look at the juneteenth holiday. and sorry to do that you have a thank you. welcome back to the session 3

the 2121 lincoln forum. i am edna green medford, and i am delighted to moderate this session. our next speaker is annette gordon reed professor. gordon. reed is the carl m loeb university professor in the school of law and history at harvard or the department of history as well the author of several highly acclaimed books. perhaps the best known the hemmingses of monticello and american family received 16 book prizes, including the national book award and the pulitzer prize. i'm reminded when i was reading her rereading her bio last night. i was reminded of the year that there was a grammy awards where the the person who won for best album. that'll give you an example of how how long ago that was. he thanked stevie wonder for not

having produced an album that year because had he produced it. he would have won the award. he had won several times and this is actually what i think of when i think of professor gordon read her work has been so phenomenal. she has also received the douglas prize the macarthur fellowship the google guggenheim fellowship and the national humanities medal. she is making her second appearance here at the forum with her latest book on june 10th. and here is a copy of that. there's several others of her books in the symposium bookstore as well. i was up until 1:30 this morning reading this book. because i couldn't put it down. it is just amazing. i encourage everyone to read it. i was talking yesterday about the fact that we need to be more in dialogue with each other. this is an example of what i'm

talking about. the book is riveting. i it explains to me in ways that i hadn't quite seen before how freedom is deferred. and so please do take the time to read book professor gordon reed. thank you very much for that warm introduction in the warm. welcome. i'm happy to be back among you. i was here several years ago. and mr. lincoln was here the reenactor who i knew was not actually abraham lincoln. but it was quite something talking to him. i kept thinking. this is interesting amazing experience and it's great to be here, too. because this is not my usual habitat. i usually circulate among jeffersonians.

and the lincoln people are a special group, and i'm glad to be here among you i also have a chance to talk about something outside of my normal. discussion my normal area which would be jefferson and monticello and the early american republic those kinds of things that i spend most of my time writing about and thinking about with this new book on june 10th. people have asked me why i wanted to do this why i left something that was comfortable to me to go into something. that's a little bit different than what i typically do. the hemmings is a monticello is a huge book 537 pages of tax and then another couple of hundred pages of notes. juneteenth is 148 pages, i believe long it's it's as in a series of essays. it's much more personal. it's about my life. it's about texas and people ask

me why i wanted to do this my editor bob weil at live right has been after me for a number of years to write a big book about, texas. i was born and raised in texas i go back there quite a bit and i consider myself to be a texan a new yorker as well. but a texan. and he said you could do something about your home state and about your family in the same way. you did something about the hemmings family. why are you spending time talking about the jeffersons and the randolph and the hemmings is and not talking about your own family. we're talking about virginia as the site when texas is an important place as well. last year i had the occasion to do an essay for the new yorker about juneteenth about being a child and celebrating june 10th in texas and what that meant? and during the same year. i did a review for the new york review of books of five books. about texas so texas was on my mind.

and something else was happening. during this period that we all remember this was during the pandemic. the beginning of the pandemic the high point of it and i was there in manhattan in the midst of all of this. harvard had closed and gone to virtual teaching and so there was no point i mean staying in cambridge and being on a computer, so i went back to new york where my husband and i live. to do our classes and we spent most of our days walking in the park trying to get exercise and staying inside otherwise, so this gave me an opportunity to think about this project and doing something along the lines of what i had wanted to do for a number of years. not the big book that bob wanted me to do about texas which i still may do but a book that was much more personal and which i did the kind of writing that i did when i was growing up. i always wanted to be a writer i never thought of myself as a

historian i thought of myself as a writer i wanted to do that kind of work that would reach as large a number of people as possible and that would be much more personal i would think of myself as something like a james baldwin, you know, for example, writing novels and plays. regionals, you know screenplay maybe moving to paris or something like that. well, the story is people say that if you're born in texas or are places if you want to be a writer you aspire to that you run off to new york people born in new york run off to paris. and of course, that's what baldwin baldwin did but this writing this essay that i thought about doing was much more in line with that than the kind of thing that i did in writing about. the hemmings is or about jefferson as a whole or monticello. it's more personal and without all of the footnotes that you have for a typical historical work. so there in the pandemic sitting there thinking about this and also thinking about my parents.

