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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Happy Juneteenth Independence Day. It's the third year of the official federal holiday after the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in 2021. You probably know that, so no mail delivery today, no stock market. Alternate side of the street parking regulations are suspended in New York City, all or most of the federal holiday stuff.

Most but not all states have made this an official state holiday. Florida. Of course, Florida, I'm looking at you. Also, South Carolina, Arizona, Kansas, Vermont, and New Hampshire, unusual for the Northeast, and others too that have not made it an official state holiday, those according to a map from the Pew Research Center. We'll assume most of you know the top-line basics, right? Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. I'm assuming you all know that.

The Confederate Army of Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865. In Texas, of course, Texas, elements of the Confederate military kept fighting anyway. It took until June 19th of that year for that all to really end with the arrival of Union troops in Galveston Bay, Texas, and the announcement that around 250,000 enslaved people in that holdout state would be freed and that the slaveholders were required to free them. Although from what I've read, some held out even then.

We'll try to go deeper than those top-line basics to not be repetitive around what you already know about Juneteenth and talk about some history, some current contexts, take some calls to share facts and feelings, and hopefully learn some new things for many of us along the way in a conversation now with arguably the single best person in the world to have such a conversation with.

It's Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who released the book On Juneteenth in 2021, and was already renowned for her books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello, or do they say Monticello, An American Family. She's from Texas to boot. Professor Gordon-Reed, I imagine there are many places you could be on this Juneteenth morning, so we're very grateful that you've agreed to give some of that time to our listeners. Welcome back to The Brian Lehrer Show and to WNYC.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, I'm always happy to be on your show. I listened to your show before I started writing, so yes, I'm glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I'm touched to hear that and honored. You said that Texas kept fighting after Lee surrendered in part because state leaders saw slavery as vital to their future. Was that an economic thing? They had no vision of a functioning Texas economy without 250,000 people and their future offspring in chains.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, apparently not. When Texas became a republic, it was committed to the institution of slavery. Even before then, it was committed to the institution of slavery. Many of the people who came to Texas from Georgia and Alabama, who came at the start of the war and during the war, a step ahead of the United States Army, and to bring their slaves so that they could hold out. These were the really, really most recalcitrant people who were there. They were never, in their mind, defeated in battle on their own territory, so they were very, very recalcitrant folks. They didn't have a vision. They just thought that this was the way things were supposed to be.

Brian Lehrer: It makes me think of the question, "Did racism produce slavery or did slavery produce racism?" There's a line of thought, as I'm sure you know, that enslavement came first out of sheer power, and racism, the myth that people from Africa were inferior, came as a justification that what they were doing was okay. Is that a question you have any research or opinions about?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, that's the so-called origins debate. It's been going on for a very, very long time. I think the difficulty is that African chattel slavery existed, not just in the Atlantic world but into the East, in the Middle Eastern world. What I'm getting at is that people had known for many centuries how African people were used in a labor economy and a slave labor economy, so I tend more towards the racism was there, to begin with. These are the kinds of people that this could be done to. Certainly, slavery reinforces it, but I understand the argument on the other side as well.

Brian Lehrer: What was the white resistance like? Just because a Union general comes and makes a statement about emancipation, that doesn't make all the slaveholders just accept it and say, "I get it. You're free to go," right?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Now, everything's all peachy keen. No, the resistance took the form of violence. I talk a little bit about this in my book that, as far as Juneteenth goes, people were physically punished for celebrating. There was an instance of a group of dozens of people who were whipped in a town for daring to celebrate the news of emancipation.

All throughout the South after slavery was over, anytime free people seem to act in a way other than totally subservient, they were met with violence by people. There were instances where someone didn't take their hat off, and the person shot him and killed him and nothing happened. If you can imagine people who had social power, had guns, and so forth, who tried to bring things back as near to slavery as possible, they use violence and whatever means they could in order to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you are welcome into this conversation. If you're celebrating Juneteenth today, we invite you to tell us how, 212-433-WNYC. If you celebrated it as a kid, and we're going to ask Professor Gordon-Reed what about her celebrations as a kid, and how she does now, but tell us about how it has changed for you or others you know, 212-433-WNYC.

