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

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.

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.

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable. It was never just about money, or else the angry store owner would have welcomed the Black dollars that could enrich him further. Being a White man, entitled to deference, with the right to vote, and hold office—entitled to hold on to power—to be the kind of person who could walk into a courtroom, shoot a Black man in front of dozens of spectators, and get away with it, placed him above Black people, whether he had money or not. Most important of all, it placed him above Black men. 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.

I know from her life and from the way her colleagues responded to me, that many of them saw themselves as on a mission. Education was about the individual students, just as it was for my teachers at Anderson, but there was an additional component; an explicit mission of race uplift. My teachers at Anderson did not have to concern themselves with that. Except for the few Black students in their classes, their students were not the descendants of people who had been specifically denied the chance to be educated, and then having their enslavement, or second-class status, justified by, among other things, their lack of education. Becoming educated was an act of resistance. The classroom was a site of that resistance. Along with ministers, many of whom also saw racial uplift as part of their task, schoolteachers were among the most respected members of the Black community. These women and men were role models, charged with preparing the next generation of Black children to take the steps toward community advancement.

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. 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, depriving those students of daily role models.

We can say, then, that much of the concern with origin stories is about our current needs and desires (usually to feel good about ourselves), not actual history. History is about people and events in a particular setting and context, and how those things have changed over time in ways that make the past different from our own time, with an understanding that those changes were not inevitable. Origin stories often seek to find the familiar, or the superficially familiar—memory, sometimes shading into mythology. Both memory and mythology have their uses, even if they must be separated from our understandings about the demands of historical thinking.

All of this was the result of a nationalist-oriented history, with an intense focus on what was going on within the boundaries of the United States, and seeing what was going on almost totally from the perspective of English-speaking (and White) people. The world enclosed in that way left out so much about the true nature of life in Early America, about all the varied influences that shaped the people and circumstances during those times. It closes off the vital understanding about contingency, how things could have taken a different turn. Very significantly, it helped create and maintain an extremely narrow construction of Blackness.

Under the conventional narrative with which most Americans, it is safe to say, are familiar, Blacks came to North America under the power of the English from places that were never clearly defined, for where they came from didn’t matter much. They went from speaking the languages of their homelands to speaking English. They worked on plantations in the fields or in the house.

This highly edited origin story winds the Black experience tight, 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 of being enslaved. All of the feelings, talents, failings, strengths and weaknesses—all the states and qualities that exist in human beings—remained in them....

So much of racism is about announcing, in various ways, the agreed-upon fictions about Black people that justify attempting to keep them in a subordinate status; like the inanity that children produced from the union of a Black person and a White person were sterile, like a mule, in either the first or a later generation.

The fiction that has African Americans naturally speaking in a particular way, or unable to learn a language, slyly promotes the notion that Blacks are somewhat less than human, in their inability to master a human trait: the capacity to engage in complex communication. At the very least, the ideas about Blacks and language serve as means to convey the supposed gulf that exists between the races.

Even more, knowing that some of the Black people who came to the Americas with the Spanish went off on their own to lead expeditions of conquest in Mexico, Central, and South America would have altered the framework for viewing people of African descent in the New World. Not to place conquering in a good light, but seeing Africans in America who were out of the strict confines of the plantation—and seeing them presented as something other than the metaphorical creation of English people—would have pushed back against the narrative of inherent limitation. Africans were all over the world, doing different things, having all kinds of experiences. Blackness does not equal inherent incapacity and natural limitation.

There is no reason for the people taken from Africa to define themselves strictly by the categories their captors created. Even though the Spanish “lost” Texas and Florida, Estebanico and the Spanish-speaking Blacks of St. Augustine should be seen as a part of the origin story of African Americans. These people, all but a handful of whom were brought to different parts of the New World for one purpose, are related to one another no matter their language or religion.

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. 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.

I could believe that Indians and African Americans and, actually different Indians among themselves, should have recognized that they faced a common foe. 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. All of that was in the big picture of the Parker narrative, a story of encroachment, met by defense and retaliation. Actually, that story was bigger and older than Whites versus Indians. 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.

Although the Comanches and Apaches dominated my earliest imagination of Indian life in Texas history, the reality is that people lived in the area long before either of the two groups arrived. During the Ice Age, Native peoples came to a region in the Panhandle of Texas to quarry Alibates flint, a type of stone used to make tools and arrowheads. Because of its significance, the site was the first in Texas to be designated a national monument, now only one of three in the state. Later, permanent villages were formed in the area. 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.”

But the English desire for Indian slaves who could be sold to the West Indies spurred the market in human beings, transforming the practice and destabilizing southeastern societies overall. Captured people were now commodities. And, as happened all over the colonies in North America, the Alabama-Coushattas were drawn into European balance-of-power politics among the English, French, and Spanish. We think our society is uniquely complicated today, but it is hard to fathom this world of colliding cultures, languages, religions, differentials of power—with few restraints on how power could be deployed—all of this taking place when people had no understanding of, or capability to deal with, the even greater powers in their world: bacteria and viruses.