i wonder what my parents who are no longer living what they would have made of this situation where we're all hell hostage the world over by a virus. you know viruses and bacteria tell us who's really in charge on the earth and making that statement very very plainly. keeping me indoors and thinking about what they would have made of this situation and i missed them. writing this book was an opportunity to relive my time with them to remember them and to think about what they had gone through my mother and father essentially me without all of the kinds of opportunities that i had. growing up and i thought about them and i was nostalgic and so writing this was a way of getting back in touch with them. so that was part of it thinking about my family and wanting to put them in history in a way that i had put other people in history other people who are not my family in history. the other thing is that i wanted

to explain texas to people. no having lived in the northeast since i went away to college at dartmouth. i've had to explain texas a lot. people say, you know, texas in florida are the places and our texans get really mad when i say texans, texas and florida are the places that sometimes have to explain themselves to the rest of america, but i wanted to talk about texas and explain why i think that texas is emblematic of so much of the american story the story of the united states of america. it's a state that had obviously indigenous people it's a state that had plantation slavery. it borders another country. so immigration is an issue. it's a state that had that was for a time its own republic and has a consciousness that's based upon this idea of leaving. a larger entity in striking out

on your own and there isn't any place and the history of jim crow after the end of slavery. there's no other state that has all of those things they each have some of them but they're all there and way that makes the place incredibly volatile and accounts for some of the larger than life aspects of texas that people love and that people hate too quite frankly. i have to say and that makes us feel people in texas that we are exceptional if there's a such thing as an american exceptionalism. there is a view of texas exceptionalism as well as i'm sure many of you probably have encountered maybe too much to your chagrin maybe or amusement. and i wanted to do those two things talk about my family. talk about texas. i had no idea i should say when i started to write this book that texas was going to be in the news in the way. it has been in the news first. there's the grid and there's the grid then there's the texas legislature and you can't talk

about slavery and race, you know, there's abbot there are other aspects other reasons that texas has been in the in the news and you know, it's timely in a way that i would never have thought it would be that's one of the things about writing a book from the time you start to write it to the time. it's actually published. you don't know it lands in a different environment and the environment that it landed in was one where texas was receiving a lot of scrutiny not all of it good and so then i thought it makes the book from my perspective even more relevant and makes it more enjoyable for me to go to talk to people about it. so when i sat down to think about this i thought about well, what am i going to say? how am i going to to talk about this state and i went back to the essay about juneteenth that i had done for the new yorker and i thought that that's an important holiday. not just for texas. i mean texans always think that

things that happen there are important everywhere but you know, and i guess it kind of worked out that way right. we have a federal holiday now. how we could take that date and make it relevant? to not just the state but talk about the development of the united states through some of the themes that come through about texas one of the things that i had to deal with. is that there is an image of texas that has been crafted that we've helped to craft but has largely been crafted by hollywood has sort of actually gone along with all of this and and the film giant exemplifies what i'm talking about. it presents a story of texas as about the west. texas is the west you think of cowboys you think of cattle ranchers. are you think of oilmen? and in the film, of course, it tells us sort of a founding

story about in the beginning. there was the cattle rancher. and the cowboy and then his life and i say in the book texas is a white man, texas is constructed as a white man and in this story. his life is interrupted by the oil man who comes along and you remember from the film if you've seen it the conflict between the cattle ranchers and the oilmen who eventually in the end come together and everything is harmonious. but something is left out of that. and what's left out of that the person the man you could say if we're going to continue with this with this this trope what would be the plantation owner that is left out of it people in the main from what i've discovered as a texan outside of texas don't think about texas and the institution of slavery. texas is the west not the it's the southwest but the southern part of it isn't really.