If you celebrate Juneteenth, we invite you to share whatever emotions you feel on this day, knowing what it commemorates and the moment we're living in right now, 212-433-WNYC, or you can ask historian Annette Gordon-Reed a history question. Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard historian, author of books, including On Juneteenth, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can also text a question or comment to that number or tweet @BrianLehrer. We have a history question that's already come in. Vic on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Vic: Yes, hi. Good morning. Might Professor Gordon-Reed just clarify the dates because the emancipation was in 1863 and Juneteenth was two and a half years later, 1865. However, the telegraph and the railroad predated both, arriving in Galveston and Houston around 1860. Does that mean despite the mass communication of the day, all the officials of Galveston kept the news of the emancipation from the enslaved for two and a half years?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: No, they did not keep it from them. That's the story that has come up that people didn't know. They knew. This was in papers. It was everywhere. Most of the things that white people knew about what was going on in the world, their African-American slaves knew too [chuckles] because they lived intimately with them. Some of them were literate.

Even if they didn't, people talked about this stuff. It wasn't about the knowledge. It's that it's not until after the Army of the Trans-Mississippi surrenders that Granger is able to go in and make this pronouncement. It's not really about knowledge. We used to say when we were growing up that it's almost as a joke, a bad joke, a poor taste joke, that white enslavers kept the noose away from Blacks so that they could get in another couple of harvests.

That really wasn't it. It's just that they knew about it, but there was nothing to be done. There's no way to enforce that until Granger and the United States Army troops can come in and take control of Texas. Even then, they didn't take control of all of Texas. In places where the army was not present, there were people who were still keeping enslaved people in bondage even after that particular day.

Brian Lehrer: Vic, thank you for your call. Well, were white Texans different in their response to any meaningful degree from white people in the more Eastern, Southern states like the slave states in the original 13 colonies, Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, or, say, in Florida, which joined as a slave state in the same year as Texas, I believe, 1845?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Texas had a reputation for being especially hard. The people who had been involved in the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been set up in various places after the war was over to help the former slaves into citizenship, into society, said that Texas was really rough, that they'd never encountered a place as rough as that. I don't have any reason for that other than its reputation as especially violent place. As I said before, the kinds of people who came to Texas, many of them rushed into Texas during the war as the war was progressing and just before and bring their slaves with them to try to make a last stand.

These were people who were the real dead-enders. It had a reputation for violence outside of slavery, outside of the question of slavery, and it showed itself in their response to emancipation. It was a tougher place. We think of mainly Mississippi as the toughest place, but there were a lot of lynchings in Texas as well. A part comes from what I talked about in the book, how people focus on Texas as a Western state, much more than a Southern state. You think about cowboys and all of that and not the fact that this was a plantation society.

Brian Lehrer: Well, maybe it's worth for our listeners taking one story of your choice from your book of how much violent white resistance was tolerated or was policy. Maybe the lynching of Bennett Jackson or the killing with impunity of Bob White or any story of your choice that was emblematic?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, the Bob White story, the most horrific thing, of course, the parade of horribles, was the burning of the man on Courthouse Square in the 1920s. The Bob White story is especially poignant and terrible because it takes place in the late '30s. The trial is in '40, '41. This is a man who's accused of raping a white woman in Livingston, Texas, the town where I was born.

My grandfather, who knew both of these people and used to talk to me about this when I was a little kid, and my grandmother as well, said that these two people were actually-- he used the phrase "going together," meaning they were having an affair. She was married. When it was discovered, it became a story of rape. He is taken by the Texas Rangers and every night taken out and whipped, tied to a tree, and whipped until he confesses, and he's sentenced to death.

He has a trial. It was overturned because of the beatings. They said this is against due process, which was a surprise in some way, but it raised the hopes of African Americans that there might be some justice, so they want to retry him. They take him to Conroe, which is where I grew up. I was born in Livingston and then I grew up in Texas, so they moved the venue to Conroe.

While he's there, while the trial is going on, the husband of the woman who was allegedly raped walked into the courthouse and shot him in the back of the head and killed him in front of police officers, a couple of hundred spectators, the judge, jury, everybody. He's arrested, but he's acquitted in a trial that was just a few days, acquitted in a few hours. That just broke many people's hearts because lynchings are bad or terrible, obviously, but these are people acting outside of the scope of the law in a way, but here was a trial.

