Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

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1:01Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians, to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

1:35Anyways, let's get to it.

1:44The national holiday of Juneteenth, which commemorates African-American freedom in the United States. My guest today is Pulitzer Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed. Annette's award-winning book, On Juneteenth, combines personal anecdotes and family history while detailing the long road to Juneteenth. The book is an essential account of American history, but also a stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing. It's an incredibly powerful read, and I hope you will enjoy the conversation.

2:23Professor, thank you for joining us. You wrote a brilliant book on Juneteenth. It is part history, but also part memoir. And obviously Juneteenth falls on June 19th, which is now the last national holiday added to the United States by President Biden in 2021. Everybody knows the day, but I don't think everybody understands the significance of it. And by the way, I would also like to applaud you because I think without your work, it's not clear to me that this becomes a national holiday, which is a necessary national holiday. So I appreciate your work on this. But tell people that don't know a lot about Juneteenth, what Juneteenth actually is and what it represents.

3:06Well, as you say, it refers to June 19th, 1865, when General Gordon Granger goes to Galveston, Texas and announces that slavery is over in Texas. And that's important because this was after the Confederate Army, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, surrendered at the beginning of June. Many people think that the Civil War was over when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, but in the Southwest, they kept fighting. And it isn't until June, June 2nd, when they surrender. And that's when Granger goes in and says, you know, this is the end of slavery in Texas. And it's important because it came after the total defeat of the military effort to maintain the system of slavery, which is what the Confederacy was about.

3:53And so it meant freedom for all of African Americans in Texas. And it started, began the process of later on sort of bringing black, trying to bring black people into citizenship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I finished your book, I had several reactions, but one of the major reactions was there was the law that was promulgated, the Emancipation Proclamation, the eventual end of the Civil War, but there was not a lot of adherence to the law, frankly, until Juneteenth. Is that a fair thing to say? Well, there wasn't adherence to the Emancipation Proclamation, only in places where the army was.

4:34When the United States Army was in the area, they could basically force the former enslavers to pay wages to the people who were working on their plantations and so forth. So you're right. It was a really spotty enforcement, mainly because if the soldiers weren't there, the planters and other people just acted as if nothing had happened. So it was something that had to be forced. And that was the sort of benefit of having the United States Army in these military districts for as long as they were there. And then, of course, when they pulled them out, reconstruction is over and then we get Jim Crow and lynching and all the other things.

5:15But so long as the army was there, that's when it could be enforced. But I mean, so let me just say it differently. The culture was such that they were more or less still wanting to maintain some semblance of slavery and some semblance of subjugation of African-Americans or. Oh, yeah, exactly. But but for the enforcement of the army, these people were basically saying, hey, we're not really going to accept this change in the law. Yeah. Oh, exactly. Because they had the guns and they had superior numbers. And so they wanted to try to maintain slavery as long as they possibly could or something that was as much like slavery as they could.

5:55It was only the army that stopped them or African-Americans left. Many of them went to Mexico and other places. But as long as Southern planters were in control, they wanted to maintain the system of slavery. So alongside of this story about Juneteenth, you are a Texas native. You were born in Texas. You describe Texas in the book. I highlighted the quote, the American story, this Juneteenth story, the American story told from the most American place. So you unpack some Texas. What makes Texas so unique? Well, the size, I mean, until we got Alaska, that's the biggest state. It's the bigger and the lower 48.

6:36The history of diversity from the very beginning, Texas didn't become diverse. It started out that way with indigenous people, people of European descent, Anglos and Spanish people. I mean, obviously, it was a part of Spain and Mexico originally and has since become one of the most diverse places in the country. I mean, Houston is called the most diverse city in the country, people from everywhere. And Texas started out that way. It's always been a place with lots of different people trying to learn how to live together, different cultures, races and so forth. And it's part of the South, but it's also part of the West.

7:15It has both of those traditions mixed in together there. And so it's always been a place of conflict in lots of ways, but also a lot of good things come out of Texas. I'm not just don't want to make it sound negative. It's a place that has instills in its citizens a great amount of pride about the place. And it's a place that mystifies a lot of other people. One of the things I say in the book is that I wanted to try to explain Texas to people because people always ask me all the time, what's up with Texas, you know, and I try to talk to them about the history and how it came to be the kind of place it is.

