On Juneteenth

The preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 establish the centrality of slavery and white supremacy in Texas’s history and the public imagination about Texas, both among white Texans themselves and the rest of America. Gordon-Reed’s experience as a Black person and her understanding as a historian illuminate and foreground the threads and complexities of the region’s development. Thus, these chapters set the tone for Gordon-Reed’s later discussion about the roles people of color have played in Texas’s past and present. 

In the preface, Gordon-Reed writes:

Significantly, my wide-ranging approach to Juneteenth reveals that behind all the broad stereotypes about Texas is a story of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is an American story, told from this most American place (14).

With this assertion, Gordon-Reed makes clear she aims to complicate dominant historical narratives, myths, and legends that have obscured the complexity of Texas’s history and the experiences of people of color who have been integral to Texas’s development. Like the US, Texas has been shrouded in a myth of exceptionalism, which Gordon-Reed acknowledges in the preface. Her initial annoyance that this holiday was becoming a national celebration was due to her sense of Texas’s exceptionalism (12). This shared sense of exceptionalism between Texas and the US also makes Texas a prime region of historical study because, as Gordon-Reed says in Chapter 1, “All the major currents of American history flow through Texas” (29). That is, Texas, like the Early American Republic, involves place, space, and time “when triumph and tragedy were inexorably intertwined” (29). Just as dominant narratives of the US’s history de-emphasize the centrality of slavery, interaction and conflict with as well as subjugation of Indigenous Americans, and the role of other non-Anglo Europeans and independent nations in the country’s development, so too do the narratives that dominate in Texas’s history. Thus, On Juneteenth, while specific to the region of Texas, is really a broader story about the US, as “Texas, more than any state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America” (13).

One major aspect of the story is the integral role of slavery, undergirded by white supremacist and racist sentiment, to the region’s development in its early days prior to nationhood or statehood, as an independent republic, as a US state, as a Confederate state, and even after the institution of slavery was legally abolished. While the region still belonged to the newly independent Mexico, the development of Texas relied on slave labor. The “Father of Texas,” Stephen F. Austin, “came to Texas […] to turn huge swaths of the Mexican province Coahuila y Tejas into a western version of the cotton fields of Mississippi that had produced such great wealth for plantation owners” (23). Although this endeavor required and involved allowance by the Mexican government, the Texas Revolution that ultimately came to be in 1836 was a direct response to the Mexican government’s “nod toward ending slavery, while the Anglos and their supporters kept resisting” (24). Furthermore, the Republic of Texas, located between two nations with growing antislavery sentiment, decided to annex to the United States to decrease this vulnerability to antislavery sentiment (24). In addition, as that antislavery sentiment grew in the United States leading to the American Civil War, Texas allied with other Confederate states who were interested in preserving their “way of life” (25), i.e., reliance on slave labor. 

Thus, the institution of slavery is integral to Texas’s development in all its iterations. However, such centrality has been obscured. As Gordon-Reed explains in Chapter 1:

But if slavery was mentioned in the early days of my education, it didn’t figure prominently enough in our lessons to give us a clear and complete picture of the role the institution played in the state’s early development, its days as a Republic, its entry into the Union, and its role in the Civil War and its aftermath (26). 

Instead, what is emphasized in dominant historical narratives are states’ rights and resistance to strong federal authority (26). Gordon-Reed illustrates that although concerns about a strong central government may have been legitimate and influential factors, they exist alongside the central role and legacy of the institution of slavery in the development of Texas and white Texans’ sense of themselves. The evidence lies in white Texans’ response to the abolition of the institution and any perceived losses of power and control for white people thereafter. As she discusses in Chapter 2, weaving personal memoir with broader historical events for context:

Texans who had enslaved Blacks and been defeated in the Civil War turned on the freed people with a vengeance, seeking to maintain the control they had during slavery. Along with Jim Crow, one of the chief means of doing this was extra-legal violence. Private citizens, along with law enforcement, either directly or by looking the other way, often resorted to this mechanism of control (33-34). 

