Except for the parts of the country where slavery was abolished long before that.
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Yes, and I’ll go further: All of Eric’s books are well worth studying.
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Can anyone sketch briefly the history of why the second paragraph of the 14th amendment was never implemented?
I had never heard about Juneteenth growing up in the north. I learned about it at St. James episcopal church in Austin Texas. The church was founded by African Americans in 1941, back when churches were still segregated.
Many the faithful were prominent African Americans in politics and business. Bertha Sadler Means was one of the church founders. She’s 101 and an amazing lady. She told me about Juneteenth
According to this, Her grandfather was born in 1828.
But even then I thought it was a Texas thing, like San jacinto day. Didn’t know it was nationally celebrated,
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A false story of Reconstruction spread by propagandists for Jim Crow segregation and disseminated in popular culture through Birth of a Nation continues to shape the national imagination.
Putting the lie to “the victors write the history”. The edition of World Book Encyclopedia I read as a child told me that the Civil War was only apparently about slavery, and that the post-war corruption was huge, and so on.
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For those, it made it a constitutional rule that could not be overturned except for a new amendment.
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Just checking in on the etiology here. It is my understanding that ‘Juneteenth’ is an absurdism along the lines of ‘the tweleventh of Julember’, meant to signify some distant date that can never come.
Am I wrong here? It may be an assumption.
Recently, I saw a clip from an old-time comedy series — mom, dad, the kids, the boss. All very happy and all lily white. What shenanigans they got into!
My point is the impression it made upon me now.
To remember an innocent child staring at a black-and-white tv at families that appeared like his own. I can assure all, there was not one parcel of racism within that child, gazing amazed at a new technology.
I am a product of Texas schools from elementary school beginning in third grade in Houston in 1958. As a young boy, I remember the ‘white’ and ‘colored’ water fountains at the Kroger owned grocery store in the Meyerland subdivision of Southwest Houston. My mother had to explain it to me when we got home.
We were required to learn, to be polite, a highly exaggerated Texas proud ‘history’ every year. I recall a literal comic book that told the glorified story of Texas. Let’s just say it was a ‘white washed’ history.
https://scoop.previewsworld.com/Home/4/1/73/1012?articleID=50418
This TPM article was a great read. Sadly, everything old is new again.
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The thing is it’s American history. American history willfully omitted so Americans who enslaved do not have to acknowledge their inhumanity towards citizens that happened to be black.
The very notion that this is “black history” underscores how much Americans refuse to own the history of the nation.
It’s sickening as we watch centuries later how the cultural wars rail against the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory being taught in schools or universities.
That any American believes there is such a thing as “black history” is a testament to the insidious racism that continues to pervade America.
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Why Millennials Gen Zs and Xers continue to flock to Austin and environs mystifies me. You will never, ever https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-gov-abbott-signs-law-shutting-diversity-offices-public-universit-rcna89694 Y’all know you’re fucked, right? Ah, but then employment is more important than personal ethics.
Indeed. Foner’s Reconstruction is an engaging and brilliant work. I find the most startling and remarkable aspect of Foner’s work is that he wrote a large slice of US history (in one place, for the first time) himself. Somehow–fancy that happening!?–neatly all US historians (minus a few African American historians) misread, skimmed over, ignored and twisted the history of Reconstruction. Foner’s history is corrective but more importantly, it was new ground for (most) US historians. A startling achievement for any historian but also an indictment of the profession.
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Texas history always cracks me up, and not in a good way. It’s a lesson in White Supremacy and greed. Mississippi’s declaration of secession clearly stated that slavery existed for an economic reason- the land was bountiful, but because of the heat and Sun, White people needed someone more suited to topical conditions to work. So the Mexican Government giving Americans the opportunity to buy acres of cheap land was enough for them to give up their US citizenship and move to Mexico. Since the Mexican Government wasn’t a fan of slavery, the former Americans lead a rebellion in Mexico. The Republic of Texas was formed but the former Americans wanted America to bring them back to America. The Republic of Texas only allowed freed Black people to stay in Texas if the Legislature approved them being there. When Texas was annexed, it came in as a slave state, and rebelled again rather than give up slavery. It’s no wonder slave-owning Texans kept the end of the Civil War secret- they needed the labor.
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No, it’s just a running together of “June” and “nineteenth.”
Slightly meta: a rare critique from me of the TPM front page headline editors.
Juneteenth history was/is not hidden from very large segments of the US population, any more than was Tulsa 1921. In addition to history nerds like me, Black Americans have much wider knowledge of Black history than middle-class white folks (also me).
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And, whether they knew they were still being enslaved or not, I would think they were usually simply impotent to affect a change in their condition.
I live in Florida, our GOVERNOR has forbidden the teaching of or books related to anyhting to do with black people or race. HE is campaigning fr POTUS. It is weird that in a state where people are flying into deep space and thinking about colonizing distant planets…that we have a GOVERNOR who is so blatantly racist, we have two mind sets here…one that looks to the future and the other that is trying to resurrect a past that only includes certain people.i have lived here for 70 years and i have never known such depressing times…why do some Republicans do so much damage to people? do they just enjoy being cruel and mean-spirited???
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I was born in the mid-60s and raised in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, and as a “science nerd” I came late to being a bit of a “history nerd.” It perturbs me to no end that I only became aware of the details of the Tulsa Race Massacre less than a handful of years ago. It’s no wonder today’s (and yesterday’s) conservative regressives try so hard to subvert accurate education of our children.
I know there are plenty of minutiae that should be left to grad school, but Tulsa should be a significant topic in all high school and college courses covering post-Reconstruction US history.
https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/
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I think I may be stating the obvious, but at the most basic level employment is more important to most people than boycotting and having no income… And besides, Austin is a growing, Blue-voting metropolis – it just has a rotten core at the Statehouse.
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From ruby-red far NW TX: can confirm.
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