Annette Gordon-Reed’s Personal History of Juneteenth


The publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019 pushed many Americans to reconsider what they assumed they knew about African American and, more generally, US history. The project, whose title refers to the importation of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619, sought to show how, in the introductory words of its special issue, “no aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.”

There were good reasons to start the project in 1619—many African Americans trace the beginnings of Black America to this moment—and to focus on Virginia, but it could have started earlier, too. The story of Africans in North America can, in fact, be traced as far back as 1526 and the creation of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony in what would become South Carolina—a colony that was likely destroyed by a mutiny of the colonists and a slave revolt. More than 140 years later, the colony of Carolina would be founded by English settlers from Barbados who hoped to create a settlement purely for the purpose of plantation slavery.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book, On Juneteenth, considers another set of bifurcating paths in African American history—this time in her home state of Texas, where both her own history and that of Juneteenth began. Texas, she argues, provides a key to the history of Africans in North America, and, coupled with the rapidly popularized holiday of Juneteenth, offers a different perspective from the one to which most Americans are accustomed. For her, the history of Black Texas, in fact, allows one to tell the larger history of Black America. “The history of Juneteenth,” she writes, “which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any [other] state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.”

This is a bold statement. Others might alternately cite the Low Country of South Carolina or the Mississippi Delta or the South Side of Chicago. Yet Gordon-
Reed’s contention, by the end of her book, proves hard to dismiss. By using the history of Black Texas, she is also able to tell the story of Black America, and by doing so, she places Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans at the forefront of US history. If nothing else, she shifts its focus away from the East Coast origin stories of Jamestown and Plymouth and toward the West. Everything is bigger in Texas, and in the hands of 
Gordon-Reed, the history of Texas becomes large enough to encompass the fullness of the American story.

Gordon-Reed has spent her career studying the majestic and often confounding contradictions of American life and how we memorialize them. Her two best-known works—1997’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and 2008’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family—told the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was forcibly involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

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