dealt with that much and people don't see it. when you think of the south you think about louisiana at the farthest reaches west or you think about georgia, virginia certainly, but not, texas. and in fact as i stayed in the book i talk about the fact that the father of texas stephen f austin. basically taking up the mantle from his father moses was given the right to bring settlers into texas, with the idea, european-american settlers, into texas with the idea of settling, to having an angled settlement there. and what was clear, that austen actually says this, is it was not going to be a successful enterprise if they did not have slavery. so slavery is a part of this,

from the beginning. there is the story of settlers moving in and clearing forests. the issue of indigenous people is implicated as well. but the idea that the father texas, for whom the capital is named, schools, all these parts of -- all these things, it was pretty clear this was going to be a slave society. extending the kotten empire from the eastern part of the united states -- cotton empire from the eastern part of the united states into the southwest. he considered himself to be antislavery, not because he actually cared about the moral issue of slavery. it is a racial question. he did not believe that whites and blacks -- he was concerned about having so many black people living with whites.

to have a slave society based on race, you have to have a lot of black people, so there was this ambivalence about needing this institution -- who is going to clear the fields? who is going to plant the cotton and sugarcane which would become the basis of agricultural crops in texas? people of african origin. he was uncomfortable having so many of them. so there is ambivalence about it but it is clear the institution was going to be the basis of this particular society. right away, you have an issue here for a black texan looking at this. how does it make you feel? how do deal with the fact that the father of texas had this attitude and that these are the origins of texas?

this is not something we talk much about. i'm a feeling they might talk about it more now. i don't know what is going to happen with the new laws they have, but we did not talk about this much in my fourth grade and seventh grade texas history classes. in texas, you take texas history twice. for high school, there is an elective in texas history so you can have three years of texas history in texas. slavery was mentioned but it was not discussed as something that was central, that was an essential part of the beginnings of texas so i had to grapple with that and i talk about that and this history and try to set up for people who do not know about texas the idea that it is a part of the south, part of the confederacy. juneteenth figures into this because of how -- the way that

holiday came about and the reason for the holiday. texas was part of the effort to remove the confederacy from the united states of america and to create a slave society not just across this continent. they had their eyes on cuba as well. it was an expansionist idea of plantation slavery and texas was part of that. so thinking about this institution, writing about the institution as part of texas and explaining some of the things that happened there that may not make sense to people, but for this connection. voter suppression, problems we have had over the years about race -- all those kind of things come into greater clarity when you understand the history of texas as part of the cotton empire and aspirations to be part of the cotton empire.

so setting up texas as a part of the south was critical to one of the things i do and i talk about what that has meant for people of african descent and i talk about it through my family, so i begin the first chapter of the book with talking about where i grew up in east texas and where i -- 10 years after brown v. board of education, integrated our town's schools. they had been there and many places in the south resisting integration and they had come up with the freedom of choice plan under which white parents were supposed to pick white schools for their kids. everybody knew what they were supposed to do. white parents would pick black schools. black parents would pick black schools and everything would go on the way it had gone on since

the end of the civil war and after reconstruction and jim crow. but my parents decided to do something different. they decided they would send me to a white school. my mother taught at booker t. washington, the inevitably named black school. nothing wrong with that. washington was a great man in many ways. my older brothers were at booker t. washington as well. because i was beginning school, my parents thought that it made sense for me to be the one to go forward and do that. this is interesting because i have kids myself. i wonder if i would have sent them into this kind of environment. and oh probably say no.

at this point. but then i have --'s when you write about other people family is, you do not have to deal with these kinds of things, these personal issues that you have to think about. was that the right thing to do? i would probably say no, but then i remember the other thing. gary talked about this too. you have to think about the context in which these things are happening. i am in a different world now then my parents were in in the mid-1960's. the mid-1960's were african-american people was a time of hope. the civil rights act of 1964, the voting rights act of 1965. there was a sense that things were on the move and so they were making this decision at a time of great idealism. thinking that everybody had to do their part.

