 Welcome. I'm Mark Uptegrove, the President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. On behalf of our co-hosts, Humanities, Texas, and the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, we are pleased to present a conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed on her new book, On Juneteenth. A professor at Harvard University, Annette Gordon-Reed is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Hemingses of Monticello. Her other honors include the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Frederick Douglass Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In her new book, On Juneteenth, the historian and native Texan examines the Texas roots of Juneteenth and its symbolism in the continued fight for racial equity. Signed copies of On Juneteenth are available at LBJstore.com. Our moderator this evening is Dr. Dinah Raimi Berry, Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Berry is an internationally recognized scholar and consultant on the subject of slavery. Please join me in welcoming Annette Gordon-Reed and Dinah Raimi Berry. So thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us today. I have lots of questions that I'm excited to have this conversation with you. As you know, I read your book with great admiration and I would love to know about the origins of your project. Like, you know, we always, we write books, but no one always knows how they got started. So how did this project come about? Well, it's sort of a long time in coming. My editor had been asking me to think about writing a book about Texas, a big book about Texas that would talk about the history of slavery and maybe start by referencing my family maybe in an introduction and then going into talking about the history of slavery. I did a review for the New York Review of Books a little over a year ago about Texas, five books about that. And then last year I did an essay for the New Yorker about Juneteenth specifically. So Texas has been on my mind between Bob pressing me to think about doing a book about Texas. And I just decided, you know, with his prompting that, you know, maybe this is something you could do a shorter version of something like this. And I wanted to do something completely different that instead of just doing a short history of Texas in Juneteenth that I would make it a memoir and a history that I would bring that component of my family into it other than just more than just the introduction. But talk about it, use family stories to tell this the story of the history of Texas. So I was here last year in the middle of the pandemic living in Manhattan. I commute between Manhattan and Cambridge when Harvard went virtual. I decided to stay in New York where my husband is, which is why I'm still in New York. And so I was here in, we were in the apartment with not many places to go, Central Park and go outside and walk around in the park and then come back and seeing the tents in the park for the overflow of the people who were hospitalized for COVID and thinking about mortality, thinking about my parents, you know, what they would have made of all of this, this very, you know, kind of unique situation that we were in. I decided that I would write a more personal, that sort of reinforce the idea that I wanted to write a more personal look at the history of Texas, but also do it the style of writing that I always wanted to do that's separate from different from the kind of writing I typically do as a historian. And so that's how the project was born. Wow, that's interesting because we think about what we do during the pandemic. And it's neat to see that there's creativity. And we've talked about that in a number of different spaces that we still can be creative in a very difficult moment. And I like that you turn this this pandemic and the isolation and and having to be quarantined and living in our homes as a way to produce something and produce something very personal. And that was that was that was my next question was, what was it like writing about your personal? I mean, most most of your writing is very professional. I mean, you've obviously done legal writing, but then you've written a number of books about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And I'm wondering, you know, how was it to write something that was memoir? Was it a different style? And was it was it more challenging? I think it was challenging in a way because you really do have to open up when you're writing a memoir. And I open up in this book, my co-author, Peter Onath, who read the manuscript said, well, you do open up in a sort of an Annette Gordon-Reedy kind of way, meaning it's open, but not way open. I wanted to I didn't want to be the focus of it. I wanted my family story to figure in it, but I didn't want it to be about me. So there were questions about, do I want to use the names of everybody? And I mentioned the names of my mother and my father. I don't and I don't mention my grandparents' name, great-grandparents' name, any of those things like that. I wanted them to be a part of it, but I didn't want my family story to take over from what I was trying to say about Texas and the history of Texas and the prehistory of Texas, the entity, the state called Texas. So, yeah, the decisions about how much information you want to give how much how open you want it to be. I mean, I have sort of a love hate relationship with memoir. I like them, but there's something for me, I would not want. I have difficulty revealing or thinking about revealing the lives of other people, not because they have anything to be ashamed of or anything like that, as so much as I don't have their permission. Yes. Yes. I don't have these even people who are dead, mainly people who were dead. Why should their stories be out there? Because I decide I want to write a book, which is probably why I never could make it as a novelist, too, because novelists always mind