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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.
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
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As my parents predicted, 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.
They taught me that not all White people are the same.
What was that loss? The move toward integration may have killed off one bad thing—Jim Crow education, which would never have truly provided equal funding for two, separate educational systems in the town—but it took some valuable things with it. The notion of “separate” being inherently unequal didn’t take account of what it meant for Black students to have Black teachers, particularly at that precise moment in history. Strong bonds existed between teachers and students at Booker T. They were neighbors, relatives (in some cases), and fellow church members. The bonds forged in the classrooms
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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
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To be sure, the institution of slavery itself circumscribed the actions of enslaved African Americans, but it never destroyed their personhood.