everybody had to make a sacrifice. everybody had to make an effort and we are not -- my kids are kids of the 1990's. that is not -- i was not in that place, in that space, so it will be a different decision. thing about choices people make -- you have to think about the era and circumstances under which they are making it, so they decided to do this. they talked to the school district about it. they talked to the press -- this is a little town. one paper. 7000 people. one paper. but they agreed they would not talk about it publicly. that we would proceed as if everything were normal. i think this may be the anniversary this year of ruby bridges in new orleans, who was the first black child who

integrated a school and you perhaps have seen the famous pictures of her being escorted by marshall's into schools with the mob yelling at her. i did not have any of that. my father -- it was decided i would not ride the bus. a bus could have taken me, but that would have been a bridge too far. my father took me to school and dropped me off. and everything proceeded as if it were normal except it was not really normal. there were people who would -- the first year that i was there, occasionally appear in the doorway, administrators who would stand there and watch to see this thing, a black child in this space and to see what was happening there. so i had a feeling of being on display. from the very beginning, so i

knew there was something that was different about this. i understood it was a big deal. one of my relatives, who was very extravagant woman, spent a lot of money, bought find things, went to the big department store in houston and bought too many clothes. for me. so i would -- i had clothes, fine for school, but this was her contribution to the civil rights movement, to make sure i was dressed to the nines to go to first grade. it was all great. so i knew that this was something unusual. i grew up in a place where, when we went to the movies we sat in

the balcony. and when i went to the doctor's office there was a waiting room for white people and a waiting room for black people and i noticed when you stand in the door there was a nurse station that had windows that looked onto either room and you could see through to the other one and i could see that the room for whites was larger. they had magazines. which i coveted. even then. reading material. and i was used to that particular world, and i knew that going to a school with white kids was a big deal and i went off into it and things -- when i look back on it, i look back on it with pleasant memories. my mother said at 1.i broke out in hives. i do not member that, but it is like anything as you get to be older. you look back in your life and at the things that are pleasant.

you focus on the good things more than the bad things. i think that is what i have tended to do because i did have friends and my teachers were fantastic. my first grade teacher -- we all remember our first grade teacher's name. it was not until i finish the book -- i probably would have said this in the book if i had thought about it -- i wonder if the fact that my mother was a teacher made them even more determined, the teachers at anderson, to look after me. essentially. there were decent human beings in general, but i wonder if that was not also part of it, that they had this camaraderie because my mother was a teacher. the teachers were fantastic. some of the kids were good. some of the kids were not. i remember one family of young

girls who were very poor and i could tell they were poor. their mother -- someone had material and she had made outfits for them, all five of them come out of the same material. and handsewn. thing made it a practice to, whenever we went out for recess got to come over and ask me to play with them. red rover but whatever it was they were doing. and i do not know if their parents told him to do that or whether they just did it on their own but that taught me that not everybody is the same. and these kids had an instinct for doing something. they understood i was perceived as an outsider. that i was an outsider because of race, and they took that step to do that, so that colored my understanding about people as

well. on the other side of it, and i talk about this mackey book because i think it is important for people to think about that time and what was gained and lost. on the other side, there were people in the black community who were not so keen on integration after it happened and i should say my parents became disillusioned as the years went on because what happened was there was integration of the kids but not really integration at the teacher level. what many black people in the town, and not just in my hometown but across the south, resented was that a number of black teachers were taken out of the classroom when there was integration. my mother remained in the classroom. she was an english teacher. high school english teacher. but a number of people were taken out of the classroom and

black students lost role models. people who had been in their community. i would say white students lost the opportunity to have black teachers as role models as well. so it was not integration. it was sort of come join us but the two become one and the one was him. that is the way this played out. so i think she was really -- my mother and father came disillusioned and that sort of change the reason why they sent me from being idealistic. they said we sent to you because we knew the court was going to strike down the freedom of choice plans, which it eventually did after a couple years, and then everybody had to switch schools relatively abruptly and that is when i really felt the kind of hostility. i had felt hostility from white students before. then i felt some hostility from

black students who sort of thought that i had caused all of this. because i had started it, but the court made the decision. obviously was not me, six-year-old me doing this. so i grew up -- this is one of those things you think about. you have occasion to think about when you're writing a book about your family. as sort of -- people knew who i was. and either liked who i was or did not like who i was. based upon what had happened, based upon my integrating the school, so writing about this brought back some really painful in some ways memories about what it was like to be a lightning rod at that particular age, so i start the book with this story and what this has to do with