the stories of their families and their friends and everybody around them. And I just have this, I don't know, I have a difficulty with that. So, yeah, it was you're you're being open, but there's that reticence that I have about being too open. So I had to find the right balance for myself. That felt comfortable for you. That felt comfortable for me. I think I think my editor might have wanted me to have names, wanted me to do more of that, but I really just didn't. I didn't want to do anything that didn't feel. And he obviously backed me in that that felt uncomfortable to me. So I wanted to have enough detachment to put my family in there, but keep Texas as the focus. Right. You know, I understand that idea about about what to share, especially when you're writing about other people. Sometimes it's for me, it's a gut feeling where I feel like I come across a story in the archive and I don't feel like I have the permission to write about it. And I don't, like, whenever I have a gut feeling about that, I'm just like, OK, I'm going to leave this one there. I'll I'll I'm OK. Yeah, it's comfortable to you. Yeah, there's other times where you feel like there's something that's really drawing you towards going deeper into that into different aspects. So I appreciate you sharing that. So you mentioned about, you know, you're from Texas and I know you're a proud Texan. So what I like about the book about on Juneteenth is that you really are it's really a history of Texas from a personal perspective, right? But it really touches on some of the major flash points of Texas history and the major flash points of even some of the contemporary debates that we're having about American history. So I wanted to know if you could say a little bit about about the beginnings. I love I love the origin stories. That was one of my favorite chapters. But can you talk a little bit about about how you decided to make different choices about what to include regarding Texas history? Well, you know, I also decided that I was going to construct it as a history of Texas talking about people telling the stories to the people of Texas. And there are different people in Texas. There are indigenous people, Indians. People of African descent. Europeans, Anglo-Americans, Latino. So I wanted to try to have chapters and vignettes and things that talk about each group and how I connected to each of those groups. And so because I had this experience of being a child integrating our town school district that put me in touch our town schools that put me in touch with the issue of race and the issue of the issue of law and race. And you kind of wind the tape back and you realize that a lot of this stuff, Jim Crow, is an outgrowth of was an outgrowth of the end of slavery when people were trying to put things back as near to slavery as they could get it. Yeah. And so you just keep walking back and, you know, it just kind of unfolds. The story is you could find out how we got to this place where I was in the mid sixties in a situation where it was a big deal for a black child to go to a white school, why there had been so much resistance to Brown in decades worth of that in Texas. So the idea was to tell the stories of people using my life, using things that happen. And fortunately, I had fortunately, unfortunately, I had that hook of having done this thing that made me a a figure of a minor figure of history in this little town that that was a good jumping off place to begin and talk about the story of Texas and why we got to that point where that was something that was necessary and was considered a controversial thing to do. So what was it like desegregating your school? And I know that was a big decision for your parents to send you to the white school. Your mother was a schoolteacher at the Booker T. Washington School that she taught. And so you they made the decision to send you to an all white school. Did you I didn't get the sense from what you shared that you had violent responses to your presence. But I did get the sense that there was tension and I'm not asking you to talk about it if you're not comfortable. But I'm just curious about that a little bit. No, I heard later on that there were threats against my family, but no, no, nothing that impacted me in that particular way. I was not escorted into the school. My father drove me and dropped me off and I just started as if it were. I didn't take the bus and there was a bus. And so I think obviously there was a sense of thinking that maybe that was a bridge too far. Yeah, that would be better if he took me. But there was an agreement from the school district and my parents and the media, what was the media at that time, the one newspaper that we would make would not make a big deal about it. And that, yeah, I wouldn't make a big deal about it. And I would just show up and be there and get started. It was a difficult time. I had a I mean, I knew that it was a big deal that because I could tell by the way people were talking about it. I had a relative who was very close to us, very close to my mother, who lived in Houston, and she went off to Sackowitz. Sackowitz was the big department store and fancy place and bought, you know, lots and lots of clothes. I mean, I had clothes, but she wanted certain kind of clothes. You know, she wanted me to, you know, I could go for days with not, you know, with different outfits. Not repeating. Yes. Not repeating. Not repeating anything. And, you know, so I had a sense that that was her. That was her contribution, right? That this is how she was going to support me in all of this. So I knew it was a big deal. I would say tension was more the feeling. I mean, my teacher, Mrs. Daughtry, who was my first grade teacher. We all know our first grade teachers. Yes. Yes. And Mrs. Gilliland, my second grade teacher. Those these would be the the formative moments there. They were just fantastic to me. They were deeply