On June 19, 1865, enslaved people were finally freed in Texas – a day of joy that would become known and celebrated in Black communities as Juneteenth. While the day became a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth's expansion is one indication of the ways Black memory and the commemoration of Black freedom is championed. In this special presentation, we look at the roots of the holiday, what has endured – and changed – and some of the ways Juneteenth is exploited. We also hear from you, our listeners, about your stories of celebration, liberation and community.
Farai Chideya [00:00:02] This is Our Body Politic. I'm the creator and host Farai Chideya. Juneteenth is a summer tradition of joy in Black communities based on the day that enslaved people were finally freed in Texas on June 19th, 1865. That was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. While the day became a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth’s expansion is one indication of the ways that Black memory and the commemoration of Black freedom is championed. In this special presentation, we look at the roots of the holiday, what has endured and changed, and some of the ways that Juneteenth is exploited. We also hear from you, our listeners, about your stories of liberation and community. We talk first with Dr. Andrea Roberts, associate professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. She's also founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project and a sixth generation Texan. Welcome to the show, Dr. Roberts.
Dr. Andrea Roberts - Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya - So Juneteenth marks a moment in time, and when we celebrate June 19th, 1865. What happened that day? What are we actually celebrating?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:01:14] So what we're celebrating is the arrival of General Gordon Granger reading something called order number three, which informed African-Americans present about the end of enslavement, but more accurately, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Farai Chideya [00:01:33] There's this narrative that this general order declares all slaves are free, and then folks magically head off to be free. But there is a bit more to the order. So talk to me about parts that don't make it into the public narrative.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:01:46] Sure. It's important to actually read the order because what it essentially says is that you now have the right to negotiate your labor and you're asked to remain where you are and remain orderly. Right. But there's nothing about the rest of the rights that you would associate with actually being a citizen of the United States, like voting or buying land or there's nothing that says you are afforded all the rights and responsibilities and privileges of citizenship. That's what didn't happen.
Farai Chideya [00:02:18] Yeah. That was obviously deliberately crafted language around the labor of African-Americans being valuable to the state of Texas and the United States.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:02:30] Absolutely.
Farai Chideya [00:02:31] So looking at history now through that lens, how do you think that trickled into what was the beginning of freedom for Texans who were being liberated more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:02:44] What we saw directly after the announcement was first concurrent announcements happening in different states that were much later also in getting the news. But what we see is constant challenges to the rights over our bodies as African-Americans and our labor. Mm hmm. And let's not forget that the 13th Amendment, which wasn't ratified in Texas until 1870, still stipulates that you can be incarcerated. That's the one exception around being held in enslavement, which kind of concedes that when we talk about the prison industrial complex, when we talk about mass incarceration, we are looking at a continuation of enslavement.
Farai Chideya [00:03:35] Yeah. Let's get a little more personal with you. You are a sixth generation Black Texan, and we are going to go back to the history, of course.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:03:43] Sure.
Farai Chideya [00:03:44] But the history of the West has often been whitewashed. What are your specific roots in Texas?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:03:50] Well, the way that I talk about my roots and Texas is very much before I was in my thirties and after my thirties, before my thirties, I had a consciousness of very much being a Texan of going and enjoying Juneteenth at the Miller Outdoor Theater in Houston. I grew up in the Houston metro area. I was born in Sugar Land and my memories and understanding of what it meant to be a Texan were just about, This is where I go to see Grandma. She happens to live in this community and I don't know quite why. It seems to be off the grid in certain ways. She has a chicken farm in the middle of the city, and I'm not understanding exactly why this cemetery doesn't look like the manicured cemeteries that I see most people are being buried in. So you're noticing, but not noticing. But once I begin to lose family members, I begin to dive into my own family story. And that took me to my family's cemetery in a community called Fifth Street. And once I delved into and begin to understand who exactly was buried there. I wanted to know the name of the cemetery. I learned it was called the Farmers Improvement Society Cemetery. I want to know what the heck was that? Because I just knew it was the Fifth Street Cemetery. And that led me down a road of learning about rural mutual aid, self-insurance. And that led me into trying to understand the communities that fostered that. And those communities were founded directly after emancipation. So there is this whole kind of hidden infrastructure that I became aware of and became pretty obsessed with learning more about.
Farai Chideya [00:05:45] And were these the freedom colonies?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:05:47] Exactly.