juneteenth is that juneteenth is not just about the day. it is about what happened on that day. things leading up to it and what happened after. the promise of this moment, when african in texas learned that slavery was over, and i end the book with that, so i start with my childhood, which i think was sort of the culmination of all the things that had taken place after the end of slavery. reconstruction, the struggle over reconstruction and then jim crow afterwards and the attempts to bring black people into citizenship. that had been a long process and it culminated with me starting my story as a person who began school with opportunities that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did not have because of the institution of slavery and the legacy that came

after that of jim crow, so i end the book talking about juneteenth, which is -- i grew up celebrating as sort of a black july 4. we celebrated both. sort of a 1-2 punch. he would have juneteenth and then july 4. when i was a kid got juneteenth was celebrated mainly by black people. i thought of it as a black holiday. we -- it was a family holiday. we barbecued. for some reason, coke was on the menu. -- goat was on the menu. somehow, that became a tradition. i have to trace where that comes from. and also drinking red drink, red soda water. i am told -- i have read that hibiscus tea was the origin, that that is what people in the 19th century would have had. they would not have had soda

water. as we called it, soda pop. during that time. but during those things -- this is one of the stories where i do not know whether it is true or something added afterward, that red was supposed to symbolize the blood that was shed during slavery. that sounds like something that may have come after the fact, in embellishment. and it works, so maybe like people just like red. but that was part of the holiday, and being in texas i talk about the fact that the holiday food that was added to that was tamales. so there is this image of these people who are celebrating this holiday with food from slavery, european food and because this is texas, tamales, hot tamales that my grandmother made. my grandmother started making

them to sell to raise money to build a minute -- a methodist church. so people would come up during juneteenth, order them from her appearance so you can see all of these different influences together, native americans, african americans might european americans all in this one holiday, seeing it through food, so this is what -- this is the holiday we celebrated. i did not think much about this other than the fact that it was the day that slaves were supposed to be -- enslaved people were freed and it was almost -- i don't want to say comical, but the joke was that black people in texas did not know that they were free and that the white slave owners kept them in slavery so they could get another harvest in. that was the sort of joke told

about all of this, when in fact they knew they were free. they knew about the emancipation proclamation, i should say. just nothing could be done about it until gordon granger arrives to make this announcement and then slavery is over. it was not about not knowing. it was about not being able to do anything about it until there was a military victory that allowed after they surrendered. they finally surrendered in june in the region of texas and then this could happen. i did not know all of this, but i did know that it was about the end of slavery. i recall talking to my great-grandmother, who was alive until i was 11, about all of this am and her saying that -- talking about what it meant to her and her mother and her family. her mother, who had been enslaved as a child was actually

freed by her father along with her mother, so that connection to slavery is that close to me. i talked to someone whose mother was enslaved. my great, great grandmother. so this was all very close, but as children do i did not pay enough attention -- i failed to do, to pay enough attention to her. one of the deep regrets i have is that i did not talk to her more about what it was like to be in texas at the turn of the century. the 20th century. i know the general story about race and all of this, but the day-to-day lives of people that is one of the things people ask me how i want people to celebrate the new federal holiday. one of the things i hope will happen is that people will talk to older members of their

families. it is a time to take family history. it is a day of family celebration. it is about coming together as a family and i think a lot of it has to do with a legacy of slavery and having family separated so you want the holiday in which people come together is very important and i will also ask -- whites ask me how can we celebrate it? celebrate it the way black people celebrate it. it is a family holiday. get together with your family and talk about or memorialize -- remember this advance in human rights and human dignity. this is not just something that was a victory for black people. it is a victory for human beings and the march of progress and even if it did not end slavery all over the country, we know the 30 them and meant brought that about legally, this is

something everybody can celebrate regard as of race. so the thinking for me has been, putting these things together is to have people understand that this is a holiday for everybody. i was stunned, i have to say, at how quickly all of this took place. and i started writing the book, i had not thought about the idea of a federal holiday beyond i knew there were people working on that. and that was not my reason for writing the book. i was a little ambivalent about everybody celebrating. at first i thought, this is our holiday in texas. why should people -- why are you taking this from us? then i thought this is an advance in human dignity, in human society, to have this take place, so everybody should