supportive. And, you know, I've said this, I didn't think about this until after I wrote the book that maybe one of the reasons, in addition to being stellar human beings, the fact that my mother was a teacher, I wonder if that this was not some professional courtesy that was going on there and thinking in the way they handled me. Some of the kids were nice and some of them weren't. You know, I had a sense that some people, some of them went out of their way to be friendly. And maybe their parents had encouraged that, or maybe it was just on their own. And some of them were pretty could be pretty nasty, or you could be going along and everything is OK. And then then they would say something that let you know that, wait a minute, it's not OK, but it's not OK. It's not completely OK. Or I talk about people who would be friendly to me in school, but then when they saw me out of places at the out of out of that context, exactly with their parents or their relatives, they would be standoffish. And that, too, made me think, you know, about race and think about the position that we were in. You know, why would people who I, since really liked me, you can kind of tell when people are feigning or what they mean it. But they love their parents, too. And and there's and how hard it is. And my father used to talk about this and say, you know, your friends could want to do what is right. They know what's right, but they can't do it because their community will not allow them. If their community will reject them and people are no one wants to be rejected. I mean, for, you know, whatever they felt about me, we love our parents and our relatives and we put up with them and we do things that, you know, we, you know, we accept things that we don't think are right because we don't want to fall out of their favor. So there was just a it's a complicated thing and made more complicated when because some of the black students after segregation was ended and they forcibly made everybody join together who felt that I had been the reason for this and they resented the loss of their school. So I had it for both sides in some ways. So that's what you're talking about. You're referring to when the schools were when all the schools were integrated, not just you going to. Yeah. And that's when. OK. And the black when they when they struck down the court struck down freedom of choice plans. And so the schools became integrated and Booker T. Washington sees to be what it had been in the community for many, many years. And I think the kids got it. They've gotten it garbled. I was sort of a it was as if I had caused that. But I obviously I didn't. Right. Legal decision. But I was the symbol, I say a symbol of a loss and there was a real loss for them. You talk about that a little bit about about how the segregated schools and the community and it seemed like you had a really strong black community that you were a part of, although you went to a white school. There was a sense of loss or change. And I've heard this. There's all kinds of debates about this when we look at the issue of segregation. Right. And I've heard from my own family, my own mother talked about this, about growing up in a segregated community, how things change after segregation. So what was what was the conversation within the black community that you recall around that time when the schools were desegregated? Well, you know, there was anger. I mean, I talk about a kid who basically was hitting me whom I didn't know, you know, this surreal experience of having being attacked, physically attacked by somebody that you don't know who they are. I knew what the problem was. I mean, I knew why he didn't like me, but I didn't know who he was. And that was a theme, you know, throughout my childhood that people knew who I was. I didn't know who they were. And some people liked what I represented and other people didn't. And I would be in these situations facing hostile people thinking, you know, who are you? I mean, what is this? I know what it's about, but why do you think that I am responsible for this? What I heard later from my mother was becoming a bit disillusioned because one of the things that happened when they integrated the schools was that across the South is that many of the teachers in black schools were taken out of the classroom. And there was integration of the kids, but not integration of the power structure. Integration, because white parents did not want black teachers teaching their kids. So black kids lost the role models. Yeah, that's important. And white kids lost the opportunity to have black people as role models, as models. So, you know, it's like Blackstone, the husband and wife, the two become one and the one was him. And here it is a similar thing. There was integration, but it was all one way. Black people had to come to whiteness. White people didn't come to blackness in any kind of way. It didn't change the power structure. So, yeah, that was, you know, it's hard to talk about this because I don't want to sound like I'm romanticizing segregation. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not, you can't have a system of dual citizenship, of legalized duals, you know, inferior status for an American citizen. So we just can't do that. We have to come up with something different. But the reality is that for some people that sense of community, because the teachers lived in the community, they socialized with the parents, they went to the same churches, all those things. I loved my first grade teacher, but she didn't live in our community. She didn't socialize. So we were Texans, but we were separated by race. And we could meet at some places, but it wasn't the kind of organic situation, close situation that existed among teachers and students from Booker T. Washington. Well, I like the point you raise about that white students lost the opportunity to be taught by black teachers. I think that's a really important point. That's something that gets lost with integration, because that would change the way people see black people, I think overall, that could have changed the way, the perceptions of the qualities of black people, whatever those qualities might be, right? So I think that's a really good point. And I appreciate you sharing that because I know that was not an easy time period in your life. And I feel like, you talk so casually about it, which I appreciate, but I mean, this is a big deal that you integrated a school. I mean, during a time where it could have been very challenging. So I'm glad you shared that. When I was reading the book, I remember being, I've known you for years and seen you at conferences and done panels and stuff with you before, but I never knew your personal story. And I was thinking like, that's a big load to carry, like as a young child, but it seemed like you handled it very well. So I just wanted to thank you for sharing that story with the wide audience that you now have shared that story because it's a story about integration that will allow people to understand it from a very personal perspective. So I think it's very important. Well, thank you. While I was working on this, after I finished the book, actually, I found an essay that I had written some years ago. And it must have been a long time ago because it was like courier type, you know what I'm saying? It was a long time ago. And about this experience, and it could have been a, you know, it was basically a Texas town, but written before the Hemings is a Monticello. I don't remember, it was so long ago, I don't remember doing it. And I think what I did recently is better than that, but basically the same things, which means that this is something that has been on my mind a long time that I had sort of buried after I went off into Hemings and Jefferson land, but something that I had wanted to write about and did write about, but never, you know, submitted it anywhere or anything. But it kind of is a big deal. You know, I don't, I don't, I haven't thought of it that way in, you know, for most of my life, but it's a big deal. I have kids of my own. I don't know that I would have done that. Yeah, I was thinking about that when I read it. I sent them to a school that was predominantly white, but not, they weren't the only black kids there where they were black teachers. And so, I mean, it wasn't like that, but what I'm, the difference is, I think my parents, they were at a moment, 64, 65, Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, black people were on the move. Everybody was doing stuff. Everybody was doing their part for Race-Up Lift. Everybody was doing that. So I can't replicate that moment when my kids were that age, because we were beyond that. There were other issues that were involved, but not that. And so I think they did that in the spirit of the moment. Right. So let's talk a little about Texas history. You know, you were right in saying that Texas history is taught in two different grades, right? I think it's, is it fourth and seventh or fifth and seventh? Fourth and seventh. It was for me. Yeah, it still is. It still is, actually. So what is the grand narrative of Texas and how does your story about Texas either mirror that or diverge from it? Well, the grand narrative of Texas, of Texas that people mainly know is of this state that of independent people who forged a place in the wilderness, in an empty land, a near empty land that forged a place in the wilderness and created at some point, they're got, you know, threw off the Mexican oppressors and started their own republic and then joined the United States and, you know, a lost cause, became a part of the lost cause and then discovered oil. Became, you know, cattle ranch and oil. I mean, there's a narrative about Texas that's very much set by Hollywood. And, you know, things that we see on television, the story of the West, which it is a part of the West. And there's that aspect of it, but burying the part about the enslavers, about the people who had slave plantations. It was a slave society and people don't think of it that way. And that the hidden narrative is the narrative that hides my great-great-great grandparents on my mother's side. It can be traced back to at least the 1820s in Texas before it's a republic and certainly before it's a state on both sides actually before it's a state. So this idea that you can hide that, that that's not a part of the understanding means that there are misunderstandings about Texas and stuff happens there and people wonder, what's that about? This race business, what does it have to do with cowboys? What does it have to do with cattle ranchers and oil? And that plantation society and the legacies of that shaped my hometown. And that's part of my family history and part of my family's story. So there's a grand narrative, but there's a narrative that people are trying to have been trying to complicate as we say in history. And then now I see, I gather from the newspapers, there's a reaction. There's a strong reaction to it. Strong reaction to that. And I wonder how that effort's gonna go because I've asked, how do you teach about the Texas Republic without talking about the Constitution? Right, and so what is it about? I mean, I think you put actually parts of the text of the Constitution in the book, right? Yes. What part, I mean, I appreciated that because I always talk about primary documents and how when we talk about, there's a nostalgic perspective about the past, like you've been sharing here. But then there's also, if we look at the actual primary documents, we can understand what people are responding to. And so why did you choose to put that in? And what is in there that you think we needed to know about? Well, I think I put it in there to have people think seriously about the words you use, the grand narrative of this little republic, this plucky little republic that