Farai Chideya [00:05:48] Can you explain it to me?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:05:49] Sure. So we might be familiar with places like Rosewood or Eatonville or Nicodemus, Kansas. And what's significant about those African-American places is they were founded platted. They have an organized mayor. However, freedom colonies and they're known by so many names, so freedom colonies or Black settlements there are freedmen settlements are all the same thing. But what's significant about these founded in Texas between 1865 and 1930 is that they were founded really around adverse possession of land, what we also call squatting. There was no grant 40 acres and mule. So these are places mostly in flood prone areas or land that African-Americans learned to make use of, and they created them and named them around institutions such as the church, of the schools, a local landscape feature or around the leader who may have led them to this area to found the community. And so it's those stories about the founding of these places, the names and how people defined these places around these names that we don't see on maps that have led me to commit my life to telling the stories of freedom colonies as being intentional Black communities where African-Americans are trying to territorial freedom in a way that they can't in other ways, in other spaces in society.
Farai Chideya [00:07:30] And you founded the Texas Freedom Colonies Project in 2014. So what does that work entail?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:07:37] Yeah, back in 2014, it was really me developing relationships and spending time in deep East Texas, which is Jasper and Newton Counties, two counties on the way to Louisiana. And I was invited out there in 2014 to attend a heritage festival in a place called Shankleville Community. And so the Texas Freedom College project really emerges out of the relationships I built with folks in Shankleville, as well as the surrounding freedom colonies in that region. And after conducting oral history interviews, documenting the rituals and the commemorative celebrations that brought the diaspora of descendants from all over back to those places, I became really interested in learning how they were leveraging oral tradition to mobilize the diaspora to return, and then to actually achieve planning and preservation goals. That's stewardship of their cemeteries, that’s homestead preservation and rehabilitation. That's land reassembly and prevention of losing land through air property. So I saw all of these best practices that manifested out of these commemorative acts, this storytelling. And so as an urban planner, what I've really committed to is really bridge the world of storytelling and memory and commemoration and bridge that to preservation and planning, which is very much about structures and land use and what happens to communities and decision making in communities. So our work is that education, it's the propagating our map, it's serving and it's training descendent communities to do this work themselves, to learn to secure these stories. And then teaching students, future master of planning and architecture students, to do the work differently. So that's a big mission of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, too, is getting these students to do the work differently.
Farai Chideya [00:10:00] And I will say that the URL is TheTexasFreedomColonies Project.com and folks can find it there. I have to say that when you mention deep East Texas and you mention Jasper, the first thing that popped into my mind as a longtime journalist is the murder of James Byrd Jr, who was lynched by white supremacists, dragged behind a vehicle. What is deep East Texas like for Black people now? I mean, just because racial incidents happen everywhere, I make no assumptions that they happen more in that area. But what is it like now?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:10:34] So really what we have and what it is to be an African-American is to hold two things at once, right? Yes. The contradictions. And so what it is to live in deep East Texas is to have the dragging death sadly, grandly overshadow the history and the persistence of African American placemaking in that region. As I said, we look at Jasper and Newton County, which used to be one county together. There are 34 freedom colonies in the deep East Texas woods. If anyone would have told me that, I would be driving from Austin, Texas, I was a doctoral student at UT Austin, and drive the 5 hours into the woods as a Black woman by myself and that I've been doing that for years. I would say that you are crazy. And what I found, though, is ways that people were creating these very free, secure places, but very aware that they were territorializing that out of communities in areas that were predominantly white, that had predominantly white leadership. But what we have now is a return predominantly among the baby boomer generation… are coming back to these communities to engage in these preservation projects, to stay part time, to stay full time. And that's really, the book I'm working on, is really about that story of what precipitates the return, why people return and what is it the work they're doing to make sure these are seen as active, alive, real places.
Farai Chideya [00:12:17] Can you give us an example of one family or one community that you've researched, you know? You've given us a really great overview of this quest to return and preserve and champion. What would a story be like for one family?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:12:33] So I would mention Shankleville Community, their foundational stories. When two enslaved Africans were separated, one was sold away to a master in Texas, and the other swam three great rivers to reunite with his love and met her at a spring. And the spring is located in what is today Shankleville, named after those two enslaved Africans, Winnie and Jim Shankle. So that is why it's called Shankleville. And there are several other families there, the McBride's and Odom's and the Clays, who are the descendants of those two enslaved Africans and their creative way of propagating that story at annual homecomings, the return literally to the spring to drink of the water at the spring and reenact that story is all very moving. But it also is what led to it being the site that draws people during an annual festival. It's a Foodways festival that happens every year in Shanksville. June 24th, actually. And they're inviting the larger community, not just descendents, to learn about the foodways, about the home that is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a humble house that was built by these descendants of Winnie and Jim Shankle in the 1920s.