celebrate it, but i was at home and someone emailed me and said you know this person who had been -- i think johnson had been objecting to the holiday, decided that he was not going to have anymore objections to it, so the senate wanted this to be a federal holiday and then the house and i thought the president was overseas. he was. but i got an email from someone in the white house in the morning saying we are going to have a signing ceremony for the holiday. would you like to come down? so this is about 8:30, so at about 11:00 i'm on a plane and down to the white house in the east room and a wonderful day. it was a happy day. we had rough times for the past

couple years, but this one was really great and it was wonderful to see people, different races, lots of texans, a woman in her 90's who has been campaigning for this for many years was there to celebrate the passage of this with the president signing it and it was a joyous occasion. it is not anything i could ever have thought about when i was a little girl, celebrating this holiday. it is not anything i thought about when i'm sitting on my couch writing this book, but i am looking forward to what we do with this from now on, where we go with all of this. it does not solve all of our problems, but i think it gives us an occasion to talk about things in a way that i hope will make a difference. texas is in the news because we are -- they wonder if we are

going to be able to talk about juneteenth after some legislation -- i am joking. of course you will be able to talk about it. i think that was made explicit. you can talk about juneteenth. it is not for two to four us to move forward and we do not have many. i am looking forward to the conversation that we will have every year from now. if people want to know how to celebrate it, look at what we have been doing in texas and we will have some ideas. with that, i would like to take your questions. >> please line up if >> you have questions. >>just a brief comment about ruby bridges p people may remember the famous illustration that appeared on the saturday evening post by norman rockwell. that painting is at the rockwell

museum in massachusetts, which i happen to visit a month ago. interestingly, it is part of the display. they found ruby bridges as an adult, conducted interview with her -- he goes for 10 or 20 minutes. i do not know if you can find it online, but if you can it is worth your time. annette: it is a fascinating story. part of the objections we are having now to some of the things taking place in schools is a complaint about a book about ruby bridges because parents have voice objections that there are groups of white people who are yelling at her and that will make white children feel bad. except there were groups of white people yelling at her. there was also a white teacher who taught her, so i do understand. the kids obviously will identify

with ruby bridges, of course, because she will be their age, but why would they not identify with the white teacher? who worked with ruby bridges? and is a hero of the story as well? so that is -- this is an interesting time but that story is not uncontroversial, apparently among some people, depictions of it. >> i have a short comment. you talked about going to school and i am a child of the 1960's. i graduated high school in 1965 and i am from illinois, southern illinois. and the all-black high school was going to close when i would be a senior in high school. so my mom said, kathryn, you may

as well go over to school with those white folks because you are going to have to be over there by the time you get to be a senior, so indian i did that. i can count on two hands how many black classmates i had. by the time i got to be a senior , all of my eighth grade classmates had joined me. i finished in the top two of my class. the other girl, who finished was white. we have -- we saw each other as adults years later and we talked about that because we always got the very same grades at the very same grades. and we asked each other, which one of us really should have

been number one? she said, you know what you did get one more a night did, i do not think carbondale was ready for that. just thought i would share that. and i did very much enjoy your book about juneteenth and so i celebrated juneteenth but we had always done that in carbondale anyway, but i made a cake. and i made red hibiscus tea. and we had a wonderful time and had a barbecue and all of it. thank you. annette: thank you so much p or you have know the importance of history, her story, and learning so much in the sessions and

conference about reframing, reshaping my remembering, and things that are so different but it really comes down to our stories in history -- and histories. i was winning about the role of texas, the culture of texas a lot of us think about is may be texas the role of that kind of oppressive situation there where you can almost do anything and get caught and punished. the punishment was legendary because you'd -- with the rangers. i even heard anecdotally it was the original sign of the klan. in looking at the culture of texas and black people and how you have been able to sustain the stories, what is it -- what is your recommendation to us to

keep going as we are developing our own versions of history in terms of incarceration, the role of incarceration in texas and this country, which is being known as incarceration nation? annette: there is a lot in. it comes to -- people ask me, why do i love texas? after all the things i have described there? that have taken place there. my answer is because that is where my family was. that is where i -- where people loved me and i learned to love people, where i had experiences tied to the land got tied to family and community and so forth, and i do not think that negative people, people who might be hostile to me and people like me get to define what texas is.