7:48So you're born in Texas, Livingston, Texas. You moved to Conroe. Tell us about your mom and dad and tell us about the decision, your public school decisions when you were a youngster. And why did you feel that you were on display as a youngster, as an elementary school student? Well, my mother and father, my father was a small businessman. He had a store in town and my mother was a school teacher and she taught starting out in what would have been considered the black school in the town. This was during segregation. This is after Brown, but the school districts were still resisting Brown. And they came up with a plan called a freedom of choice plan where white parents were supposed to keep picking white schools for their kids and black parents would pick the black school.

8:35My mother and father decided to do something different and they sent me to a white school in the town. And that was a big deal because I was the first black child in our town to do that. And I felt I was on display because I was on display. I mean, people would come to the door of our classroom and stand there, administrators and other people to try to see what was, you know, to see this miraculous thing, this black child in a classroom with white students. And it's something that we take for granted now, But it was a big deal then. And I mean, I knew that it was a historic thing. I didn't quite understand why it was such a big deal.

9:16And I think that those days gave me an interest in history very early on because I had to think of why is it a big deal that, you know, a black kid is going to school with white kids? What was this all about? And that's when I had my first real occasion to think about history and how we got to the point where there was a fight about this and why it was a big deal that I went to this school. So it helped shape me and make me, I think, do the kinds of things that I've done since then is want to become a lawyer, number one, because I knew that law was involved in this. But also, as I said, to think about history and the past and how that influences us today.

9:55Well, the Supreme Court obviously struck down those freedom of choice plans saying they were unconstitutional. But we both know that the court is a political engine because we got Plessy versus Ferguson at the Supreme Court and we get Brown versus Board of Education. You know, we share a legal background, at least. I'm only a lawyer when I play one on television, but I did go to law school. I took con law under Professor Tribe. I actually had Randall Kennedy. I did, too. Yeah. Professor Tribe is a good friend of mine. I consider him a friend. And I enjoyed the course. You bring up Texas versus white.

10:28And this is a fascinating case because another person I was very fond of, she's now deceased, is Pauline Meyer. I don't know if you remember Pauline Meyer. Oh, yeah. Pauline was a great, great woman, a great historian. Yeah, constitutional historian. There's a very big debate about the secession. Was it possible for the Southern states to secede from the union? Obviously, Jefferson Davis took the position that it was possible inside of the Constitution that was signed in 1789. Abraham Lincoln took a different position. But fascinatingly, the Supreme Court really didn't opine upon this until 1869 with a very, very famous case that you write about in the book called Texas versus White.

11:06So I got a lot of young people listening in. Professor Gordon Reed, tell us about Texas versus White, the seminal case that it represented and what it meant for the South and ultimately the reconstruction period of the United States and the rebuilding of the Union. Well, this is another Texas v. White that I'm talking about in the book. I mean, there are numerous ones, but this is about a murder case where someone was accused of raping a white woman and ended up being shot by her husband in the courtroom. And people saw it and no charges were file at all. As for Texas v. White, as for secession, I mean, the whole question was about what did the framers mean when they, you know, created a constitution, a union?

11:55Was it a compact, people just sort of, you know, together as an association, or was it something that created a union that could not be dissolved? And as you said, Lincoln thought that it was definitely a union that couldn't be dissolved, and the constitution gave him the right as the president to put down insurrections. And this is something that word comes back today. And the determination that their secession would be against the Constitution. How did you get interested in this? If I may ask you. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a little bit of a policy wonk. People wouldn't know that about me. You know, I studied constitutional law, obviously, at Harvard.

12:36And I was gravitated to Pauline Meyer's book. She wrote an amazing book about the Declaration of Independence in 1997, and then two subsequent books about the - American scripture. American scripture. I don't know if you remember, that book was a brilliant book. Unfortunately, she's not alive for me to interview on this, but I loved her. I thought she was an exceptional intellect. And I think for Lincoln, when you read his writings, he, again, his personal writings, not biographers about Lincoln, but his personal writings, he was vexed with this because he knew that a deal had to have been struck with the Southern states to get them to ratify the Constitution.

13:16And he was vexed by what that deal actually was because chances are, and again, this is Pauline Meyer's position, chances are there's not a lot of concrete evidence to this, but chances are there was some things in there to allow them to potentially secede from the union so that they could protect the economics associated with slavery. Otherwise, they wouldn't assign the damn thing. And so here's where I think Lincoln, listen, Washington, obviously, is an amazing president. We can talk hours about him. But I think Lincoln ultimately settled the issue of the union. And he ultimately did things, including obviously the abolition temporarily of the writ of habeas corpus and other things to protect the union.