Not only does this passage imply it was a concerted effort on the part of white people to maintain Black subjugation, but it also demonstrates this effort was a direct legacy of slavery. White Texans had no sense of themselves without Black people to control and subjugate. Therefore, almost a century after the end of slavery, Black people still faced the wrath of white people, who defined their sense of self against that of the Black subject. Efforts at equality by Black people, legalized by the federal courts, were perceived as losses of power. Thus, de facto subjugation of Black people remained in place even as legal codes changed to rectify the injustices of slavery and white supremacy. Regarding school integration following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, as well as the 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia that struck down Freedom of Choice and prompted the integration of all Conroe, Texas schools, Gordon-Reed writes:

I knew what was happening with me, and with other Black children, was a matter of law, which I understood broadly as the rules of what could be done in society and what could not be done. I also knew that law wasn’t the only thing. 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 (42). 

What was to be maintained in the face of the legal changes were the intangible benefits of whiteness, predicated on institutionalized inequality, or so it was believed. With the dismantling of de jure inequality, white people “felt the balance of power was shifting in society” (45), so the white storeowner from the 1960s, who Gordon-Reed recalls in Chapter 2, “had much to lose. Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable” (45). Here, Gordon-Reed brings in a class component, demonstrating the connection between the material and immaterial advantages of whiteness, the immaterial being bolstered by the material. After all, Stephen F. Austin’s vision was the creation of Anglo-American wealth via the slave plantation. The storeowner, then, perceives, albeit incorrectly, that because he is not a wealthy “southern grandee” (45), the immaterial advantages of whiteness are even more at stake if Black people’s condition improves by way of legal code. What is to stop him from becoming lower on the social scale than, perhaps, a Black person who manages to become wealthy because the legal code has granted an avenue toward that wealth by leveling, in some ways, the playing field?

In addition to class, there is also an element of patriarchy that interacts with white supremacist domination, and it becomes clear in the way white men in particular use patriarchal power to reinforce Black subjugation to maintain a sense of power over Black people, as slavery had institutionalized for them. For Gordon-Reed, “Patriarchy, which is not only about the subjugation of women but about competition between males, is so central to this story” (46). She expands on this point in Chapter 2. White men’s responses to the end of slavery and changing legal codes that offered de facto equality often involved grotesque and public displays of violence toward Black men, particularly those who were in interracial relationships with white women. 

For example, a Black man, Joe Winters, was burned alive at a courthouse square in 1922 after he was accused of raping a teenaged girl (34). Then, in 1940, the case of Texas v. White centered on a Black man, Bob White, who was accused of raping a white woman named Ruby Cochran. White was beaten into a confession, and after the Supreme Court ruled the coerced confession was a violation of due process, Cochran’s husband murdered white in an open courtroom (36). The husband was acquitted by an all-white jury after two minutes of deliberation (36). As Gordon-Reed explains, it was well-known among the Black community these were not matters of rape but rather consensual relationships between Black men and white women. When the white women were found out, they succumbed to white supremacist and patriarchal pressures and were coerced into alleging rape because “the taboo against interracial sex between Black men and White women” (38) was so strong “that a White woman found to have welcomed the advancements of a Black man would likely be banished from her family and White society, if not subjected to violence” (38). 

Winters’s and White’s stories are pointed demonstrations of not only white supremacy and patriarchy interacting but also that such a particular interaction is a legacy of slavery:

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 (46). 

Thus, even in the 1970s, a Black man would still be murdered for an interracial relationship with a white woman, as was the case with 18-year-old Gregory Steele, who was murdered by a police officer. The police officer was a friend of the father of the white girl Steele was secretly dating (53). The unmitigated violence is an attempt to maintain white supremacist control, and such control cannot be discussed without recognizing its antecedents in the institution of slavery. 

For these reasons, the neat historical (and largely mythological) narratives of Texas and Texans are incomplete. They diminish not only the complexity of the region, but also the experiences and contributions of all actors who were involved, who were not just white Anglo-Americans as dominant narratives have emphasized. To understand the complexity and the contingency of history, those whose voices have been written out of the narrative must be brought back into it. Gordon-Reed’s point is that while the inclusion of these voices does indeed complicate the sanitized and limited versions of history, it is “a sign of maturity” (29) that “broaden[s] our understanding of who we were and who we are now” (29). The preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 drive this point in preparation for the inclusion that comes in later chapters.