there's a tendency to do that, to say whoever is the most hostile person, the people who are the most negative, they are the ones who do find the place. and they do not for me. the only thing you can do is to keep struggling. one of the most moving things that happened to me when i was working on this book was finding my great-grandfather's name on a voter registration list in 1867 and to think about this person who had been treated as -- but knew he was a human being now putting -- being on mac i list, going forth to say, i'm going to be part of the people, of the people, by the people. part of the people. who will help govern the united states of america. the people. and that kind of faith, to keep

going, believing that people like me and my brothers, other people of my generation would be able to do things that they could not dream about is keeping that faith and understanding that he worked there. he -- he worked land there. he was born there. he buried relatives there. that was his place as much as the people who were saying it did not belong to him, so you have to keep that. it is never -- it is always moving forward. it is never going to be -- everything perfect everything settled. it is a struggle. i know it is tiring, but people did it before. people struggled so that we could be here. and move forward. we just have to carry on. i talk about a group of four black men who in 1876 bought land in houston to set up a park for -- where people could celebrated juneteenth. that is forward thinking.

they were thinking this is something that will be commemorated every year and emancipation park is there. i have been to emancipation park celebrate and juneteenth. i would love to be there this coming one after a really get it together for the federal holiday, but 1876, people who had been treated as property buying property and thinking we are going to go forward with this peer this is a long answer to say people who were in terrible circumstances moved forward so that we could be here. we have to keep moving forward. [applause] >> answer some questions after the session. >> my question -- as a college senior, i have had a total of three black teachers in my

entire life and you mentioned that, as integration started, they started to pull those black teachers out of the schools and so those black students did not have the opportunity to have that influence from them. do you think that those actions all that time ago, pulling them out and students not seeing black teachers led to the reason today why there are so few black teachers at certain schools still? >> that is definitely part of it. there are a lot of -- it probably depends on where you are. there are a good number of black teachers in places where there are per anomaly black students, but yes. the pipeline got interrupted in a way and we have not recovered from that yet. >> that was kind of my thought.

my moment in the book was what happened to black educators when integration came about, but i also want to ask about the controversy on the book forgets the alamo and will texas be the first state to have a monkey trial in the teaching of history? annette: they have a more incendiary title. on juneteenth is nice, right? forget the alamo -- i do have a chapter in the book, member the alamo, that talks about the same thing they talk about in forget the alamo. it could be. i think teachers are pretty independent lot. i'm a feeling they are not going to take these kinds of strictures lying down. some of these things will be challenged in court. and i think parents -- they are not just one set of parents. they are parents who want their kids to learn about these kinds

of things. you cannot talk about the history of texas -- the republic of texas -- without talking about the texas constitution, which explicitly protects slavery by name. the american constitution kind of pussyfoots around. but texas is explicit and it also says that african-american people cannot become citizens of texas. they cannot come to texas and stay. you cannot teach the history of the republic without the constitution, so i wonder what is going to happen with all of that, when the battle gets joined. i think it will be because i do not think teachers are just going to say you got me. there are people who really do want to teach the real history.

[applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, >> exploring the people and events that tell the american story. this weekend, professors douglas irwin and others discuss how the federal government has implemented tariffs and impacted domestic and global economies. at 4:15 p.m. eastern, the author of dinosaurs at the dinner party talks about the early 19th century paleontologists who discovered foss isles and coined the term dinosaur. and we will focus on african-american history with the discussion of the history of juneteenth with the executive director of the african-american museum of pennsylvania and the

new york public library center for research and black culture celebrates its founding 100 years ago in 1925. and the story of how she broke the color barrier in california's disneyland, becoming the park's first black tour guide. watch american history tv saturdays on c-span2 and find a full schedule of the program or watch online anytime. >> get c-span wherever you are with c-span now, our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy, live and on-demand's. keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the u.s. congress, white house events, campaigns, and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. catch the latest episodes of washington journal. find scheduling information for

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