Read This Book…

Harvard University professor Annette Gordon-Reed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a Texan. In this quintessential book, she explores the confluence of the various historical happenings that brought us to Juneteenth. This book was actually written and published just prior to President Joe Biden signing Juneteenth into law as a federal holiday in June 2021. This doesn’t surprise me as there have been activists fighting for years to get Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday.

Juneteenth, at its heart, began as a uniquely Black Texan holiday and it’s important to remember that. It originally commemorated June 19, 1865, the day that enslaved Blacks in Texas were freed. Texas was the last state in the Confederacy to have enslaved people and Juneteenth was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Gordon-Reed unpacks the labyrinthine history of Texas to explain why Texas was the last holdout of slavery. She also gives a very different history lesson than what we’re taught in U.S. schools about perhaps who the first Black people to step foot on this land were and how truly diverse Texas’s history and topography is. It’s not all white men, cowboy hats, and tumbleweeds as popular media would lead folks to believe.

The author also weaves in her personal story and family history as Black Texans, which only adds to the already fascinating writing. As she goes through the sordid and complicated history of the Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, white, Black, and more folks who converged in Texas and does not leave the racist portions of Texas’s history and present untouched, she also unabashedly loves her home state and tells readers why Texas is worthy of her love.

I learned so much from this very short book and it upended so many of my preconceived notions about Texas’s history and its present. It is definitely worth a read!