“So if I told my family story, I would be telling that story.” “Slavery helped to create and maintain the racial hierarchy in Texas and all throughout the South,” she said. Traditionally, narratives of the state’s past have emphasized cattle, oil and gunslingers, while ignoring the East Texas plantations that relied on enslaved labor, including her ancestors who, she said, “were brought over as enslaved people with whites who came to Texas in order to extend the cotton empire into that region.”

In writing the book, she said she wanted in part to tell a more complete history of Texas. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School, is herself a descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s. Gordon-Reed, a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and the Carl M. Her talk was based on “On Juneteenth,” which was released last May, a little more than a month before Juneteenth was made a federal holiday. Gordon-Reed, the first African American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History and one of the most authoritative voices on race and history in America, spoke at James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University on Thursday for VCU Libraries‘ 21st annual Black History Month Lecture. “But the takeaway is that we each have a role to play to try to fulfill that promise.” That’s what Jefferson believed,” Gordon-Reed said. That things are going to get better and better and better. I know that as a historian, I’m not supposed to believe that there’s inevitable progress. And the book really shows one family’s and one society’s part in that journey. “The country’s on a journey to try to realize the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. is on a journey to live up to its founding ideals, and that all Americans have a part to play. Throughout the book, she said, is the message that the U.S. Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s 2021 book “ On Juneteenth” weaves together American history, family chronicle and memoir to tell the story of Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S., and specifically the day slavery ended in Texas – June 19, 1865.

On juneteenth author gordon reed