Farai Chideya [00:13:57] That's a beautiful story.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:13:58] Yeah, it's compelling, but it also has real worlds, practical ways of working. And that's what I've done since, is really explore all the ways that hundreds of these communities are using and searching for their stories and using that to facilitate return and reinvestment in these places. And now we're up to some 489 places and stories in Texas alone.
Farai Chideya [00:14:27] So how do you see young people reacting to this history or being engaged with this history?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:14:32] What I'm beginning to see predominantly among, I'd say, millennials and Generation X is an interest in bringing an artistic interpretation to these places in these stories in order to have them integrate with or be in conversation with current day issues. So the way that's happening is films. People are making short films or making documentaries, they are developing new events. So in Shanksville, one of the events that they developed was a scholarship competition. And so they are to talk about the values of Jim. And when he schenkel, a different value is selected every year and the descendants are urged to come out to Texas and the Argosy, which says a lot, but one of the incentives is scholarship money. So we're seeing one people becoming more creative about getting people to come back to these very old decades old celebrations, but also creating new celebrations and really looking at new multimedia ways to bring the freedom colony innovation of our ancestors in conversation with our discussion on things like Black Futures.
Farai Chideya [00:15:52] Yeah, that's really exciting. So you have been working on a book Never Sell the Land. Great title. Tell me more about that.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:16:00] Yeah. So one of the things that I heard, if not exactly in those words, close to those words, it was a frequent refrain of never sell the land. And so what happens very often with African-American communities is the loss of land ownership through several different means, but one of which is simply being asked to sell because this has become very valuable land… used to be rural and now it's in high demand. The other is not having estate planning and not having each of the parts of the land subdivided so that when the ancestors pass away, there's a clear transfer. And so the never sell the land is really a refrain about the settlement pattern, the never selling, not just the land to another owner, but retaining the purpose, retaining the spirit of the land, and really about preserving the landscape. There's a real kind of holism to the ways that people think about these places. And so the book Never Sell the Land is again about the repertoire of strategies that are used. But it's also about those exciting freedom colony origin stories that keep people coming back, that keep them committed and that really shape their identity.
Farai Chideya [00:17:29] Yeah. So let me just end on a note of joy and celebration, which is that Juneteenth is now a federal holiday and some people have mixed feelings about it being appropriated by the whole country. But let's talk about how your family celebrates Juneteenth. What do you remember from childhood and how do you celebrate now?
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:17:49] Well, it's funny. I wouldn't say we boycotted the 4th of July. Right? Any day off is a good day. Right. Right. Another excuse to barbecue, but it was our 4th of July. It was what we call red soda water. It was big red. It was watermelon. But mostly it was the barbecue, the potato salad, it was going to, as I mentioned before, Miller outdoor theater where you would go see blues artists, you would go see musical artists, you'd see people come out, bring their bikes or bikers, African-American bike clubs. You would see out. You would see people riding their horses, which yes, I know you see Beyoncé and you see those videos and you think, Oh, that's so cute. No, they ride horses. They ride horses they own and they have riding clubs. And so during these celebrations or rally celebrations, those are the type of activities people are engaged in and also in the larger cities. They're parades. There's African owned park grounds where people are gathering and eating and playing music. But it's really a day where we're showing ourselves to ourselves and we're somewhat free of the white gaze in that there's nothing about this that is referencing or performing for, or projecting something for white folks or for employers for that matter. It's about owning oneself, one's own labor, one's own time, and leaning into the restful aspects of that, and the joyous aspects of that. So that's also brought me to a mixed feeling around the fact that it's federal. Yes, I want to know about Juneteenth, but it is by no means the freedom date. It's something we fashioned as such, which we should be commended for, But we have a long way to go. And so we are really excited in Texas about that, about the fact that it's a federal holiday. But I also think that there needs to be some reality checks around our current conditions and what the state of things were and how easily we can slip back into some of those conditions if we're not careful.
Farai Chideya [00:20:09] Yeah. To see the past celebrate the victories and also point out that we have a long road yet to walk.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:20:16] Absolutely.
Farai Chideya [00:20:18] Well, Dr. Roberts, I'm so grateful for you taking time to give us more perspective on Texas, on Juneteenth, and on some of the challenges we face for the future, as well as the joys. Thank you.
Dr. Andrea Roberts [00:20:30] Thank you.
Farai Chideya [00:20:31] That was Dr. Andrea Roberts, associate professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project. You can find the project's map of historic Black settlements online at TheTexasFreedomColoniesProject.com.
