TX Observer: “This past summer, celebrating Juneteenth at home in Texas made me feel as though I was at the center of the world. I was used to spending the holiday, which celebrates the announcement of the end of legal slavery in Texas, gathering with my church in Houston, being chastised by my mother to fix her a plate, and dancing in the company of people who’d known me since my christening. I never bothered explaining to folks from college what the holiday was—it was our thing. After the police murder of Houston’s own George Floyd, who grew up in the Third Ward, where my church is, Juneteenth was catapulted into the national consciousness and Texas along with it. I shouldn’t be surprised; this nation rarely celebrates the bounty and abundance of Black life, save for when Black people are thrust into a position of precarity.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed offers a historical primer on the conditions that made Juneteenth a holiday and its importance to the nation. In six short essays, she combines first-person storytelling about her family in Texas, whose roots date back to the early 19th century, alongside historical narrative and analysis. Her purpose is clear: “The essays that follow do not strive to present a chronological narrative of the place where Juneteenth was born. They are, instead, designed to provide a context for an event that has become increasingly important in the life of the American nation.” The slim 140-page volume is almost like a pocket constitution, and I could see it having a life in classrooms as well as in the hands of lay readers of history.
As this summer showed us, Texas has long claimed a strange place in the history of the United States. Since the years before the Civil War, the South has held the racial anxieties of the entire country, serving as a convenient scapegoat for white Northern liberals to exonerate themselves of blame for the country’s racist origins. “The history of Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed writes, “shows that Texas, more than any state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the United States of America. That fact has been obscured by broad caricatures of the state and its people, caricatures that Texans themselves helped to create and helped make the state seem exotic, almost foreign to the rest of the Union.””