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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC Good morning again, everyone. On the eve of Juneteenth, President Biden signed legislation officially making the day a federal holiday. June 19th Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery by marking the day enslaved people in Texas finally learned they were free. Is now the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created in 1983. In fact, the news was so big our next guest was invited to the White House to be there for the moment, at the very moment, that she was scheduled to be on this show on the 18th of June. Like I said then, we understand that cancellation, but while the recognition of the holiday marks is a step in the right direction, for some the state where the holiday originated, is facing somewhat of a different reality today. Texas Governor, Greg Abbott signed legislation just a few weeks ago, outlining the ways in which kids can and cannot be taught about the racist violence in our nation's past and similar bills are being debated in other states so there is lots to discuss with our guest. Joining us now is true Texan Annette Gordon-Reed, she's a Harvard University professor, historian and author of the book On Juneteenth, which is out now. Thank you for being here professor glad we could find time to reschedule.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for being understanding about that.

Brian: Last we heard on June 18th, as we were about to do the segment with you, you were on a flight to the White House. How did that come to be at the last minute?

Annette Gordon-Reed: I got an email that morning asking if I could make it down for the signing ceremony. All of this had taken place really quickly between the time the senate acted and the house acted. I thought the President was overseas and indeed he was but he came back and I guess one of the first things he did was to arrange to sign this bill. I hopped on a plane and went down.

Brian: I could question your priorities that day, but I won't. As someone from Texas, was it even more special than it might have been for any other African American to be in that room when President Biden signed that legislation?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Absolutely, it was special and it made more so because Opa Lee, another Texan, the daughter of Texas, as Biden called her had been campaigning for this for years. She's 94 years old and during the course of doing talks about this book, I've gotten a chance to meet her because we've been on a couple of shows together. It was wonderful when she walked into the East Room and right there at the last moment. The ceremony began and President Biden recognized her and brought her up on stage and gave her a pen. It was wonderful.

Brian: Sounds wonderful. There's a lot of conversation online about who really benefits from the passing of the holiday and what change it really provides or if it just provides cover, symbolic cover for not doing enough to actually bring about more racial equality in this country through legislation and policy and the like, do you think this was an important move by the President?

Annette Gordon-Reed: I think it was an important move. I think it was sort of unrealistic to think that a holiday is going to accomplish all the political things that need to be done political, social, and economic things that have to be done in this country. It stands as its own, to me as a way of recognizing the joy of the people who have been treated as property who learned in Texas that that would no longer be the case. They knew they would still have to struggle, but that being designated chattel and property that was over. We can recognize their joy and we can also think about how to fulfill the hope they must have had at that time, to work on voting rights. To work on educational opportunity, all those kinds of things. I think it's unrealistic to believe that anybody would think or should think that a holiday substitutes for political action.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some of your phone calls for Annette Gordon-Reed Gordon-Reed. Maybe you've seen or heard her in other media around the release of her book on Juneteenth. We're also going to get into critical race theory. The ban on which is coming from that very same home state of Texas 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer if you want to communicate with Annette Gordon-Reed Gordon-Reed today 646-435-7280. In the introduction to the book, you discuss the image of Texas being a white man so can you paint a picture of your hometown in Texas and tell us about his history of race relations?

Annette Gordon-Reed: When I was growing up there, it was a small town, but fewer than 5,000 people at the moment. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the country. It's almost up to 80,000, 87,000 people.

Brian: Sorry, what city is that?

Annette Gordon-Reed: It is Conroe. Conroe, Texas.

Brian: Thank you.

Annette Gordon-Reed: It was a small town. It is 40 miles North of Houston but when I was growing up, between Conroe and Houston was pretty much a pine forest but now Houston has spread out to the point that it is more like a bedroom community but it was a separate town. It was a town that had a very, very tough racial history. There were histories of lynching there, a man who had been burned at the stake on Courthouse Square in the 1920s. Lots of incidents of violence, and it was a prosperous town, it was started as an oil town. It wasn't a matter of a hardscrabble place with people living hand to mouth it was for many people there a prosperous city. The school district that I went to was very, very well appointed. They had enough money for the things they needed to do, but this racial history when I was a kid was still a part of the town. When we went to the movies, we had to sit in the balcony, Black people. When we went to the doctor, we sat or we went to a separate waiting much smaller, less well-appointed, waiting room. There were all these remnants legacies of slavery that Jim Crow brought with it. Jim Crow is basically trying to accomplish in law control over African American people and maintain a racial hierarchy. I came of age at a time when those hierarchies were being challenged.