We turn now from the history of Juneteenth to the present day and how corporations seek to profit from a holiday that's supposed to be about the emancipation and freedom of enslaved people. So how should corporations responsibly approach a holiday like Juneteenth? Should they focus not on the holiday, but the corporate practices that impact their Black employees and Black communities throughout the rest of the year? Here to unpack that with me is Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, editor of The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System. It came out in paperback on June 13th. Anna is also a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Anna, welcome.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman [00:21:30] Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Farai Chideya [00:21:33] And also with us is Amara Enyia, director of policy for the Movement for Black Lives. She's also the senior advisor to the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School. Amara, welcome to the show.
Amara Enyia [00:21:46] Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya [00:21:48] So, you know, I was flipping through the virtual pages looking at what Juneteenth sponsorship looked like. And last year, for example, Wal-Mart had ice cream with the Pan-African colors. And, you know, they just… they apologized for that. A museum had a watermelon salad for Juneteenth, and so there have been some, you know, relatively, you know, tone deaf moments in in corporate Juneteenth celebration. So, Amara, is it problematic for corporations to focus on Juneteenth or is it just about the execution? What's your thought on that?
Amara Enyia [00:22:31] Well, I think the underlying issue is the default commercialization of pretty much every holiday and just the latest being Juneteenth. And so we have to really look at the question of why it is that the only way to lean in to Juneteenth for corporations is to lead into commodifying what essentially is the pain of the Black people have endured in this country and a commemoration of a point in history that was critical for Black people. And so when you see these instances of colored ice cream and, you know, all the other things that corporations come up with. I think it just speaks to one of the lack of imagination, to the lack of accountability. And three, the problematic default of leading into commercialization and commodification, which is a product of capitalism that tends to be the norm.
Farai Chideya [00:23:25] So, Anna, sometimes Black people are marketed to in ways that other people are not. You think about, for example, menthol cigarettes some states have banned them. There's been a proposal of a federal ban because of the way that they were hyper marketed to Black people. And when you think about what Amara just said about, you know, commercialization being the route to commemorating everything in this society, what are some of the better options that we might be able to take a look at?
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman [00:23:59] Yeah, You know, this is a great question. And thank you again for having me here. I think a lot of it comes down to where are the Black people in the room and how are they informing the ways in which we not only, you know, market to Black people but include their voices in actually developing workplace policies that include Black people? Right. So a lot of the commodification of Juneteenth, as Amara has been talking about, is, in my opinion, a bit lazy, right? It's like, how can we talk like like what's the fastest thing we can look at that seems Black that can then be used to, you know, pump up our dollars or make us seem less racist. Right? And so you see this a lot with I mean, not maybe not this year, but like in the past year with Pride in June, where, you know, how can we integrate the rainbow symbol and emblem into our logo so that people know that we're doing the bare minimum, but like, you know, signaling that we still care a little bit, right? And so I think one of the biggest ways to do that is centering Black expertise. Right? Where are the Black experts in your organization? Are they concentrated at certain levels within the organization? And if they are, why is that the case? So really grappling with how Black voices are being integrated into the actual marketing of Black… to Black communities, but also thinking about how Black expertise is being kind of woven into the fabric of the company itself.
Farai Chideya [00:25:28] And your book, The Black Agenda, really gets to homegrown solutions from Black experts. You know, as you compiled The Black Agenda, what sorts of things came up as people looked at marketing and its impact on Black Americans if that came up?
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman [00:25:45] Yeah, I would say that specifically didn't come up. But I think the things that organizations are trying to address by marketing to Black people have come up, right? So I think a lot of times when, you know, organizations and corporations are trying to pander to Black communities, they're not really listening to Black communities. Right? And so one of the biggest gripes I have with the commodification of Juneteenth is that you have these organizations that are saying, you know, Black lives matter, you know, we care about Black people, we care about Black freedom, but then they're underpaying their Black employees, right? Or they're not pouring into Black communities. And so what they're purporting is not actually consistent with what is actually happening. And so that is kind of what the Black agenda speaks to, Right? There is a very lived reality that Black folks are experiencing here in the United States. And I would even be more specific and say Black Americans are facing here in the United States, that is not being grappled with seriously. And so you now have these sort of experts who are providing these solutions, but also providing the context for that lived reality. And so organizations that really want to do something about it can look at experts like the ones featured in the Black Agenda to start thinking about ways beyond just Afrocentric marketing to really help and uplift Black communities.
Farai Chideya [00:27:09] Amara,after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was a huge rush of corporate self-identification with the movements around justice and pledges to insert resources into communities that hadn't had them and to, you know, give away money. And it's been shown that some of those taps are just drip dripping rather than flowing. You know, a lot of those pledges didn't seem to be actually effectuated. And we also have a situation where Black people account for only 7% of managers. So where do you think corporate attention should be going on, not just on Juneteenth, but throughout the year?