starts and creates the sort of Texas spirit of independence and all those kinds of things. But to understand that, that was in large measure in support of slavery. I mean, they had other problems, obviously, different cultures, different language, religion. There were points of tension there, but the Texans were concerned and were insecure about the Mexican position on slavery. And they looked the other way with the Texians because they initially wanted them there to sort of be a bulwark against and help, fend off Comanches and other people, Indian people who were there who claimed the land as well. But then this conflict over different understandings about what people would say a way of life led to this break. So what are we supposed to do with that? How are people who want to be forward thinking in Texas, who want a Texas that belongs to everybody, can't just pretend that that didn't happen. Right. I think, yeah, part of the way they're pitching, and we saw this, I think it was just yesterday, the day before that our governor and Greg Abbott signed a law established in the 1836 project, which is now sort of modeled after Trump's 1776 commission. And they say that they want to promote a patriotic education. And so I'm wondering what is patriotism? And why is it if we present history as it was and talk about the documents and we're telling stories about native people and people of African descent who contributed to this history, how is that not patriotic? I don't understand that. I don't understand it either. I don't understand patriotism, just as I wouldn't understand a concept of love that made you say that the person that you love is perfect and that you can't love them unless they are perfect. Like parents who have kids and everybody else is always wrong. The teacher's wrong, the kids are wrong, your kid is always right. Or any person you love, not recognizing weakness as yourself, not recognizing where we fall short with the hope of making them better. And so I think that to me is self-indulgent to think about love in that way. It's all about your feelings, all about you and your response instead of thinking, look, we have this document, this primary document that unlike the United States Constitution that kind of tiptoes around the issue of slavery, persons hurled to service, versus this thing that is sort of a full-throated endorsement and acceptance of slavery and says that people of African descent can't be citizens. You can't just skip over though, you can't redact those provisions and just look at the stuff that you like. You have to deal forthrightly with it and say, you know, they were wrong. If you believe they were wrong, if you believe that slavery was wrong, if you believe that black people should be citizens, then there's no way to square that with what they're doing without saying, they were wrong about that. But, and I guess you could say, we're gonna go forward with this, but not acknowledging that. I just, it would be, it's not a matter of interpretation. It's like somebody looking at a document and say, well, there are two ways to see it. That's point blank in the Constitution. And how are they getting around that? I don't know. I mean, my thought as a professor is that you teach, you just teach the history and we can't control how students respond, you know, to how, we can't control how students feel. And we don't have, I think a good instructor would just say, these are the experiences from all these different perspectives. This is experience from a Comanche. This is experience from a person of African descent. This is experience of somebody of Anglo descent. This is a person of Mexican. These are how people experience a particular moment. And I think you really do a great job of that in throughout the book, throughout the whole book. You're talking about the history, like the origin stories in that section where you're talking about Esteban, right? And I love what you said. If you could say a little bit about this notion of him being an interpreter and knowing languages and how that would change if you had learned that in your fourth grade or your seventh grade, Texas history class, how that would have changed the way you see either yourself or see American history. Well, you know, we mentioned Esteban. We call him Esteban. I guess Estebanico is the most common usage when they described him diminutive. We talked about him in passing, but I think it would have made a difference if we don't, we have an origin story in Africans in America that is just about plantation slavery. Just about Jamestown as if, you know, people of African descent here are the creation of British people. Right, right. Essentially. That's an important inflection point, but you should know that there were people of African descent in the area that was Texas and Mexico 100 years before Jamestown in St. Augustine, they're there as settlements, in settlements there. And, you know, they spoke a different language, but that doesn't mean that there were not points of commonality with English speaking enslaved people. They were both people, groups of people who had been brought from Africa to be enslaved and who lived under white supremacy. To my mind, that is a more important connector than the fact that Europeans spoke different language and carved up different parts in the United States and the British one, you know? And so what? We don't, we shouldn't define ourselves by how our captors viewed themselves and their societies. They would have been treated if a black person escaped from, you know, St. Augustine or whatever was brought from there up to Virginia or, you know, vice versa, they'd be treated the same way. They'd be seen the same way. So I think an origin story about a person who was, who was a translator, who was for a time when they were away from Spanish settlements had to have been treated as more equal because they were trying to survive. They dwindled 300 