert with White Texians to create a republic in which African-American–based chattel slavery would be protected forever, and in which free Blacks would not be allowed to live, is a bit too much.

What does this mean for Black Texans thinking of the Texas of the past? Being a historian trying to think and write effectively about the American founding, a period in which Black people were living under oppression at the hands of people who did some other things I admire, requires a degree of detachment. I realize that others may take a different tack. Thinking of past events, and people who lived long ago, and observing the process of change over time satisfies my deep interest in the past on its own terms, though I am also interested in the legacies of the past. I don’t feel hostage to others’ conceptions of what Texas should mean to me, or accept that Texas “belongs” exclusively to any group of people who lived, or live, there. Being a Black person and a Texan, then, are not in opposition.

CHAPTER 6 On Juneteenth

General Order No. 3

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.

Language about equality echoed the words of the American Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” People have long quibbled about what those words meant to Jefferson personally, as if that actually matters to whether the words are true or not. It does not.

Black Texans were determined, despite the early intimidating anger of Whites, to celebrate what was initially called Emancipation Day. Most of the first celebrations were in churches, in keeping with the culture of a generally religious people. I also wonder if holding meetings in churches was thought to provide some level of protection in those days. Later, in larger towns, the celebrations migrated to public spaces, though some sort of religious observance might be included in the program. In 1872, in Houston, four Black men, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, Elias Dibble, and Jack Yates, pooled their resources and raised money to buy land in the city for the express purpose of celebrating the holiday, creating Emancipation Park, one of the oldest parks in Texas.

Slavery was just a blink of an eye away from the years my grandparents and their friends were born. Although I was angered by the stories I heard about their lives under Jim Crow, and I had my own issues about the treatment of Blacks in my lifetime, they surely compared life as it was, knowing what it could have been but for the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and General Order No. 3. Although there was a very long way to go before we had full and equal citizenship, we were able to gather together as a family to celebrate. Family members who were lost, were lost to death, in the way that all families lose people. No one was being sold away.

CODA

This brief sketch of the history of Texas told through vignettes of my family

When asked, as I have been very often, to explain what I love about Texas, given all that I know of what has happened there—and is still happening there—the best response I can give is that this is where my first family and connections were.

Texas is where my mother’s boundless dreams for me took flight. It’s also where I learned to think that people could, and should, try, in whatever way they can, to make life better for others alive today and for those to come.

About the difficulties of Texas: Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so. How that is done matters, of course. Striking the right balance can be exceedingly hard. I hope I’ve achieved the proper equilibrium.