More than 150 years after the day that Texas received word of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the holiday of Juneteenth still has not received federal recognition. Historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed joined Jim Braude to talk about the significance of the day, explored in her new book, ‘On Juneteenth,’ and growing up in Texas, where the holiday originated.
“The image of Texas is of a white man — Texas has been constructed as white and male,” Gordon-Reed said. “People think of a cowboy, or an oilman or a rancher. Even though a number of cowboys were Black — that’s another part of history that’s not known well. From Hollywood there’s an image, it’s [that] Texas is about the west, not East Texas, where I grew up, which was a plantation society… a slaveholder’s republic.”
“Violence has always been a part of the story,” Gordon-Reed said about Americans’ lack of knowledge about Black history and Juneteenth.
WATCH: The legacy of Juneteenth