down to four walking across Texas. Miles and miles. Miles and miles across Texas and Mexico or over to the Pacific Seaboard. And black people, others who came with the Spanish and who broke away from them and some went down to Vera Cruz and, you know, made a genetic mark on the people there. And, you know, to know that black people did lots of things. There's constant effort to limit the capabilities and the experiences of black people in this language business I thought was intriguing to me because, you know, I talk about this in the book and how exasperating it is when people have asked me over the years, you know, how did James and Sally Hemings, you know, learn to speak French? Like, you know, like they, black people speaking French, you know, what is, what's going on with that? How could that happen? And it's this sense of limitation. Questions that I don't think would have been asked about a white person, say, who had been taken over to France as a servant. No one would be asking after five years living there, how did he learn how to speak French? Exactly, exactly. So the sense of limitation, if you tell, if you, if children have a broader sense of, you know, the capabilities of people of African descent, it just shapes the way you see black people in general. I agree, I agree with that. Thank you. Another point in the book that I thought was really interesting was when you talked about where you were from, was in Montgomery County, is that correct? That's right. I was born in Polk County. Yeah, okay. When I was about six months old, my parents moved to Congo, which is in Montgomery County. Right. So you talk about a few racial incidents that occurred there before you, before you were there, before you were born. There were a few lynchings that have, I'm calling them lynchings. Is that, is that how you would characterize? I mean, these are, Yes, yes, yes. Did you grow up, did you care about those stories as well? Were they part of the lore? And were you worried about the KKK or other racialized racial violence activities why you were growing up there? I was not worried about the clan when I was there, even though it may, may I should have been because they were active in this area. I mean, I was in childhood, you know, Yeah, yeah. I mean, I knew that store owners were sometimes not nice to us. I knew, I understand I stood about all of that, but I don't think I did not live under the idea that I was under constant threat of violence, even though I knew that there was tension in the air. And there's just, again, it's this thing you don't know exactly where this comes from. But this was a town that had a history of lynching. A man was burned at the stake on Courthouse Square, on the Courthouse Square in the 1920s. Which is the same place where people were auctioned off in the 1820s or not 1820s, probably 1840s, 1850s. Yeah, in courthouses and in a place where I worked just before I went off to law school. And this history in this place, they're sort of the atmosphere, it doesn't leave the atmosphere, I think when you have things like that happen, it shapes the way people view things. And very famously, well, my grandfather told me the story of Bob White, who had been accused of raping a white woman in Livingston. And while he was incarcerated, when he was being held in the jail, the Texas Rangers took him out every night and tied him to a tree and whipped him until he confessed. This was a case, and I did not know this until I was working on the book. Oh, wow. That went all the way up to the Supreme Court. I teach criminal procedure. And the court says, not surprisingly, I guess, that taking somebody out and tying him to a tree and whipping them until they confessed was a violation of the due process. Right. And sent it back down. Now, I teach this stuff, but I use Brown versus Mississippi. Okay. I was surprised they sent it back down. Yeah, for a new trial. Yeah, that was really interesting. And sent it right back to the same community at first. Yeah, they sent it to, well, they had been in Livingston and then they had to change your venue to Conroe, my two towns, because allegedly, well, because Conroe, I mean, everybody knew these people. My grandfather knew Bob White. He knew the Cochranes. He knew all the parties. There's even smaller than Conroe. So they sent it there. And while the trial was pending, the husband walks into the courtroom and shoots Bob White, the back of the head, killing him instantly, hands the pistol to the bailiff or some official there. And very quickly he's tried, he is tried, but then he's quit it like in two or three minutes and everybody cheers and he was never punished for that. And that really, the thing that, now that I, once I realized that this case had the procedural history of the case, I understood that it went all the way up to the court. And I think I can only imagine that Black people had some sense of hope because it went up and then it came back and they thought, okay, maybe we will have some justice here and he kills him and then nothing happens. And so that, I had relatives who would not spend the night in Conroe because of that, because it just, it was, it's so disgusted people. You know, lynching the mob, I mean, that just makes you wonder about human nature, right? You know, people coming to a lynching, like it's a picnic or something like that. It's smiling in front of burning bodies. Exactly, exactly. But the idea that you could be in a courtroom and do this and nothing happened, then all hope is lost essentially is the way people saw that. That's interesting because there's, there might be a dissertation topic in this because there's a student, a former student of mine wrote a paper and I think it was published in one of the Texas journals on a guy named Hal Geiger, who was an African-American man, who was a lawyer representing some Black women and he was shot in court because the judge did not like the tone. So he