I remember one time a history teacher who was talking about George Washington said to the class, 'Wouldn't it be great to live in those times?” And I said, 'No, because if I lived in that time, I would be a slave.' Teachers mostly didn’t want to acknowledge slavery, but there was also a discomfort about the topic among Black students, because you never knew what people were going to say, how we were going to be portrayed. So you were a historian even way back then! Yet in the book you write that slavery wasn’t something that was fully taught in school. And then there were all these series that we had-on Martha and George Washington, on George Washington Carver, and, Frederick Douglass. And then in the third grade I read a children’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, that he’d written the Declaration of Independence but was also a slaveholder. What is the first book you remember really having an impact on you?Ī children’s book about Egypt and the pyramids awakened my interest in history. The teachers were wonderful but they didn't have to take any extra effort with me at all, because I took to it very, very quickly and easily. I was a very good student and loved reading and learning and so forth. I made it easy for them in the sense that my mother had prepared me. Yes, I was essentially integrating the school. You were attending an all-white school because your parents thought that’s where you would be offered the best opportunities. In truth, it often requires the opposite.

About the difficulties of Texas: Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affection. In other words, Texas is where my mother’s boundless dreams for me took flight. Tull, who had been a professional classical pianist. It’s where my father drove me thirty-five miles to Huntsville, at my mother’s behest, for piano lessons with Mrs.

It’s where I rode back and forth between Conroe and Livingston to visit my grandparents, aunts, and cousins. It’s where I lived with my father, mother, and brothers. Texas is where my first family and connections were. They were confident that their alliance with other Southern states during the Civil War would solidify their position and enable them to remain a “slave society.” But two years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and two and a half months after Lincoln was assassinated, Major General Gordon Granger brought the news on June 19, 1865, that that effort had not succeeded.Īnd yet abstract notions of places-of Texas-for me, at least, don’t capture why places are worthy of love.

It was a slave-based economy, and Anglo-Texans had been fighting for their “way of life” since the 1820s. The History Behind Traditional Juneteenth Foodsīut, the state has not historically been at all progressive in terms of racial politics.The True Meaning of the Juneteenth Flag, Explained.

Annette gordon reed on juneteenth