14:01But he was vexed by this. He wrote about this. He was troubled by it. And obviously, we're going to talk about the two Texas versus white cases, but the one that I was referring to, I wanted to get your reaction to because I think it's a seminal case. The Supreme Court basically said, hey, you can't leave the union. And it made it very clear. And I think some people would contest that it wasn't super clear in the 1860s or 1858 when they were debating this issue. Well, that's what sent them out. I mean, the Southerners said, as you describe it, we wouldn't have come into this union without that.

14:36The question is that the Northerners, and Lincoln said this himself, about not wanting to have slavery expanded. The Civil War is really about the expansion of slavery. Yes, exactly. The Northerners thought, well, okay, we're not going to disturb slavery where you are, but you're not going to get to go west with it. We're not going to have a slave country. And that's what the real battle was about because Southerners weren't just content to have slaves just in the South where they existed. They wanted to go West to Texas. That's part of the story that I talk about. They wanted California. They wanted Cuba, actually.

15:11They wanted Mexico. It was expansionist. And the people of the North were like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not, you have slavery in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and those, And those South Carolina, North Carolina, that's OK. But the problem is that with slave population growing, soil depletion, all those kinds of things, plantation slavery is expansionist and it couldn't stay just in one place. So when Lincoln says, you know, I will not disturb slavery where it is, if I could save the Union by keeping slavery, I would do it. And if I could save the Union by destroying it, I would do it.

15:45Southerners were hearing them say, you don't get to expand. And if they didn't get to expand, that means they would be stuck there with growing numbers of African American people, depleted soil and a disaster. So for people who think that Lincoln didn't care about slavery, when he said that, the South heard, you get to stay where you are and can't go any further. And that's what caused them to fight about it. I mean, a union, if you think about the idea of a union and the right to secede, I mean, it's just, there's too much integration. There's too much economic integration. There was a concern about foreign powers.

16:19What would happen if you had two nations on this continent? Great Britain, all those places that were powerful back then would have come back in making alliances with people. It was a national security nightmare to think of having different countries on this place. They would be making deals with people all over. And it's just, you know, it would not have been anything that Washington, Jefferson or those people who wanted the union would have thought of doing because they understood what would happen. Europe would be all over this if there were two countries. I think it's so well said. And obviously, Lincoln made an agreement with the Great Britain to keep them out of the Civil War conflict.

17:01He certainly didn't want a Lafayette incident for the South or something like that. But your Texas versus white that you reference is the reason why I have been against the death penalty from the age of 25. Really? Yes, because it's arbitrary and capricious. And again, people are going to be mad at me. We're in such a sensitive society right now. You can never really have an open, honest conversation, but we do do this on our podcast. If you're white and rich, if I took a machine gun out and I took out my employees, God forbid, dropped the machine gun and wired$25 million to my souped up, brilliant criminal litigators, I'm going to probably go to jail for insanity.

17:41I don't see myself getting lynched or dying by injection. Okay. Having said that, if I'm African-American in certain parts of this country, and let's say I don't have the wherewithal to protect myself the way I just described, you have a good chance of having yourself killed. And if you believe in justice and you believe in the protection of people, well, then you have to obviously protect minorities because we know minorities are the dominoes that fall. And we know that this is an arbitrary and capricious way that we administer this type of justice. And I've been dead set against it. In that case, other cases, and of course, obviously, people that have been accused of committing crimes that they didn't commit.

18:18And now with DNA technology, we can prove that they haven't committed those. But listen, you're a great writer. I mean, I read your Hemmings of Monticello book. When that came out, you got a lot of press on that. I said, okay, I've got to read this book. Obviously, your book on Juneteenth is a short book, so it was a quick read. But you're writing about very complex things, Professor. So let me ask you a very complex question if you don't mind. Okay. Okay. We're all the same. Okay. Whether you're black, white, green, we're all the same. We have the same struggle in life. We have the same, generally same wants.

18:51Okay. And yet here we have this love story between Sally Houndings, or if you want to call it a love story, maybe it's more complicated than that based on your book, perhaps it was, but these are people. And so I guess what I'm wondering is when do we break down all of this and get back to being people without the tribal association and all of the group think that comes with that? Like, how do we get to just seeing us ourselves in others? How do we go to seeing ourselves in others despite skin color, origin, sexual orientation, et cetera? How do we get there? Well, as you know, it's a tough question, but it's an important question.

19:34It's the most important question because it's the root of all kinds of problems. The fact that we don't do that. We don't see the humanity of other people. What I've, I try to do in that book in my other writing, and particularly in this book, I wanted to tell the stories of individual people. I wanted them to think, I wanted readers to think about Sally Hemings and James Hemings and her family as individual people. She was not just somebody who was connected to Jefferson. She was a mother. She was a sister. She was a daughter. She was a friend. And if you find out about individual people, you find out about their lives, you do realize that their struggles are familiar.

