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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. 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
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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 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.
Balcones Escarpment, a raised limestone fault, roughly bisects Texas, separating east from west.
June 19, 1865,
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.
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.
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.
As painful as it may be, recognizing—though not dwelling on—tragedy and the role it plays in our individual lives, and in the life of a state or nation, is, I think, a sign of maturity.
William Faulkner famously wrote, in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe the Nobel laureate was wrong about that. The past is dead. But, like other formerly living things, echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future. A bit of history, then, is needed for context. East Texas had been the locus of slavery and the plantation system even before Texas became a state. The legacy of that time, and its baked-in racial hierarchy, survived long after enslaved people were freed. Texans who had
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violence. Private citizens, along with law enforcement, either directly or by looking the other way, often resorted to this mechanism of control.
Montgomery County, of which Conroe was the county seat during my childhood, was known for being particularly harsh for Black people. Just to mention the more publicized examples, in 1885, twenty years after the end of the Civil War, in the town of Montgomery, just seven miles from Conroe, Bennett Jackson, a young Black man, was lynched after being charged with breaking into a home and assaulting a White woman and her children. That Jackson would be lynched was well known ahead of time, as it turned into a public celebration for White citizens in the area. Men, women, and children gathered and
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period, he had no lawyer and was not allowed to speak with anyone. He was found guilty in the first trial and sentenced to die in the electric chair. The case was appealed, and a new trial was ordered. This time the trial was removed to Conroe because the ...
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The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. Writing for the Court in 1941, Justice Hugo Black held that the confession, obtained by severe beatings and keeping White incommunicado, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With that, the case went back down for retrial. It was during the final proceeding in Conroe, in June of 1941, that W. S. “Dude” Cochran, Ruby Cochran’s husband, walked to the front of the courtroom and shot White in the back of the head, killing him instantly. He handed the gun to the prosecutor and turned himself over to the
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The Winters and White stories had something in common, besides the cliché of hysteria surrounding the taboo of Black men and White women. In both situations, Blacks offered an alternative version of what had happened. They insisted that the teenaged girl had been caught in the woods with Winters, having gone there voluntarily. Embarrassment about being found with a Black man led to the charge of rape. As for the White case, my stepgrandfather, who knew Bob White and the Cochrans, insisted that Bob White and Ruby Cochran had been “going together.” White, apparently, talked freely about it. When
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What to make of these counter narratives, of course, is central to writing history. 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
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Some years ago, a reporter, doing a story about a rape allegation, interviewed me about the phenomenon described in the Winters and White cases—White women saying (or people saying it for them) they had been raped after their liaisons with Black men came to light. As we talked, it became clear that he desperately wanted me to refute the idea that this ever happened. I had never, until that time, spoken with a reporter doing a news story who seemed so invested in a particular idea. I could hear him become more and more frustrated as I pushed back against his obvious certainty that these stories
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advancements of a Black man would likely be banished from her family and White society, if not subjected to violence. In any event, it would take a long time to escape a history like the one made in Conroe, if escape were even possible. It would certainly take longer than the nearly twenty-five years separating White’s murder-without-consequence ...
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The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers.
Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.
in 1968, the Supreme Court, in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, struck down the freedom-of-choice plans as the subterfuges to avoid Brown that they were. With that, the process of integrating all the schools in Conroe began in earnest for other kids, including my older brothers.
The law might say I could go to a school or into a store. But it could not ensure that I would be welcome when I came to these places.
I felt the same puzzlement at my classmates, some of whom were quite hostile, while others seemed friendly but then surprised me at crucial moments when strong racial animus would appear seemingly out of the blue.
This was one of many lessons I learned. I had considered this girl a friend, but her outburst revealed that despite our friendly connection, the bottom line was, there is “us” and there is “you.” I learned a similar lesson when I would see my school friends in town with their parents and siblings, say, at a local store and my greeting to them would be met with total silence. They knew, at that young age, that their friendliness toward me might draw rebukes from their relatives.
relations between enslaved African Americans and Indians were not as I thought they should have been. 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.
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
Farther south in what is now Texas, there is also evidence of other early settlements. Indigenous people were all over the area. Later peoples included the Caddos, a farming group who lived in the pine forests of East Texas and called their confederacy Te-Haas, rendered Tejas by the Spanish, which was the Caddo word for “the friends.” That is thought to be the origin of the word “Texas.”
A public service announcement from that era, designed to combat littering, featured an Indian man (the actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was actually Sicilian) in full dress walking through a modern United States covered in litter. In the final frame, he sheds a single tear.
