On Juneteenth

In Chapters 5 and 6, Gordon-Reed reiterates her earlier points about the centrality of slavery and white supremacy to the development of Texas and white Texans’ sense of who they were/are as a people. Again, she points out the role of origin stories and myths in fostering white people’s particular conception of themselves. However, by illuminating the perspectives, experiences, and involvement of people of color in the region’s development, she draws attention to a more complex and inclusive understanding of what it means to be Texan, countering the dominant understanding that makes Texas synonymous with whiteness. Juneteenth, then, is a prime example of these complexities and varied experiences coming together to offer a more comprehensive portrayal of Texas and its people. 

Gordon-Reed begins Chapter 5 by quoting W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, where Du Bois espouses his philosophy of double consciousness. Double consciousness is the idea that Black people in the United States face a certain twoness in their understanding of themselves because “Blackness” and “Americanness” have been constructed in opposition to one another. That is, the idea of “Americanness” has been constructed as a synonym for “whiteness,” and “whiteness” has been constructed in opposition to “Blackness.” Thus, Black people have been faced with the doubleness because, as Gordon-Reed writes:

Almost from the very beginning of their time in North America, Blacks have shown their deep and patriotic attachment to the country they helped to build, even as they have been utterly realistic about the way many of their fellow countrymen viewed them. Persisting in the face of that reality has been a struggle for centuries (98).

Black Texans face the same dilemma regarding Texas. As is the case with the US generally, white people have cultivated an image of Texas that makes it synonymous with whiteness. This calls back to Chapter 1 where Gordon-Reed discusses the archetypal images of Texas in the public imagination, the Cowboy, the Rancher, and the Oilmen—all white men. However, as Gordon-Reed demonstrates, the idea of Texas being synonymous with whiteness has actual historical antecedents in the region’s development as a republic. Again, the centrality of white supremacy and slavery to the development of Texas is significant here. Gordon-Reed includes sections from the Texas Constitution revealing the republic’s founders were deeply concerned with race and intended to welcome only white people as citizens. For example, Section 6 of the Texas Constitution specifies that “all free white persons” (105) are entitled to citizenship and rights. Section 9 communicates that all people of color who were enslaved prior to emigration to Texas would remain enslaved in Texas and not even Congress or slaveholders could emancipate enslaved people unless they intended to send them away from the republic. This section then further clarifies that no free people of African descent would be allowed to remain in the republic (105-06). Section 10 explicitly states that no Africans, descendants of Africans, or Indigenous people would be granted Texas citizenship or rights (106).

With these sections, the intention for Texas to be a white republic was made clear, and the only space for Black people was in positions of servitude. Furthermore, although Texas modeled its Declaration of Independence after Jefferson’s American Declaration of Independence, the Texas framers explicitly left out the language of “all men are created equal” (105) because there was no space for equality in the Republic of Texas. This basis of inequality, then, becomes a major problem for white Texans following their defeat in the Civil War and the issuance of General Order No. 3 by General Gordon Granger. As Gordon-Reed explains about the language of equality found in General Order No. 3: 

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 (127-28).

Thus, what is demonstrated here is a deep concern with racial power, specifically a racial hierarchy in which white Texans are at the top. Their sense of whiteness and Texas-ness is constructed in opposition to and dependent upon enslaved Black people. The centrality of white supremacy and slavery to this constructed image, however, is obscured, because of the ways white people need to see themselves in the present to evade guilt and accountability for past atrocities. Gordon-Reed points out the irony in the hesitance to acknowledge this centrality:

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 textbooks that Americans used in their school social studies and history class. 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 (107).

Therefore, origin stories, myths, and legends come into play here, and the construction of these sanitized narratives are not only deliberate, but also happen through the concerted efforts of white people to adopt partly or wholly fictionalized narratives of historical events to preserve a particular (white) perspective that serves white people in the present. Dominant interpretations of The Alamo and the Reconstruction Era provide two examples of this concerted effort. 

Regarding dominant interpretations of the Alamo, which young Texans learn about even prior to having a Texas history class in the 4th grade, Gordon-Reed explains that the purpose of the narrative is to communicate that “the men who fought and died at the Alamo did so for a noble cause […] This was part of the war for Texas independence, which was an unquestionably good thing” (103-04). In effect, this heroic narrative “appear[s] to be an easy way to knit groups of people into a community” (108), particularly white Texans. Furthermore, it absolves the Texas revolutionaries of the violence committed against Indigenous and Mexican people to gain control of the region. On another but related note, a dominant interpretation of the Reconstruction Era, the Dunning School interpretation, holds that the expectation of Black equality was too radical for the time and that white Southerners were correct in trying to regain control of society by maintaining the racial hierarchy (129-30). This interpretation, then, dignifies the violent response of white people to emancipation and efforts at Black advancement. 

Thus, what these narratives of the Alamo and Reconstruction share is a disregard for the presence, experiences, and perspectives of people of color, which sometimes counterpose the motives and ideas of white people who were influential in Texas’s history and which refute the idea that “Texan” is equivalent to “white person.” Even when the presence of people of color is acknowledged, it is done so in a way that is still self-serving for white people. For example, Gordon-Reed notes that the story of Emily West, also known as the “Yellow Rose of Texas,” comes with the question of “what work is this story doing?” (114). She considers several possibilities including to convey “a man of European origin brought low by his attraction to a non-White woman” (114); “to suggest the innate degeneracy of Texas’s great foe, and all Mexicans” (114); and to perpetuate the “stereotype about African American women […] suggest[ing] her natural licentiousness” (114). Gordon-Reed also points out that being a woman of color means West would not have even been accepted as a citizen of the Republic of Texas, so she questions what loyalty West would have had to the Texas Revolution and revolutionaries (114). In considering these possibilities, Gordon-Reed demonstrates that an accurate analysis of history requires questioning the motives of the historical narrative. 