Amara Enyia [00:27:57] Well, I think it's key that corporate attention lasts for more than a few weeks or a few months. I think they tend to move at the pace of the trends, what seems to be trendy or when the when the heat is on, if you will, that's when they're paying attention and putting in place all sorts of measures, some kind of pulled together very quickly in some instances without a level of thoughtfulness. And then months later or years a year later or years later, we find that the follow through on many of those pledges hasn't been what it what it what was promised. And so, in fact, there were millions upon millions of dollars pledged by corporations across the country. And when you analyzed how much has actually been disbursed, how much has actually been distributed, what has been the follow through? It has not been any kind of follow up in any form compared to what was proclaimed at the time. And this is for all institutions. It's for financial institutions that make commitments. We tell institutions that make commitments pretty much across the spectrum. So I think what there are a couple of tensions that we just have to be very honest about. One is the the tension between efforts around corporate social responsibility, if you will, and profit seeking. Right. So corporations will typically go to the extent of their bottom line. Once it begins to affect their bottom line we begin to see rollbacks or lack of follow through. And we can even look at some of the conversations that have happened this summer about Pride month and corporations seemingly pulling back some of the investments and proclamations around Pride, even the materials and products that they were putting forth and rolling that back. So that's even more recent. And so that tension will constantly be there. It's really important for corporations to, in my view, look within. You can't even tap into Black expertise if you don't have Black people in your company. So what does the culture and the climate of the company look like? What do promotion and retention practices look like. Alongside the uprisings around justice we saw a lot of corporations being challenged by Black people in their companies who said, Well, actually you're saying Black lives matter, but did the Black lives of your employees matter? And then. They were pointing to many practices that were actually exposed to sort of hypocrisy around what's being publicly proclaimed versus what's actually happening in the company. So we know that there's going to be tension between profit making and corporate social responsibility. But we also know that there's room for these corporations to live up to what they're saying in their very practices, in institutionalizing practices that actually value their Black employees and ensure that they have a place within that company. That's where they can start. Once you have that, perhaps we may see some follow through on some of the commitments that have been made over the last few years.
Farai Chideya [00:30:54] Anna first and then Amara, how do you think that you get that accountability? What are some tools or strategies to getting that?
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman [00:31:02] Yeah, I love everything Amara said. So shout out to you. I just love that answer a lot. It's so funny, this actually relates to my own research that I'm doing in my dissertation right now, so I'm really interested in those accountability measures. Right? And the reality is we don't actually have a lot of evidence of what would hold these corporations and organizational leaders accountable to Black people and our humanity, especially within the workplace. But I do believe it begins with really looking at the data. Right. What is going on with promotions? What is going on with retention? Are there ways in which we can incorporate observability, meaning, you know, individuals are kind of being observed when they're making evaluations of, you know, Black and brown employees to ensure that they're not biasing? Right. You know, there's a lot of talk about the use of AI right now. Is there a way that we can use AI to sort of measure the sentiment of some of these performance evaluations that are definitely used to promote or demote employees within the organization, right? And so I think those are like some really practical ways that we can start to think about it. I think the other thing, too, is that corporate social responsibility needs to go beyond what Mama was saying Black History Month or Juneteenth, right? Or Pride Month, right? There are several ways that these organizations can engage Black communities, right? The Black Agenda provides a couple. I know Amara's work also applies cleansing, right? And so I think doing things within the workplace that hold organizational leaders, managers accountable to their employees and to sort of the overall mission and values that these corporations or organizations claim to purport is one place to start. But I think also getting these organizations to be accountable to Black communities themselves. And I do think that begins a little bit with that. And I think putting that all on Black employees is a lot. But I also think that Black activists, organizers and folks outside of organizations can really rally together to get some of these issues addressed by multi-billion dollar corporations that are essentially lining the pockets of those who are the most powerful.
Farai Chideya [00:33:11] Amara, what do you think about ways to hold people accountable, corporations in particular?
Amara Enyia [00:33:16] Well, as as Anna mentioned, around just collecting data, I mean, you measure what you treasure. If you actually see the value in the numbers and the metrics for employee satisfaction, promotion, retention, etc., then you will actually measure that data and you'll be transparent about that data both internally and externally. So that's a critical place, I think, that companies can start. The other thing that I think is useful, however we feel about it is the public shaming, right? This is when companies respond, whether that is via using social media… I've seen many instances on Twitter, for example, where someone has an experience and then they tweet and then the company responds and then the issue is addressed. Right? Regardless of how we feel about social media or public shaming, it has proven to be an effective tool to shine light on these companies practices in ways that also lift some of that burden from the employees themselves, having to take that risk to try to call out their company for the practices in many instances at their own liability or at their own jobs if there is retaliation. So I think that public shaming component is really, really important because sometimes that is the only way that corporations feel compelled to actually do anything. And then the last is just really from the grassroots, civil society, perspective. It really is continuing to push for the policies that we know have to be addressed. And that goes across the board and is everything from hiring, promotion, retention policies, but also tax policy, environmental policy. Many of these companies are engaged in practices that are harmful to our communities. We have to continue to hold them accountable. And that way through activism and through the legislative and policy advocacy processes.