He'd gotten a new trial and people thought that there might be justice. To see him murdered and the murderer acquitted, murdered under such blatant circumstances, it really showed the kind of impunity that people felt that they could act within that time period. Members of my family, some of them refused to stay in Conroe overnight because of that. It was just totally demoralizing to people.

Brian Lehrer: I think Gail in Brushton, New York wants to go back to the question of whether slavery produced racism or racism produced slavery. Gail, you're on WNYC with Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed. Hi.

Gail: Hi. I read a book called Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. In the medieval period, anyone could be a slave. Slavery from Southern Africa was in its very infancy. In most slaves, slavery happened by conquest. In Iberia, there were raids from North Africa. Christians were captured and taken into slavery. There were raids going the other way. North Africans were taken into slavery in Spain. My guess would be that racism didn't come into it until that stopped. It needed to be justified by it being a possibility mostly for Black people. I think it's just nice to know that history. It's fascinating.

Brian Lehrer: Gail, thank you.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes, there were people of other races who were enslaved as well. Slavery really comes about, she said "conquest," because of war. The idea is, "If we didn't kill you, if we spared your life, then you are eligible to be made a slave." What we're talking about, I was speaking specifically of the American context and the Atlantic context, the idea that a group of people on a continent is eligible for that kind of treatment when you don't have that treatment of other people who were powerless. They could have dragged Irish people, English people by in large numbers who could have branded them. People said, "We couldn't do that because they're all white."

Now, there are ways to differentiate enslaved people versus free people. I just think that it goes back so far. The continent was used in that way for so long that by the time we get to the British doing this and the French and other people, there's a notion of Black inferiority that drives it forward. There's a book called White Over Black by Winthrop Jordan, who talks about English attitudes about Blackness even before slavery that explains all of this. I accept his understanding about the origins of it in terms of Europeans' connection to slavery.

Brian Lehrer: Richard in Southern Delaware, you're on WNYC with Annette Gordon-Reed. Hi, Richard.

Richard: Hi. Longtime listener. Thanks for taking me on the call. My point was going to be that the museum down here has a very nice display of the issues that came up around here with slavery and the Civil War and so forth. I felt that the point should be made that maybe it's been made before, of course, but not just a North-South difference here.

It was clearly something that some of the Northerners didn't like the Emancipation Proclamation either. In Southern Delaware, in particular, there were slaves. Apparently, they, some of them anyway, were considering getting paid for the slaves to free them. Lincoln apparently, I think, used one of the larger slaveholders in Delaware to try and negotiate among the slaveholders to set the offer payment.

Brian Lehrer: For the federal government to buy the enslaved people's freedom?

Richard: Yes, by the freedom before he adopted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Brian Lehrer: Richard, thank you. Is that a real thing? Did that happen?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: The North and the South. Yes, there were proposals. Some of the people floated ideas about paying and they rejected that, the notion. Slavery was an economic system certainly, but it was also a system of social control. One of the things that people feared the loss of was control. Social control over Black people in places like Virginia, for example, that was 40% Black, or South Carolina by the time of the war, three to one.

Every three Black people for every one white person, and social control but also hierarchy. It produced the racial hierarchy that I've talked about that was satisfying to people. The idea of freeing Black people and having them exist as equals presumably or citizens in society was horrific for many whites. Even if they got money, there would be a resistance in changing what they called their way of life that basically had them in control over people of African descent.

Brian Lehrer: Backing up a bit, Juneteenth happened, June 19th, 1865, and what happened to the formerly enslaved people in Texas on June 20th, did 250,000 people with, in many cases, little money or formal education or skills, besides the ones they learned as enslaved people to work on those farms, even once it was enforced that they needed to be freed, did they just walk off those farms till they didn't know what or what happened on, metaphorically speaking, June 20th and 21st in 1865?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, most of them, the General Order No. 3, which was Granger's order that effectuates what has become Juneteenth, encouraged them to stay on the farms and work for their former enslavers as employees, that they would exist in the state of absolute equality, but they would also be in an employer-employee situation. What happens afterwards, the army begins to set about facilitating these contracts.

Then when the Freedmen's Bureau was set up, that was one of the main things that they did besides marrying people, helping people find family members, and educating people, setting up schools and so forth, was to manage work contracts between former enslaved people and their former enslavers. In places where there was no army, where there was no federal official, there are records of people who were kept in bondage until the army could go through and actually take full control over Texas. It was not June 20th and 21st when that happened.