I was a part of that when I integrated the schools of our town when I was in the first grade.

Brian: What was it like to help integrate a school? Did you even understand what was happening as a first grader or beyond?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes, I understood what was happening. I had been to the Black school, Booker T. Washington, which was K through 12, and where my mother taught and where my two older brothers went to school. It was sort of the nerve center of the Black community in Conroe, I knew when I was going to Anderson Elementary School, a white school, that I was doing something different. My parents were bucking the expectations because they had instituted something called a freedom of choice plan and white parents were supposed to choose white schools and Black parents was supposed to choose Black schools, but they did something different because they wanted, I think they wanted to test the waters. This was the mid-'60s everything was up for grabs, the Civil Rights Act had been passed and the Voting Rights Act and people were marching. I think they saw that this was us being part of the civil rights movement at the time. It was tough. It was intense.

Brian: I'm sure. How do you think the choice your parents made for you as a child affected the way you turned out as an adult?

Annette Gordon-Reed: It certainly gave me occasion to think about race in a particular way. To be somewhat puzzled by how white people responded to Black people, because I didn't think-- I never thought that it was anything that I was doing. There was nothing wrong with me, [laughs] I thought, but I wondered about going to a store where this proprietor would just be really mean and nasty towards Black people. Why would he be nasty towards an eight-year-old or six or seven or eight year old kid who was coming to buy bubblegum? Just but my very presence was a provocation. We actually weren't supposed to be going to that store, but sometimes kids, we went in and get stuff. It made me think about race and think about why is this like this? I think that may have led me-- It could have led me to history to thinking about once I discovered-- I understood that slavery existed, but once I started thinking about it, and I understood that there was likely a relationship between the past and what was going on at this point. I think that may have led me to a career in history.

Brian: To the extent that your book is a reframing of Texas history, I mentioned before that you discuss the image of Texas being a white man, but it's really a certain kind of, I don't know, tough, rugged pioneer settler, maybe, but you're right. There is however, another important figure critically missing from other defining depictions of Texas, a figure who helped make Juneteenth necessary the slave plantation owner. Although this species of Texan no longer exists, the influence of the world he put in place continues to this day. Can you expand on what have the legacy of the father of Texas, Stephen F. Austin, from which of course we get Austin, Texas connects to that lineage?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Stephen F. Austin was the son of Moses Austin who had been given the right by the Mexican government to bring Anglo settlers into Texas. He was an impresario and he was going to settle them there and, give them land. Moses died and Stephen F. Austin took up his mantle and he understood-- Stephen F. Austin understood and he said this, that slavery was necessary to the enterprise. He said, if whites came to this territory without this, they could expect to be poor for a very, very long time. Even though he was anti-slavery, he styled himself as anti-slavery not because he cared so much about Black people or anything about Black people, it's just that he didn't like the idea of having so many Black people, the numbers of Black people, you would have to have in order to create a full fledged slave society. He understood that if he wanted to make cotton, grow cotton, which is what they wanted to do. Cotton and sugar cane were the two crops that were going to be he felt that slavery was necessary.

The people who were recruited to come there came from slave-holding states, Georgia, Alabama. When I think of my family history on one side, the story is of people coming from Georgia and another side some people coming from Mississippi and Alabama. These are people who are pioneers in a sense they're settlers who are committed to the system of slavery. It's not like, I don't know that they would have styled themselves as people who thought it was a necessary evil. These were people who saw it as a positive good and they came there determined to make their place and make this part of a cotton empire that had been very, very profitable for a number of people in the other parts of the south. When people think of Texas as the west and in the movie Giant, I talk about this in the book that pits the cattleman against the oil man. Sort of tells a narrative that in the beginning there was a cattle ranch, and then the oil came, but that's not the whole story. There were cattle ranches. The Spaniards had that even before all of this, but for Texas, the Texas that we know about the Texas that became the Republic was part of the cotton empire.