Farai Chideya [00:35:10] Thank you, Anna.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman [00:35:11] Thank you so much. I appreciate this.
Farai Chideya [00:35:14] Thank you, Amara.
Amara Enyia [00:35:15] It's such a pleasure being with you. Thank you.
Farai Chideya [00:35:24] That was Amara Enyia, director of policy for the Movement for Black Lives, and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, editor of The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System.
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Farai Chideya [00:35:54] Welcome to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. In this special presentation for Juneteenth, we are going back into the archives to share a conversation I had with Harvard Law School professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author Annette Gordon-Reed. Since Professor Gordon Reed spoke with us in June 2021, an elementary school in Texas was named after her in the same district that she integrated as a child. She spoke with us about her book On Juneteenth, which traces the history of the holiday and her own family's history as well. Let's listen.
Farai Chideya - Professor Gordon Reed, welcome to Our Body Politic.
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:36:33] Glad to be here.
Farai Chideya [00:36:34] So I grew up in Baltimore in the seventies and eighties, and I didn't grow up celebrating Juneteenth. And you write early in the book about learning that non Texans were starting to celebrate the holiday and that you were initially annoyed and felt possessive of the legacy of Black Texans. So start out by telling us how you remember Juneteenth as a child.
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:36:55] What was it like? Well, it was a day of celebration. There are certain foods associated with Juneteenth. One of them is anything red. So we had red soda water, as we called it. It barbecued. We played with firecrackers even as a little kid, if you can imagine. And. At some point later on making hot tamales with my grandmother and my mother because we're in Texas and the tamales are sometimes a holiday food. And so that would be a part of the celebration as well. But it was really when I think about it, I think about a day for the family to be together and people in the community to wander by, and men playing dominoes and so forth. So it was a relaxed kind of day, but a fun day.
Farai Chideya [00:37:41] Yeah. And so now you are looking at Juneteenth through the lens of memoir with a lot of cultural analysis of what people think Texas is and isn't. And you write about how Texas has a race and a gender in the popular imagination, and that is one of a white man. So what do you mean by that?
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:38:03] I write that Texas is a white man because the Hollywood version of Texas involves the presentation of the oilman or the cowboy, even though, as you know, many cowboys were Black. But that's not the way they were presented in Hollywood. Now, if you see a person as Black cowboy, people think that that's an effort at diversity, that they're doing something that's not true. But in fact, there were. But still, for the most part, cowboys were seen as white, the oilmen as white. And this whole notion of the plantation owner as an important figure in Texas is lost. Most people think of the South. They think of Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. They don't think about Texas as a slave society. One of the points that I make in the book, so much that happens there grows out of that history that a lot of people don't know.
Farai Chideya [00:38:53] And so pull this forward into how you were taught about race as a child. What did your family tell you? It mean it's sometimes heavy transmitting these things to kids.
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:39:03] Well, I learned things in an age appropriate fashion. But my parents were great readers. And this was… you're too young to remember this, but this was a time when things seemed to be on the move. This is the mid-sixties, late sixties, early seventies. That time period, we had the Civil Rights Act ‘64, the Voting Rights Act. And we took Ebony and all these magazines. And my parents had books about race and all of this. There were I remember documentaries about it. This stuff was in the air and we talked about it a lot. I knew when I went to the doctor's office there was a separate reading room for Black people and one for white people. When we went to the movies, we had to sit in the balcony. I understood about the separation of the races, that this was a natural thing. And then when I ended up integrating my town schools, that brought home to me even more because I became the focus of a lot of attention. And I sort of understood that this was because I was doing something that was part of this movement, that I had a vague sense, even as a six year old, I understood. Something is happening here. The society is changing and I am a part of that.
Farai Chideya [00:40:22] And as you were experiencing segregated spaces in your early childhood and helping to integrate a school, do you remember anything about whether Juneteenth was taught at all? Like good, bad or ugly? Do you remember whether as a kid this even came up in your classroom?