20:16You know, some of the things are now this is different because they're enslaved people. But even within that system, she was all those things. As I said, mother, friend, aunt, all those kinds of things. And I wanted people to get to know them in a way that would make them say, you know, what would I do if I were in that situation? Or here's how I would feel about that. This would be why I would be hurt, for example. I mean, to see the points of connection, if you think that people are completely foreign, if they're not, you started off by saying we're the same. But if you're convinced that we're not the same, and we don't have anything in common, I think it's easy to dismiss people.

20:52It's easy to cool and to demonize people if you do that. So what I try to do in my writing and the kind of what other historians who are right in this field do is to try to get people to see beyond the label, you know, enslaved person or black person or white person or Jefferson even, founding father even. He was a person and he had flaws and he had great points. And the idea is to give a complete picture of it. So you get to know who this individual is. I think the only hope we have is if we pay attention to one another and we recognize, as you say, that we're the same and we have points of commonality.

21:31And that commonality is the fact that we're human beings. And we're born and we're going to die. We have a set amount of time here. And what we do here really matters because we don't have forever. And that's the story of every single person. And again, seeing yourself and other people, I think that's ultimately the transitional bridge that we all need. But you write about this stuff beautifully, and I appreciate you coming on. I've got more questions for you, if you don't mind. Slightly less difficult than that one, but more questions, okay? I want to go to the events of June the 19th, 1865, and General Gordon Granger, and the four sentences of General Order No.

22:093. I want you to take us there, what you write, what it's about, and its relevance today. Well, the General Order, he comes and he makes an announcement. Some people say that he did it from the balcony of the villa where he was staying. He probably did that. But there were also soldiers went around and they tacked General Order No. 3 up on the doors. One, an African and Methodist Episcopal church, he does that. The soldiers do that. And the General Order basically says slavery is over. But he also says that the former slaves would be in a position of absolute equality with everybody else, which was he didn't have to say, But was really something that probably ticked off a lot of whites who were enslaving people because they lived in a society where the opposite was true.

23:00They were not equal. And so for him to say that, he's sort of, I say in the book, referencing the Declaration of Independence, which says, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And also he anticipates the 14th Amendment, which incorporates notions of equality. So what I take that statement to be is his recognition that in the United States, equality is a value. It's an important thing. And so he puts this thing out that, as you mentioned before, he says these things, but he can't make it true, right? He can't make everybody treat former enslaved people this way.

23:37But it's an aspirational thing that you could try to create a society where people got paid for the work that they did, whose families, their children were not sold from them, which is one of the things that very often happened. And the family separation, separating husbands and wives, mothers and children and fathers and children was endemic to slavery. That was the most painful thing about the institution. And so when he says slavery is over and you will be in a state of equality, it reminded them that that part, at least that part of slavery was done. The family separation and they would be able to be paid for what for the work, which it seems like to us like it's a simple thing.

24:19But the idea that you would make people work for nothing and have them as property, that was over. So that's what General Order No. 3 represents for people. That's why people celebrated and were very often punished for doing so. It was an occasion for hope for lots of people. So I want you to describe your reaction to the signing of President Biden of making Juneteenth a national holiday. What was your reaction to that, Professor? You know, when I set out to write the book, it never occurred to me that that was going to happen. But I was here and I got an email and saying, you know, I guess there had been a senator, Johnson, Johnson, who had objected to it.

24:59He was sort of holding things up. But then he acquiesced and said he wasn't going to hold it up anymore. So I knew it was going to be a holiday. But I got an email asking me if I wanted to come down to the signing of the bill. This is like at, you know, 830 in the morning. And so I hop and I said, yes. And I hop on the shuttle and I went down to D.C. and there were it was a happy day. I mean, they had some Republicans there, Republican senators from Texas were there and Democrats were there as well. And it was just an amazing event. My book came out in May. It didn't occur to me that something like that would happen just a month later, but I was very happy.

25:39I think the holiday is a chance for people to talk about serious things. It's a family holiday. It's in the summertime. You can be outside. It's a family and community day. That's what it's always been. That's the way we celebrated it when I was a kid, and I hope that people continue to do that. Well, listen, we sometimes, and I have to explain this to my kids, when we celebrate a Labor Day, I can explain to them what it is, or we celebrate a Memorial Day. Yes, it's about hot dogs and hamburgers and having some fun, but we are honoring something about our nation's history, our country, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday around his birthday and so forth.