didn't give him enough deference in court. He was an attorney. So I'm just saying, here's the second Texas courtroom where they were shot. Yeah, like, oh my goodness, who thought about that, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you hear these kinds of stories, then you don't really wonder about what's happening now. I mean, it's hard to erase this stuff to get rid of all of this in a, you know, I mean, I think the, you know, Sandra Day O'Connor's notion that, well, 25 years from now, this all be over. It's like, no, this could take a long time. Yeah, change form. Yeah. So I want to close with some thoughts about Juneteenth. You know, one of the things that I said in my, I reviewed the book and I said, you know- And thank you very much. There's a very thoughtful review. Oh, thank you. I actually wanted to talk more about the Supreme Court case, but I didn't want to give it away. So I didn't say so much about that, but I had, well, two things I want to say. One, completely, before we get to Juneteenth, I grew up in California and I used to go, growing up, we would go to Six Flags. Six Flags, it was called Six Flags Magic Mountain. And I had no idea that it came from Texas and I had no idea that it came from the Six Flags that flew over Texas. I had no idea. And I love how you always said in the book, over Texas. You know, every time you talk about Six Flags, you don't think about it as Six Flags. It flew over Texas. Over Texas. So I thought that was really, really interesting. And I thought, how many people go to this amusement park and not have no idea that there's a connection to Texas and that the historical connection is the Six Flags. And I think that you make a great point that Texas is a wonderful state to study, to understand American history in a way because of the Six Flags that flew over is what I thought you were saying. Yeah. Okay, so that was just one little side point. But my thing about Juneteenth was I was saying that for the readers that pick up this book, if you're looking for these stories about what people do all day and during Juneteenth celebrations, they're not gonna have that. This is really a history and a memoir but a history of Texas through the eyes of Juneteenth. And that's sort of how you came to it is what I thought. But I would love to know like, what did you do to celebrate Juneteenth? I mean, this is becoming such a huge national and in some places other countries are now starting to recognize that whether it's a holiday that's celebrated that corporations are giving people the day off. There are some counties and cities that are also making it. And there's some states have made it a holiday outside of Texas that did. So I would love to know what you grew up doing during Juneteenth. I know you ate some unusual foods, right? Yeah. Well, we drank red soda water and we had barbecue. There were some people, there's a tradition of barbecued goat. I don't know where that came from and our family didn't partake of that, but others did traditional kind of Southern fare. And in our family, we made tamales. That's very Texas too, right? That's very Texas too. I mean, to have these groups, these foods together, you have soul food, but people would recognize as Southern black cuisine and barbecuing and red soda water. I don't know where the red soda water came in. I mean, all of these Chinese traditions sometimes have stories grafted onto them. I sense heard that red was supposed to represent the blood that had been shed in slavery. Interesting. I mean, I'd not heard that until recently, but there's something about red, the strawberry pie that some people do, red soda water. And some people suggest hibiscus was the thing that would have, hibiscus tea, which would have people wouldn't have had big red. Right. So yeah, that's what we did. And we ran around and drank too much soda water, which we didn't get very much of in those days because that was not something we did. We didn't drink soda every day. And we threw firecrackers, which is fun as below 10, I can't believe that they let us have matches and firecrackers, but it was, that was what they did in those days. So yeah, it was a day of sort of unbridled celebration. It was sort of a Black 4th of July. It's the way I would have seen it then. That's great. Well, one last question, what would you want people to take away from this book on Juneteenth? If there was one message or do you have one message that you want people to take away? Well, I have lots of messages, but one thing that I do think of is listening to your grandparents, take your family histories, pay attention to that. I have so much regret for having had my great grandmother for 11 years and not listened seriously to the things that she was saying and not ask her more about her lives. We are all part of the history of our states and our country, and one way of keeping that alive is to talk to the elders and make sure you take their stories down. Well, on that note, I wanna thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful book on Juneteenth. For those that are watching, if you haven't read it, please go out and get it. It's an excellent education on the history of Texas, but also a wonderful memoir of a phenomenal scholar. So thank you so much, Professor Gordon. You're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for inviting me. Bye-bye. Our thanks to Dr. Barry and Professor Gordon Reed. Signed copies of On Juneteenth are available at lbjstore.com. Thanks also to our program's sponsors, the Moody Foundation and St. David's Healthcare. We depend on your membership support to produce programming like this. If you aren't already a member, please consider joining the Friends of the LBJ Library at lbjlibrary.org. Our next program on June 29th will feature former US Senator and Virginia Governor Chuck Robb. We'll talk about his new memoir in the arena. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.