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:40:39] Oh, no, no. Juneteenth was all about our community. You know, this was okay it's June 19 and we're going to celebrate this. That's what we do. Now, I don't recall, even when I got to be older, I don't recall discussing Juneteenth in school. Now, part of that is because it's Juneteenth and we always got out of school in May, but there could have been some sort of and I'm sure there are now some sort of unit, some sort of references to that for young kids. But we didn't talk about this. This was all a community driven thing.
Farai Chideya [00:41:12] And as someone who has been such a powerful voice in history and uncovering different aspects of American history like Sally Hemings and her family, how do you process this moment in time around teaching history? So the idea of critical race theory has become a big buzz word. But one of my friends who writes quite a lot about race and history is like, look, you're not teaching a six year old critical race theory. You're teaching them what the truth is. And so when issues and history like Juneteenth are kept out of books, to me, that seems kind of like an issue of truth, not an issue even of critical race theory. It's just like, are you teaching the truth?
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:41:55] Yeah, well, you know, I am a law law professor. I went to law school and my classmate, Kim Crenshaw, is one of the, you know, leading exponents of this and one of the creators of it, along with Derrick Bell. Certainly, I know what critical race theory is, and I am pretty pretty sure that people are not teaching middle school students and high school students critical race theory. They don't know what it is. I mean, critical race theory talks about race, but not all talks about race are critical race theory. And you are, as you said, teaching the truth. I mean, if you want to talk about the Texas Republic, how do you talk about it without the Constitution that has multiple provisions that talk about race? The thing that I think is so funny about this or so weird is that people act as if we just started…we just sort of made up race as a topic. And that beforehand nobody ever talked about race. But if you look at the laws from the 18th century, the 19th century, essays, books, legislation, whatever you want to look at it, they talked about race all the time. They legislated about it. The Texas Constitution supports slavery. It says that Black people can't be citizens of the Republic of Texas, that they can't live there without permission. So if you're going to teach history, the history of the Texas Republic, how can you do that without reading the Constitution? You know, redact those parts. If you use primary documents and you're teaching the truth, you're going to be talking about race. You just are.
Farai Chideya [00:43:31] Among other things, that Texas is a powerhouse in, is shaping the textbooks that many parts of America get. Have you thought about the role of Texas in textbook production and what gets in and what gets out?
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:43:47] A lot actually have because this is, this has been a real controversy. I was called upon to talk about this some years ago when they wanted to take Jefferson out of textbooks because he didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus. And so he you know, he had to go. And people would ask me, So what do you think about that? I think, well, you know, I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, Thomas Jefferson has to be in American history. You know, if you have American history, he has to be there. So, yes, I have thought about this quite a bit. And my only hope for that is that there will continue to be push back about it and to push back against this effort to to hide history. It's so wrongheaded to imagine that talking about the truth of what happened in the past means that you hate the country, you hate Texas, you hate these places. That's not true at all. But you have a realistic view of them. And that's what people seemingly don't want kids to have.
Farai Chideya [00:44:46] You write about a historical figure I never heard of; a man of African descent who came to Texas in the 1500s Estebanico. So who is he and why did his story catch your imagination?
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:44:58] Mm hmm. Well, I first heard of we called him Esteban, we take history. Twice in Texas, fourth grade in seventh grade. And he was mentioned in passing as coming to the area that would become Texas. But I was thinking about the origin stories of Blacks in the Americas. And most people would probably assume, if you ask them that the first Blacks came to the Americas in 1619 to Virginia. And in fact, a number of people of African descent came to the Americas with the Spanish, including Estebanico and their expedition that started out like a couple of hundred people dwindled down to about four. And he was one of four survivors who came upon the shore of Galveston and was enslaved by some indigenous people, then escaped, and then basically walked across Texas and Mexico, ending up on the Pacific seaboard. Along the way, he served as a translator. He apparently had a gift for languages. And I always thought that when I was writing an essay about this, that if people understood that there were Black people in the Americas before Jamestown, that they were doing all kinds of things. Some of those people were enslaved. Some were not. Some left the Spanish expeditions and went off on their own and mixed with the Indians and Mexican people, you know, in the area. It gives you a broader sense of what… the Africans have been all over the world.
Farai Chideya [00:46:40] Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, thanks so much for joining us.
Annette Gordon-Reed [00:46:44] Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya [00:46:46] That was Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author and Harvard law professor.
I want to close out our show with some reflections from you, our listeners. We asked you to tell us about your celebrations of Juneteenth as a child. So first up, we've got a member of the Youth Abolitionist Leadership Institute. It's part of the Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York.