Seeing itself as part of the cotton empire, the people in the Eastern part of Texas, the most populous part of Texas. If you think of it as the west, you're missing a whole story about the place. A lot of stuff that goes on down there doesn't make any sense, if you don't understand that it was a slave society that created a racial hierarchy that is still in place and that people have been fighting against ever since then.

Brian Lehrer: Gosh, and today we think of Austin as a pretty progressive place. I think we've renamed things for less than what you just described.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes. Austin, all of these places, it is what it is because of the people who came after him and the people who are living there now who charted a different course for it.

Brian Lehrer: Duke in Jersey city, you're on WNYC with Harvard historian, Annette Gordon-Reed Gordon-Reed author of the book On Juneteenth. Hi Duke.

Duke: Hi, Brian, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: We can hear just fine. Yes.

Duke: Okay. I wanted to ask professor Reed to clarify something, and this is why critical race theory is important to some of us. In the introduction, Brian, you had mentioned Juneteenth represents the end of slavery, but-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Duke: I think in general that's what most Americans are taking it as. That this term Juneteenth represents the end of slavery, but to Black folks, it does not represent the end of slavery. The term Juneteenth represents the time when the Blacks in Texas were notified that they were free for two years. There's a big difference there. It may be a generational thing too. Like if you ask the average young kid, what was Juneteenth mean? They'll say, "Oh, it's the end of slavery." No, no, not exactly. It represents the fact that for two years, people in Texas continue to be enslaved-

Brian Lehrer: Because they didn't get the word.

Duke: -when the amend proclamation had already been signed.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Professor Reed, is it a distinction without a difference or is he making an important categorization here?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, he's making an important point and I will complicate it further. Slavery legally ends in the United States when Georgia ratifies the 13th amendment, it ends in December of 1865. What Juneteenth represents is the date that Gordon Granger United States army general Gordon Granger comes to Galveston to take over the state. Most people think that slavery ended, excuse me, that the war ended when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in April of 1865, it did not. They kept fighting, the army of the trans-Mississippi kept fighting and they surrendered at the beginning of June and that's why Granger could go into Texas and take over the territory and say that slavery was over. It was not a matter of enslaved people not knowing about the emancipation proclamation. They knew about the emancipation proclamation, but the proclamation could not go into effect anywhere that the union army was not in control. It's not them sitting around knowledgeable working for two years in ignorance of the fact that the emancipation proclamation had been signed. It could not work. It was not like the Confederates would read it and say, "Oh, Abe Lincoln has made this proclamation. It's all over now."

No, they kept fighting. What this represents is the triumph to me, this is what I take it as it the triumph of the United States Army over the Confederate army. With largely with the help, with the incredible help of Black men who left plantations and joined the union effort. Juneteenth ends slavery in Texas, and it is the result of the final surrender of the Confederate army. It doesn't end slavery totally. There are other states that have different days for emancipation. When I think South Carolina celebrates January 1st as emancipation day and other places do other days, but Juneteenth is specifically about Texas, but it's also about the surrender, the final surrender of the Confederate army. I would say, and I think this is really important. I'd like to emphasize this. It's like, people didn't know. They knew everything that white people knew and not in terms of education and going to school, but things that are going on in the society, they heard people talking about it. They would have seen it in the newspapers. Some people were literate, they knew what was happening. It's just that you can't do anything about it if until the military side of things had been settled.

Brian Lehrer: Duke, thank you and keep calling us. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Abbott signed legislation just a few weeks ago, dubbed by several publications like the Dallas Morning News as the anti-critical race theory bill, but critical race theory is something, as I understand it, that's taught in law school, around the country. For you as a historian, what is that bill? What is this conversation that's broken out mostly in conservative media about?

Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, I'm a historian and a law professor.

Brian Lehrer: Did not know that.

Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes. I'm at Harvard law school. I have a joint appointment. One of my classmates, Kim Crenshaw was one of the originators, one of the founders of the critical race theory movement that we were, and Derek Bell, her mentor, who was also at Harvard law school was also instrumental in starting this. This is a law school class. I find it really hard and it's not even in every law school. Right now there are students who are agitating to have more critical race theory, people teaching. It's in law schools. It's not widespread even in law school. I find it hard to believe that actual critical race theory is being taught K through 12. As near as I can tell from the newspapers, it seems to be a situation where people were saying any talk about race is critical race theory. Critical race theorists all talk about race, but not everyone who talks about race is a critical race theorist. There's more to it than that. It's really just in my mind it's a culture war red herring that's designed to take people's attention from what I think - again, this is all very subjective to me other things that we should be focusing on rather than that -  the cultural war getting people riled up about stuff sells. What are you going to do? How are you going to talk about it? I'm puzzled.