The main thing is that the army helps and the Freedmen's Bureau later on begins to help them set work contracts between the people who had enslaved them before. A lot of people moved. They tried to encourage them to stay in place. Some people did stay in place, but other people moved around and tried to find work other places. Some went out West, started out West, but the bulk of them remained in place and had to rely on the Freedmen's Bureau in their districts throughout Texas to try to help them order their lives or protect them in some ways from the people who had been their enslavers.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed on this Juneteenth 2023. We'll take more of your calls. We'll bring it up to the present and talk about the holiday as it's being observed today and the historical context of this moment as it relates back to that moment and looking forward as well. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC on this Juneteenth, June 19th, Juneteenth National Independence Day, to be thorough in 2023 with Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, and your calls, 212-433-WNYC, or you can text a comment or a question to that number, a history question as we've gotten a few of already, or your thoughts and feelings and ways that you celebrate or observe Juneteenth, very welcome, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to that number or tweet @Brianlehrer.

Professor Gordon-Reed, I know that before your book, On Juneteenth, you were already a very prominent historian for your books on Sally Hemings and her family and Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. That's 18th-century Virginia for the most part. Juneteenth is focused more on 19th-century Texas. I'm curious if something about your Sally Hemings and Jefferson research led you to want to focus on Juneteenth as a point of continuity, or if they were really two different areas of historical interest for you, tied only by the fact that slavery was a theme.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: They are totally separate. [chuckles] If somebody had told me four years ago that I would be talking to you about a book that I'd written about Juneteenth, I would say that's crazy. I did do a book about Andrew Johnson, The American Presidents Series, which brought me into the mid-19th century, but I don't really like writing about this time period because it's so-- Slavery is depressing, but it's an infuriating moment because there was such moments of high hopes. I know what's going to happen. [chuckles] They're going to be dashed. This was a moment when the country could have gone in a particular direction and it did not go--

Brian Lehrer: You're talking about reconstruction-

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Reconstruction.

Brian Lehrer: -just after the Civil War, right?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes, after the Civil War, the mid-19th century. That part of it is just a disappointment to me. It's an area that I didn't have a thought that I would go into, but it was really my editor, Bob Weil, who has wanted me to do a history of Texas, a big book about Texas, who agreed with me that I might do and suggested that I do something small and short.

I fastened on Juneteenth as a way of talking about the history, but also do a broader but short look at Texas itself because people are always asking me, "What's the story with Texas?" I'm always having to explain the state in some way. I thought that this was a way to perhaps do that to remind people about Texas's Southern roots and that a lot of the things that we see coming out of here now, the fights over history, fights over the substance of history classes and book banning, all of that kind of thing grows out of the racial dynamic that exists in the state, which was born of its history with slavery.

Brian Lehrer: Well, some people call the moment that we're in today a third reconstruction. It was started and stopped by resistance after the Civil War started and stopped by white resistance after the civil rights era. Maybe starting again today, maybe with the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and George Floyd, and some degree of white acknowledgment that those killings represent something larger in reform that takes place out of that. Do you see a kind of third reconstruction taking place today?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, I would see a third kind of redemption taking place, or a second redemption in the sense that the backlash, I believe, against the election of Barack Obama, which really signaled that the country had turned a particular corner, and that energized and engendered hope in many people. For a number of other folks, that was a nightmare.

That it is not so much what he did. It's what he represented as a person of color and his family. I think seeing his family up there too was a particular provocation to many people. That was a signal that the country was very, very different. I think there's some people who didn't like that. What we've seen is a political backlash against that and a cultural one as well.

It's no accident, I think, that we're fighting about-- We're calling them cultural issues. Robin Kelley has an essay in The New York Review of Books that says it's not really a culture war. It's actually a political war when you get at it. However you characterize it, I think it's a backlash against a particular form of Black advancement, which as you've said, we've seen whenever that happens, there's a reaction to it. I think we're in that now.

Brian Lehrer: Lindsey in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lindsey.