Junique Huggins Gabriel [00:47:12] My name is Junique Huggins Gabriel. I am 19 years old and I am a sophomore at the University of Buffalo. As a young person, I started to celebrate Juneteenth in 2021. I started celebrating Juneteenth because we began to discuss it at the Underground Railroad Educational Center as we started planning for the Juneteenth event. It is important to me because it is another holiday that acknowledges one of the many struggles that African-Americans have faced. At the Young Abolitionist Leadership Institute they make it a priority to learn about our history, and because they make it a priority, they make sure that we've gotten the opportunity to participate in community projects that deal with our history. Juneteenth is an important holiday because he acknowledges the one of the many struggles that the African-Americans have faced. The federal government should continue to celebrate this holiday by making sure it is acknowledged by all employers.
Farai Chideya [00:48:03] And for some of you, Juneteenth wasn't part of your childhood, but through your communities, you found your own ways to celebrate Black freedom and Black memory.
Kristen Clark [00:48:12] I did not grow up celebrating Juneteenth. I remember learning about. Juneteenth in school and reading for the first time What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? That became a ritual for me to reread every Juneteenth, and that is when I essentially started building resentment towards the 4th of July. I remember spending the 4th of July either at Penn's Landing, watching a fireworks or out by the art museum. But by the time I got to high school, I didn't understand the hype. I really didn't like it at all. And that's because I was actually really tapped into the idea of Juneteenth being more of a symbol of this quote, unquote, Freedom that we celebrate rather than the 4th of July. So do I know that Juneteenth is a lot for my community to cope with and understand the complexities of that? Yes, and celebrating it for me is less about acknowledging with Freedoms and acknowledging the pursuit of freedom despite the oppressive systems and you know, world that we live in.
Ellis Gibbs [00:49:20] Growing up, when it comes to Juneteenth, that's what we did not celebrate in my household, unfortunately, as a child the only holidays that you really take seriously were the ones that you got off the school from or of work from. So I was always oblivious to Juneteenth until my twenties. My grandparents are the most historic part of our family's history, and with it they used to tell a story all the time that they did not celebrate July 4th, but they did celebrate Juneteenth. They did not pass that along when it came to their grandchildren. But they always kept in mind untouched by our family history. So I would like to celebrate my grandparents were Juneteenth for basically migrating their whole family from down south to up here and created a new generation and a new life.
Dejanaya Spicer [00:50:13] I feel like the way that I make sure that I'm continuing to celebrate Black culture and Black businesses specifically is by continuing to work with Black women; having a really great friendship, having a really good bond, making money for each other and with each other. And I think keeping in mind that we do better when we collab and not compete, we will continue to see Black business thriving. So I think just really being mindful that community is wherever you are, that's the best way to continue to spread number one, Black wealth, but like Black friendship, Black community, just passing that down to the kids underneath us.
Nora Carroll [00:50:46] So I grew up in a small village, small town just outside of Chicago, about 15 or 20 miles south of the city called Robbins. And it's so small that it is a village. Robins is very Black, or at least was very Black. If someone, you know, just dropped you there, you wouldn't really think that you were so close to the city of Chicago because it just is so distinct. I don't remember a celebration around Juneteenth. I don't even remember us being taught about Juneteenth. But what I remember is a celebration around Labor Day. So we would have a Robbins Day parade. I think it's called like the Village of Robbins Parade or something like that. And I mean, it was just a to me, a celebration of Blackness. I don't remember any adults in my life at the time talking about Labor Day. But I do remember just a celebration of our culture, you know, of our food, of our music the way that we dance. And in fact, when I was little, I was, I danced in one of the parades and it was such a good time. Just again, a celebration of Blackness. And also that weekend was our rodeo. So what was cool about that again, the geography of the town replicates that of something you might find in Mississippi, a you know, a place you might find in the South. And so because of that, at the time, there was so much space for, you know, a rodeo to just literally be in the middle of the town, you know, because some of the streets weren't paved. And so these cowboys would come out, these Black cowboys would come out, they would do a show. They would allow for little kids to get on the horse, horses and. Take photos with the horses. And so for me, the weekend was truly just this supreme celebration of Blackness. And, you know, no one was really calling it that. But that's what it was for me, especially as an adult now, knowing how much horses and cowboys were so present in… in Black culture, you know, back in the day. So that is a very sweet memory I have of celebrating our culture.
Farai Chideya [00:53:30] That was Our Body Politic listeners on your memories of celebrating Black freedom and Black history.
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We are on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcast. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @OurBodyPolitic. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch.
I'm host and executive producer Farai Chideya. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Monica Morales-Garcia is our fact checker. This episode was produced by Shanta Covington and Monica Morales Garcia. It was engineered by Mike Garth and Carter Martin.
This program is produced with support from the Luce Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.