Dartmouth, a school started in 1769 to educate Native Americans,
“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” With those famous words, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk, identifies the central dilemma facing Black people in the United States—that, to a great degree, “Blackness” and “Americanness” have been cast in opposition to one another, a predicament created by the details of history and the desires of others. What has it meant (what does it mean) for Blacks to claim
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Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that as a matter of official policy, when it came to matters of race, the United States could move on “separate but equal” tracks, even though it was obvious to all that the “separate” facilities, schools, and the like, created for Black people were not “equal.” There could be first-class citizenship and second-class citizenship in the American republic. The “twoness,” then, was externally imposed and, as always in history, a different path could have been taken. Almost from the very beginning of their time in North America,
“Golden Age of Virginia,” the period from the 1730s to the 1760s?
The idea of violence as a solution to a problem has plagued humankind from the beginning. People all over the world have employed violence to move situations from one point to another. But there is no question that violence has been at the heart of the Texas story, or I should say violence has been foregrounded in the origin stories of Texas, in ways it is not in other states. Perhaps this is related to my statement that the image of Texas is of a White male, and males are more prone to violence. Certainly, Hollywood has helped this along, contributing to the feedback loop mentioned above.
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What the Texas Declaration very pointedly does not take from Jefferson are any words about “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” There was no place for such language in a battle in which race and culture were central. General Provisions of the Constitution, also drafted in this intense period, make concerns about controlling people of color, protecting slavery, and managing the new republic’s racial future very clear.
SEC. 6. All free white persons who shall emigrate to this republic, and who shall, after a residence of six months, make oath before some competent authority that he intends to reside permanently in the same, and shall swear to support this Constitution, and that he will bear true allegiance to the republic of Texas, shall be entitled to all the privileges of citizenship.
In the new republic, only Whites ...
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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
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this republic, excepting from the United States of America, is forever prohibited, a...
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Any concerns about the property rights in enslaved people were allayed. Slavery was to be a permanent state for Blacks. This actually interfered with the right to dispose of property as the owner saw fit. Enslavers c...
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SEC. 10. All persons, (Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians excepted,) who were residing in Texas on the day of the declaration of independence, shall be considered citizens of the...
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History is always being revised, as new information comes to light and when different people see known documents and have their own responses to them, shaped by their individual experiences. One person looking, say, at the provision of the Texas Constitution that excluded free Blacks from coming to the state, who does not see that as a problem, or that it had any great implications for the way matters unfolded in what would become the state of Texas, might choose not to discuss the provision at all. Another historian might notice it and wonder how that statement of policy shaped racial
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never it—but it is important to know what paths were taken, and why. That is history.
Still, there is no escaping the fact that we humans seem to need myths and leg...
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the things one admires and making them embody the individual as a whole. When a historian comes along and says, “Oh, you do know that William Barret Travis came to Texas one step ahead of the law to avoid being jailed for his debts, abandoning his wife and two small children in the process?,” that can be discomfiting. I will freely admit, as realistic about figures in the past as I am, that it disappointed me when I learned of Travis’s misdeeds, even though I had no great expectations of him. It was an irrational response, born of the residue of early training about Travis’s actions at a
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under bad circumstances has been given a backstory that suggests, with no real evidence, that his wife, Rosanna, may have had an affair with a neighbor and become pregnant with his child. If we had any reason to think this was true, it might create some smidgen of sympathy for Travis. But, only a smidgen.
The strong available evidence indicates that Travis left behind in Alabama a young mother—she was sixteen when they married—with his two small children, to escape his debts and the arrest warrant that was about to be issued for him. That was not an uncommon course to take in those days. Once in Texas, Travis claimed to be single. He and Rosanna would later be divorced, but they were still married when he first said he was unmarried. And then there is the whole business of Jim Bowie, with his shady deals and slave trading. The answer to this, of course, is that we should refrain from idealizing
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One part of the legend of the Alamo that I did not learn during my time in elementary school and William Barret Travis Junior High School was about the “Yellow Rose of Texas.” As the story goes, the Texian fighters were able to catch Santa A...
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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
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On June 19, 1865, as relayed at the beginning of this volume, Gordon Granger, a general in the Army of the United States of America, arrived in Galveston from his post in Louisiana to take command of all the troops in the American army in Texas. The Civil War had been over since April, when the Army of Northern Virginia, headed by General Robert E. Lee, surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of the Army of the United States. Confederate soldiers in Texas, nevertheless, continued to fight on into May. Indeed, they were victorious in the last battle that took place on Texas
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