Lindsey: Hi, happy Juneteenth. Thank you so much for this great segment. My question is just related to how so many of us in the United States who aren't Black have benefited from Black women celebration and sometimes in solidarity and sometimes not. Particularly, I wanted to hear more about Mexican Americans in Texas at that time who were also the targets of violence and dispossession of their lands, and how Mexican Americans may or may not have supported Black Americans in that moment or been part of those struggles. Thank you.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: It's like anything. Some did and some did not. The situation with Mexican Americans is different because this was their land before. She's absolutely right. There were sustained campaigns of just killing Mexican Americans. There are books about that now. I'm blanking on the name of the author. A very good recent book about the whole process of trying to essentially ethnically cleanse Mexican Americans from Texas. Sometimes Mexican Americans were allies, sometimes they were not, because there was the option of being white or being considered white person as well.

It really depended upon the personal inclination of the individual. Do you see the oppression that you are suffering as having anything in common with Black people, or do you want to move as far away from Black people as possible and adapt and be closer to Anglo? There was no uniform response to that. There were some Mexican Americans who were very much allies to African-American people in voting and so forth, and some who were not because they always had the option of being in between either white or in between and standing outside of the fray.

Brian Lehrer: You grew up in the infamous Conroe, Texas, as you were describing before. Did your family or your community celebrate Juneteenth in any way when you were a kid?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, absolutely. I don't remember. It's one of those things that our families and communities just did. I don't remember a beginning. It was just always there. It was our version. I would've thought of it as sort of a Black version of the 4th of July, which we celebrated too. It was a community day with special kinds of food, firecrackers. I can't believe we were allowed to play with firecrackers, but we were. During that time period, it's a different day. Yes, it was definitely a time of celebration. Then eventually, as I got to be older, whites celebrated as well. It became a Texas holiday in 1980 and it was something that people of all races celebrated.

Brian Lehrer: Is it significant to you that the act of Congress that established this as a federal holiday is called the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, and that the fuller name of the holiday is not just Juneteenth, but Juneteenth Independence Day, because the 4th of July, which you just referenced, is also called Independence Day? Is that a coincidence?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, it's an interesting one and it caused some people to get upset saying that you're trying to replace July 4th. [laughs] That's not it. I think the importance is that there were a number of independence days. Emancipation was a process. I like the title of that because it emphasizes, it makes you think of the two holidays together. When you think of one, you necessarily think of the other. I think that that's the way they should be seen as being in tandem that bringing people into full citizenship was a process. It didn't happen any one day.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, so you see the two independence days as more compatible, comprising a whole when taken together, let's say, rather than in competition with each other?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: No, they're not in competition with each other. I think that people should think of them together because Granger in his order talks about equality. The word "equality" is associated with the 4th of July. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Jefferson's words, "All men are created equal." Juneteenth reminds us that it took a struggle to get that. We're still struggling for it, but they're linked with this notion of equality being a basic American value.

Brian Lehrer: Well, your book, On Juneteenth, came out in 2021, one year after the murder of George Floyd and in that political and cultural environment, but I imagine you were working on it. Well, before that, was Juneteenth already on its way in your opinion to becoming a national holiday in the sense of the act that Congress passed in 2021, or was it really the national awareness after the murder of George Floyd that led to that?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, actually, I started working on this book in June of 2020 and delivered it in September 2020.

Brian Lehrer: Did even this book--

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: This is a pandemic book. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but that was also the month after George Floyd was murdered.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes. No, I think people were thinking about, "How did we come to a place that something like this could happen?" I remember reading that there were huge spikes online in searches about Juneteenth after the murder of George Floyd. People identified slavery as creating a legacy. Having the holiday come right after that led people to think about, "How did it end? What happened in the immediate aftermath of it?" I think it definitely spurred interest in this holiday and more interest in the history of slavery as well. No, this was a pandemic project and one that was very definitely influenced, thinking about the legacy of slavery that George Floyd's murder represented.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts this question, "Did the plantation owners in Texas who blatantly disregarded the Emancipation Proclamation orders from the President receive any type of penalty?"

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: No, not that made them stop in any kind of way. A lot of it took place under conditions that people wouldn't have been aware of that. It's only the testimony afterwards that people understood what was happening. Even the people who enacted the violence very seldom had any kind of penalty imposed upon them.