How in Texas, in particular, how are you going to talk about the Republic of Texas without talking about its constitution, its 1836 constitution which explicitly protects slavery.

Which also says that African-American people can't become citizens of Texas, that they can't move. Free Blacks can't move there and live without the permission of the government. That's in the document. This is not my interpretation. It's there in the document. The United States constitution foots around slavery talking about persons held to service where we know what they're talking about. The Texas constitution is full-throttled support of the institution of slavery because they had left Mexico out of insecurity about what the Mexican government was going to do about slavery. There were other things, there were other issues involved.

Brian: Is that just filling in a fuller picture of history or is that something called critical race theory?

Annette Gordon-Reed: I think that's filling at a fuller picture of history. The truth is that there are a lot of things that happen in the past for which many people feel ashamed. There's this tendency to want to glorify heroes in the past or even thinking about their families maybe. Things that their great great great grandparents did that were not great. There were people, there were lynchings, people got lynched, the constitution, somebody wrote that constitution and other people support supported that. There's no getting around the fact that it's there. I don't understand why people can't say, "Yes, those times were bad." "Yes. Those people did those things and they made a mistake." We repudiate that, but we're going to build a new future. I don't understand why anybody thinks that a white child living today learning about this as they should learn would think that they're hostage to whatever sentiments and whatever feelings those people had or that they are responsible for them, they're not. What they are responsible for, I think, would be to say, these are not American values anymore. We are the American values that of today that we choose to support today and go on from there.

Nobody should be made to feel guilty about these kinds of things but I will understand why people looking at this past might feel bad saying that these kinds of things happenede, but you can't hide it.

Brian: Robin, you're next you're on WNYC with Annette Gordon-Reed. Hi, Rob.

Rob: Hi there, Brian. I just wanted to make a quick comment. I am from a little town outside of Houston as well. It's called Sugarland and growing up there for 18 years I never learned about its history and the fact that it was pretty much built on the backs of enslaved people and growing up there I saw the income inequality. I saw the pretty much-segregated schools. You cross the train tracks by the sugar factory and it just completely changes. I just wanted to make that comment.

Annette Gordon-Reed: You may have read about an article about a discovery of graves in Sugarland. That it was a really really rough place because after slavery ended forced labor continued and not just in Sugarland but in other places as well in Texas. I offered up my town saying that it had a rough history racially but are a lot of towns in Texas and in the south that had rough histories. I offered that to try to give a context for the chapter that talks about me integrating our schools and making the point that the things that I was discussing had happened within the living memories of my parents and my grandparents, people I knew. It wasn't, something was not like talking about medieval times. We're talking about stuff that was just the blink of an eye in history terms. Not even that.

Brian: To end, Professor Gordon-Reed, now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, that more people will have offer every year. Do you have any recommendations for how people most appropriately celebrate?

Annette Gordon-Reed: It's a family holiday. That's what I remember the most about it. A family and a community holiday being at my grandmother's house with my cousins throwing firecrackers and drinking too much soda and barbecue, that community kind of spirit, I would want people to continue.  I also think that it would be good because, I mentioned this in the book that, I really wished that I had talked to my great-grandmother who lived until I was about 11 years old. If I had talked to her about her life in East Texas and with my great-grandfather on a cotton farm on their cotton farm in East Texas. I would like for people if they're getting the family together, young people to take family histories from the older people in their family, if they do nothing but not necessarily even write it down but to record it. To keep this family history even if they don't want to write anything about it themselves, they could be useful to historians who want public historians people who want to learn more about the locality where people actually live. I would like for it to be a family day and a day for collecting family history so that memories won't be lost.

Brian: Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, professor of history and law and author of the book On Juneteenth. Thank you for some time. We really appreciate the conversation. Glad we were able to reschedule after you got called to the White House on our original day.

Annette Gordon-Reed: I am too. I love your show.

Brian: Thank you very, very much. That means a lot Brian Lehrer, WNYC more to come.

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