Professor Annette Gordon-Reed on Juneteenth
“I want people to think about the choices they make”
This Sunday is Juneteenth! In anticipation of the holiday, I spoke with Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of On Juneteenth, a fantastic book interweaving the history of Juneteenth with stories about her life growing up in Texas.
We chatted about the origins of the holiday, the mixture of hostility and jubilation that followed, and what she typically ate to commemorate the day. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. Paying subscribers can access audio of the full conversation here. I hope you learn as much as I did!
Ben: I suppose we should start with the simplest question. Would you mind giving a quick overview of what Juneteenth is and what it commemorates?
AGR: Well, Juneteenth commemorates June 19th, 1865 when the United States Army General Gordon Granger came to Texas—Galveston, specifically—and announced the end of slavery in Texas. That was not the end of slavery in the entire United States (that happened legally with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865), but this was the end of the military effort to maintain slavery in the Confederate states. So that's what Juneteenth commemorates, and Black Texans have celebrated it every year since then.
Ben: Going off of that, in On Juneteenth you point out how there's a few-month gap between the Confederacy surrendering and the informing of the enslaved peoples of Texas that slavery is over. I guess this gets to a larger point that there wasn't Twitter, and also that there was perhaps recalcitrance to ending slavery by part of the population, especially in Texas.
Can you talk a bit about that resistance, and what occurred after Juneteenth? Was everyone just immediately like, Okay, we'll get rid of this centuries-old hierarchy. Sounds like a great plan. Why haven't we done this before?
AGR: Yeah, no. So General Robert E. Lee surrenders in April 1865, and it's really over at that point for the Confederacy, but the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, located in Texas, keeps on fighting. And in fact, the last battle of the Civil War was in Texas and the Confederates won. They knew the whole effort was doomed, but because they were so recalcitrant in Texas, they kept fighting until June. And then once the announcement was made on June 19th, of course, the enslaved people were jubilant.
They knew about the Emancipation Proclamation from two years earlier. They knew what was eventually going to happen. But the former enslavers and people who perhaps hoped one day they would have enough money to own slaves were very, very angry. During my research, I found instances of people whipped for celebrating. And not only were people being whipped and threatened, but whites enforced a system of sharecropping, which was almost like slavery for some people, until the 1930s. Whites did not just give up and try to do away with the whole racial hierarchy.
People have often asked me, should we celebrate this holiday? Because it was so tough after the announcement on Juneteenth. But it’s a time for celebration because enslaved people knew that it would no longer be legally allowed to separate families, to sell husbands away from wives, to send children away from their parents, and so forth. So there was general jubilation about this in the midst of some real hostility.
Ben: In On Juneteenth, you talk about the “masculinization” of Texas history. How does that factor into the hostility enslaved peoples faced?
AGR: Well, one of the things I try to do in the book is explain Texas. I say Texas has been constructed as a white man. When people think about Texas, they think of a cowboy, a cattle rancher, or an oil man, somebody in the oil business.
But obviously, I'm a Texan, and I'm not a white man, and my family has been there for generations, and I wanted to talk about the other part of Texas. The obscured part of Texas that really forms the modern incarnation of the place. Because Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas” brings Anglo settlers there in the 1820s, fully aware of—and actually, depending upon—the idea that they're going to come with slaves.
And later on, of course, as the Civil War advances, a number of people from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, fled Union attacks, bringing the enslaved people with them to stay one step ahead of the war effort. So a lot of the people who come to Texas during the period of the Civil War are really diehard folks. They are the dead-enders. They really, really have faith in the system of slavery and want to preserve it and believe that this is part of the destiny of Texas.
Ben: Wow. I wonder if you could chat about your experience growing up in Texas as relates to this racist dynamic and segregation, which was still persistent. Well, granted you're a ripe 35-years-old, but let's just say segregation was a thing at the time.
AGR: Very gentlemanly. Yes.
Ben: So I wonder if you could talk a bit about your experience growing up, and also your relationship to Juneteenth within that prejudicial environment?
AGR: Well, I grew up in a small town in Texas, Conroe. It was a small town when I was growing up there. There were fewer than 5,000 people. It had started as an oil town, so it was a prosperous town, but it was deeply segregated. It had very violent origins with respect to Black people. Lynchings had taken place there. The Klan was active there. A man had been burned alive on Courthouse Square in the 1920s, some medieval stuff.
And in the mid-60s, 10 years after Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated the schools (or said that they were supposed to be desegregated), my parents decided to send me to a white school. To work around the Supreme Court decision, Texas, like many southern states, had devised “freedom of choice” plans, where whites were supposed to pick white schools and Black people were supposed to pick Black schools. But when I was going to the first grade, my mother and father chose a white school.
Later on, they said it was because they knew that the Supreme Court was going to strike down these freedom of choice plans. And sure enough, they did [in 1968], but I also think they were idealistic. They viewed their actions as part of the broader Civil Rights Movement at the time. And so I integrated our schools. It was a tough time. The teachers were fantastic to me. Some of the kids were nice and some of them weren’t. So, it was a very intense time.
That’s why Juneteenth is not just about the day. It's about all of the things around it. Slavery, the racial hierarchy that was created and which continued to exist up until the time that I was starting elementary school. I'm linked to that moment, and in the book, I talk about growing up, celebrating the holiday, the community feel to it, and the special foods we ate.
Ben: You mentioned that you ate goat. Is that right?
AGR: Well, our family didn't. That’s the sort of traditional fare you're supposed to have: a red drink, goat, and you know, the traditional kind of Southern fare. when I was a little kid, we had tamales. You don't think of Southern fare as including that, but it does in Texas.
Red is supposed to symbolize the blood of people who suffered. I don't know if that was something that was made up afterward, but the drink that people had at the time was hibiscus tea, which is red. We had soda water.
Ben: Oh right, you drank a lot of soda!
AGR: Yeah, less healthy than his biscuit tea, but it was red.
It was a community day, sort of like July 4th for Black people. We celebrated both holidays, but I knew that there was this historical aspect to Juneteenth. My great-grandmother was alive until I was about 11. She would talk a little bit about what a big day it was. Her mother was enslaved.
So it was a celebration for the kids, a time for us to drink too much soda and run around. But I knew that there was a serious thing attached to it.
Ben: On a concluding note, in the book, you mention this idea of historical paths not taken; the idea that everything was a choice made by someone. What motivates you to point that out?
AGR: Well, historians always say that nothing is inevitable. One of the purposes of history is, I think, to understand where we are, but I also think it’s to help us make better choices.
We could have continued in a world after slavery where Black people actually were brought into citizenship. We could have had the talents and the energy and full force of all members of society, and in the process, not kept the country from realizing its greatest potential.
So I want people to think about the choices they make. We talk about the past a lot, but we're not hostage to it. As a citizen, who has hopes for our present and hopes for our future—I have children and I want it to be a certain world for them—my hope is that we'll do better.
Ben: Mine is too. I appreciate your reminder to be cognizant of the choices you make. I certainly will be deeply considering which type of red drink to have on June 19th.
Thank you so much, Professor Gordon-Reed. It was such a pleasure having you.
AGR: Good luck to you and thank you for inviting me.
BTW, I’m pleased to report that Skipped History is now on:
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