On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

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. It’s not unlike the search for Black Confederates, insisting that enslaved people forced into encampments, and into the thick of battle by their enslavers, were full-fledged Confederate soldiers supporting the Lost Cause. The quixotic effort appears designed to satisfy modern-day needs. In an interesting, though admittedly perverse, way, these kinds of efforts can be seen as evidence of some form of progress. 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 that admiring such people poses no problem. The difficulty is that not many European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were 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.