Annette Gordon-Reed
ON JUNETEENTH
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING
historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed chronicles the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. From the June 9, 2021, online program “Annette Gordon-Reed: On Juneteenth.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. ANNETTE GORDON-REED, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University; Author, On Juneteenth In conversation with Judge LADORIS CORDELL, (Ret). LADORIS CORDELL: It is my pleasure to welcome Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth. Annette is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Carl M. Loeb Professor at Harvard University. As a Texas native and descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s, Annette chronicles our country’s long and
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
ongoing journey to ensure freedom and equality for all. Welcome. ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me. CORDELL: In your book you write, “Texas, more than any state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States. It is the American story told from this most American place.” What exactly do you mean by that? GORDON-REED: I mean Texas has all of the kinds of things that America has struggled with, within the confines of the state. There’s westward expansion, conflict between Native peoples and Europeans, plantation slavery, Jim Crow after the end of plantation slavery. It borders another country, so immigration is an issue. It was a republic. It’s all there, and it makes it a very, very volatile place. Even though it seems to be exotic and very different from the rest of America, it has all of these components of America right there. CORDELL: I loved, in the book, the way that you intertwined your own story with the story that builds up toward Juneteenth, so let’s talk a little bit about your upbringing in the town of Conroe, Texas. If you could tell us about your parents and how their
views impacted your public school education that resulted in you integrating your town’s schools. And really, what kind of parents would have you do that? What was their thinking? And what was the experience like for you? GORDON-REED: Okay. I was born in Livingston, Texas, about 50 miles northeast of Conroe. My parents moved to Conroe when I was about six months old. My mother got a job teaching at Booker T. Washington, the Black school in the community, K-12. My father had a store, and he did a number of things trying to be an entrepreneur at the time. They moved to Conroe, and with my two older brothers I went to the Black school, we should call it, when I was in kindergarten. By the time I was going to the first grade, Texas had come up with something called the Freedom of Choice Plan. And it wasn’t just Texas; other jurisdictions in the South had this too. It was a way of trying to get around the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This is like 10 years after that. Under the Freedom of Choice Plan, white parents would choose white schools and Black parents would choose Black schools, so that everybody was