Eric Foner's book on reconstruction is really good about Texas and the immediate aftermath of the war, not just aftermath, after the war's real end. He talks about people seeing bodies floating in the rivers, coming upon a village where about 27 people were hanging from trees, men, women, and children who'd just been killed. They unleashed a torrent of violence. Not only keeping people in bondage or killing them, a lot of this stuff took place with impunity.

Brian Lehrer: A follow up-question from that same listener, "Why aren't their descendants," meaning the descendants of the recalcitrant slaveholders, "liable for financial restitution?" I guess that would be a fairly narrow version of reparations, those particular slaveholders.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, because we're not liable for the crimes of our-- I'm just talking strictly in legal terms. You don't inherit your ancestors' debts. You don't inherit your parents' debts. You could say they should be but in the form of some kind of reparations, but that would be a tough call in that they weren't the people who enacted it.

Brian Lehrer: Another question via text, listener asked, "I recently visited Monticello. Do you know anything about the men Jefferson hired to oversee his slaves? Were they awful or did Jefferson assure humane treatment by them during his own long absences?"

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Some of them were better than others. There were some that were known to be brutal who ended up-- They got fired, but the whip was endemic basically to the institution of slavery to keep people in control. There are times when the whip was going to be used. There were instances where Jefferson tried to use incentives, money rather than the whip, but the whip was not absent at Monticello. Gabriel Lilly, this comes to mind as a person who was described as especially brutal. He ends up being fired, but not just for reasons for being brutal. Other overseers there managed without as much violence as Lilly, but violence was always a part of plantation life.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I guess just to the wording of the listener's question, there's no version of enslavement that probably could be called humane, but I guess within the--

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: I know what they mean. Were there psychopaths and brutal people? Sometimes the overseers were. Jefferson didn't ever whip anybody himself, but there were overseers there who one in particular that I think of who was a brutal person.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you've written whole books on the topic, but is there a radio interview-length answer to the basic question of the paradox of Thomas Jefferson? How could the person who primarily wrote the Declaration of Independence, which said, "All men are created equal," also have continued to enslave so, so many people?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, because human beings are complicated creatures. We can have a set of intellectual beliefs that we don't have, the emotional capacity to live by. I think he thought slavery was wrong. I think he knew that, but he had no inclination to disrupt his life in a way or to go against the people in his immediate community and his family to try to make that point. Some people did. Most people who did in Virginia were people who were under the influence of religion, the passion of religion. He was not. [chuckles] He didn't even have that as a spur to make him do what I believe he knew would have been the right thing to do.

Brian Lehrer: Religion worked both ways though on slavery, right?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Yes.

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Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, absolutely. I remember looking at the diaries of one of his grandchildren. He's going through the Bible and finding instances, discussions about slaves as a justification for slavery. That's nothing Jefferson would ever have done, but that generation by the time of his grandchildren's existence, they are full-on into the idea that Christianity allowed for slavery.

Brian Lehrer: To finish up, what would you say was the mix of emotions that Juneteenth inspired when you were young? You talked about July 4th-type fireworks and eating, but how festive because it was an Independence Day celebration, how mournful or exhausted or angry or other feelings for all that Black Americans had been put through before Juneteenth 1865 and since? Do you feel like from what you can see, emotional relationship that a lot of people have, I don't want to overgeneralize, but to this holiday is different than when you were a kid?

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: I think I have more of a sense now that it was an ending but a beginning of something. A beginning of another struggle. When I was a kid, I would have taken the end of slavery as one thing but maybe separate from the march that Black people then started on afterwards. I'm aware of the fact that a struggle began then. It was the struggle for citizenship and the right to vote, education, all those kinds of things. Now, I see it just as a marker of African-American progress, but also a marker for the gap between the full realization of citizenship and where we actually are.

It's not that I don't honor it as much or I don't think it's as important. I just see it as part of a process too that it's a day we should mark, but we still have a lot of work to do. That's how I basically see it as an adult. I wouldn't have seen that as a kid because I wasn't looking at the total picture. As a little kid, it was more barbecue and too much soda and being with my family and members of the community. The celebratory part of it was more, but the meaning of the day is more powerful, is more impactful to me now than when I was a little kid.

Brian Lehrer: Professor of history at Harvard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Genius Grant among many other things. Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth, author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and more. Thank you so much for joining us on this Juneteenth 2023. We really appreciate it and I enjoyed this conversation.

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I always enjoy it. Thank you.

 

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