All of this fit with the hippie-themed back-to-the-land movement that romanticized Indigenous people as much as taking them seriously. It was also of a piece with earlier responses to Native Americans. After removing them from their land, preventing them from becoming a threat, Americans often claimed to admire the special virtues of Native peoples, who were supposed to possess a unique spirit. They named towns after them, states, later sports franchises. That iconic commercial with the “Crying Indian” played to the idea that Indigenous people have a spiritual connection to the land that others do not possess. The people who took their land did not appreciate it, or care for it properly. This was almost a half-hearted confession that what had happened was wrong. That didn’t mean the land would be given back to them, of course.

More likely, it was the character Billy Jack with whom they identified. The half-Indian martial arts master and Green Beret had decided to protect the hippies. His support gave my fellow townspeople permission to identify with, and champion, characters who in real life many of them would have disdained. That he was part White also made him safe. Would the appeal have been as great if the character had been a full-blooded Native American? Could audience members have lost themselves in such a character so thoroughly, giving themselves permission to imagine themselves as a non-White person? Certainly, the people who made movies during those days would have wondered about that. It was an article of faith in Hollywood that White audiences were not keen on watching films with people of color as the main characters. That common wisdom has been exploded in the past few decades. It was also important that the film presented right and wrong in extremely broad strokes. Billy Jack’s purity, proved by his Native heritage, helped make the choices very clear to my fellow townspeople, who undoubtedly saw the movie differently than I. The townspeople on the screen looked awfully like some people I knew in Conroe and Livingston. I have no way of knowing the answer, but I wonder if any of them made the connection between the racial intolerance—the lack of tolerance for difference, in general—displayed in the film and the forms of intolerance that had been a part of our town. Perhaps sitting ...

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 Americanness while substantial numbers of their fellow Americans reject the idea that Blacks can be true Americans? And that they have used their greater numbers to make that rejection the basis of law and social policy?

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. Texas is firmly within the Western movie genre, and there is no similar genre associated with the East, North, and South. Even without the Western theme, with its sheriffs, gunfighters, and outlaws, people had to fight in, and for, Texas.

I often encounter great hesitancy about, and impatience with, discussing race when talking about the American past. The obvious difficulty with those kinds of complaints is that people in the past—in the overall American context and in the specific context of Texas—talked a lot about, and did a lot about, race. It isn’t some newly discovered fad topic. Race is right there in the documents—official and personal. It would take a concerted effort not to consider and analyze the subject, and I realize that evasion is exactly what happened in many of the textbooks that Americans used in their school social studies and history classes. This, in part, accounts for the pained accusations about “revisionist” history when historians talk about things that people had never been made aware of in their history educations. 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.

Still, there is no escaping the fact that we humans seem to need myths and legends as well as history. They appear to be an easy way to knit groups of people into a community. That is not a presumptively “feel good” statement. Communities can be held together by positive myths and legends or negative ones. A supreme risk with myths and legends of whatever kind is that we can easily fall in love with the people who are in them, as if we know them.

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.

That is the basis upon which Texas and other members of the Confederacy had formulated their society. Even before the war, Texas had made this a part of its creed in its own Declaration of Independence that formed the Texas Republic. While it copied the form of the American Declaration, as noted, it left out the language of equality. The general order announced a state of affairs that completely contravened the racial and economic ideals of the Confederacy. Announcing the end of slavery would have been shocking enough. Stating that the former enslaved would now live in Texas on an equal plane of humanity with whites was on a different order of magnitude of shocking. Had the Order said, “Slavery is over. And former slaves will now become the equivalent of peons on the land of whites, with severely diminished to nonexistent legal, social, and political rights”—the state eventually imposed in Texas and throughout the South—the reaction may have been different.

The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.

General Howard, heading a new bureau that was underfunded and poorly staffed, 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. Why would White Texans be more obstreperous than other White southerners? It has been suggested that this was because, unlike other Southern states, Texas had not been defeated militarily. They had won the last battle of the Civil War. That the state had been its own Republic, within the living memory of many Texans, also set them apart from the other Confederates. The very thing that has been seen as a source of strength and pride for latter-day Texans, may have fueled a stubbornness that prevented the state from moving ahead at this crucial moment.

Gregory noted, with seeming surprise, that black Texans, in the face of this hostility, went about the business of making new lives in the state, when they could have, in some places, unleashed carnage on their former enslavers. They, like freed people throughout the South, focused on other things: solemnizing their marriages keeping away from the violence of Whites, trying to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery, working, and, very happily, taking advantage of the schools the Bureau created. Adults sat in classrooms with children, all eager to learn to read and write.

It was from that area that one of the most influential people in the history of Blacks in Galveston, and in Texas, appeared. His efforts laid the groundwork for my great-grandfather’s time in the city. George Ruby, a native New Yorker, who had had an adventuresome life, was put in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau school system. He left that position for a stint as a traveling agent for the Bureau, and returned to Galveston to become a deputy director of customs in 1869. This was before the end of Reconstruction in Texas in 1870, and Blacks were voting and holding office across the state. My own maternal great-great-grandfather registered to vote in 1867. Most important to his career, Ruby became a part of the Union League, an organization started to support the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln. The group helped organize the Republican Party in Texas and sought Black support by championing the rights of Blacks, to the consternation of Whites. His involvement with the League helped him be elected to the Texas State Senate. He also helped organize the Labor Union of Colored Men to get jobs for Black men on Galveston’s wharves and to help them keep those jobs.