However, such questioning often interferes with people’s tendency to idolize the historical figures who become folk heroes and legends. Nonetheless, “the attempt to recognize and grapple with the humanity and, thus, the fallibility of people in the past—and present—must be made” (110). Therefore, figures like Jim Bowie and William Barret Travis, and indeed all of the figures who are celebrated as “Founding Fathers” and heroes in US history, must be regarded with a more realistic and rounded understanding. The reality is that most, if not all, of these men were slave owners and were imbued with the racial thinking of their times. Therefore, not only were enslaved people present during the significant moments that become a part of the historical archive, but disregarding their presence accomplishes nothing more than absolving white people of their guilt about the fact that slavery did in fact happen and was integral to the development of not only Texas but also the United States as a whole. People in the present learning and studying history, and sometimes clinging to certain historical narratives for their own edification, must grapple with the complexities of the varied experiences and interactions among different sectors of society, as “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 people of color who occupied the same space and time with them” (115-16).

Turning to a holiday like Juneteenth and its historical context, particularly the Reconstruction Era, highlights these complex interactions and wrests everyone from monolithic and simplified notions of whiteness, Blackness, Texas-ness, Americanness, etc. For example, regarding the end of the Civil War, the issuance of General Order No. 3, and the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, those studying history with a more accurate analytical framework can recognize that alongside the reality that “Whites in Texas were incensed by what had transpired, so much so that some reacted violently to Blacks’ displays at joy at emancipation” (125), there also existed General Oliver Howard, Brigadier General Edgar M. Gregory, and others working to help the formerly enslaved transition into a life of freedom. There was also interracial cooperation, as George Ruby, a Black man, was commissioned by the Freedmen’s Bureau to head the Bureau’s school system (132). Furthermore, among Black people themselves, it was not so simple as unfettered support for anyone Black. While Norris Wright Cuney was celebrated for his political accomplishments in the Republican Party, he also faced some opposition and criticism from Black people who found his political action insufficient for supporting Black labor unionists and strikers (133). 

In addition, there is recognition of how Black people themselves perceived and understood the promise of freedom and equality. In other words:

It was not just the reaction of White Texans that mattered. The idea that the society that oppressed them might be transformed into one based upon equality influenced Black Texans in much the same way that the Declaration of Independence influenced Blacks in the early American Republic […] Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves (128). 

Here, Gordon-Reed points to a significant problem with the interpretation of history—that it is primarily the perspectives of white people that are considered the most and presented as “ostensibly neutral and factual narrative” (130). This recalls Gordon-Reed’s discussion in Chapter 2 where alternative narratives about Winters and White existed among Black people, countering the “official records” of what transpired to prompt them being murdered by the white community. Again, the perspectives and reactions of white people, particularly white Southerners, are not the entire story of Texas, the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, or even the history of the United States as a whole. 

In fact, what Juneteenth demonstrates is more variance and complex interaction in Texas and US history. Gordon-Reed mentions the contrast between the 4th of July and Juneteenth. Considering what the 4th of July commemorates—American Independence premised on notions of equality of freedom—begs the question of what Black Americans have to celebrate when their ancestors were still subject to chattel slavery at that time. For many Black people in the United States, as Gordon-Reed notes regarding her own kin in Texas, the 4th of July is met with a certain ambivalence, interpreted as “a day off to be with relatives and friends” (135), if not protested outright. Juneteenth, on the other hand, holds a more personal and substantive significance for Black people. As Gordon-Reed notes, “For my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and relatives in their generation, this was the celebration of the freedom of people they had actually known” (135). Even the ritual involved in the celebration says so much more about the complexity of the Texas region and American history than the 4th of July ever could. On the addition of hot tamales to the traditional Juneteenth menu, Gordon-Reed writes:

This ritual was fitting, and so very Texan. People of African descent, and to be honest, of some European descent, celebrating the end of slavery in Texas with dishes learned in slavery and a dish favored by ancient Mesoamerican Indians that connected Texas to its Mexican past; so much Texas history brought together for this one special day (137). 

Thus, Gordon-Reed’s analysis of Juneteenth and her discussion of Texas’s development, as well as both of their connections to a broader US history, demonstrate the value of acknowledging the multiple perspectives and experiences of history’s actors, including their full humanity and the complexity that being human involves. Simplified narratives constructed by those who are considered victors and who maintain certain contemporary privileges diminish the richness of the past and present and impede the ability to move into a future closer to the ideals the US would like to believe itself founded upon. The remedy, then, is not taking dominant narratives at face value and questioning the motives and subtexts of that presented as unbiased and completely factual. In the exploration and analysis of history and the unearthing of perspectives and experiences that have been left out of “official records,” historians like Gordon-Reed can find notions of identity and a sense of belonging are ever-changing and complex:

Thinking of past events, and people who lived long ago, and observing the process of change over time satisfies my deep interest in the past on its own terms, though I am interested in the legacies of the past. I don’t feel hostage to others’ conceptions of what Texas should mean to me, or accept that Texas “belongs” exclusively to any group of people who lived, or live, there. Being a Black person and a Texan, then, are not in opposition (117). 

In conclusion, On Juneteenth, and particularly Chapters 5 and 6, illuminates a more inclusive understanding of Texan and American history and identity.