On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Author:Annette Gordon-Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-03-29T21:33:58+00:00

CHAPTER

5

Remember the Alamo

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” With those famous words, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk, identifies the central dilemma facing Black people in the United States—that, to a great degree, “Blackness” and “Americanness” have been cast in opposition to one another, a predicament created by the details of history and the desires of others. What has it meant (what does it mean) for Blacks to claim Americanness while substantial numbers of their fellow Americans reject the idea that Blacks can be true Americans? And that they have used their greater numbers to make that rejection the basis of law and social policy?

When Du Bois wrote that in 1903, he had every reason to focus on Black double consciousness. The country was not yet a decade beyond the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that as a matter of official policy, when it came to matters of race, the United States could move on “separate but equal” tracks, even though it was obvious to all that the “separate” facilities, schools, and the like, created for Black people were not “equal.” There could be first-class citizenship and second-class citizenship in the American republic. The “twoness,” then, was externally imposed and, as always in history, a different path could have been taken. Almost from the very beginning of their time in North America, Blacks have shown their deep and patriotic attachment to the country they helped to build, even as they have been utterly realistic about the way many of their fellow countrymen viewed them. Persisting in the face of that reality has been a struggle of centuries.

What are we then to make of Black Texans, who may feel the “twoness” Du Bois described when thinking about their status as Americans, but also have to confront the same double consciousness when considering their place in Texas. This may be yet another instance of making Texas “exceptional”—and again turning it into a small version of an “exceptional” United States—when residents of other states may be in a similar position. African Americans in all the states of the former Confederacy, just for example, are potentially in the position of loving a place that was deeply oppressive to their ancestors. What sane Black person could feel nostalgia for the so-called “Golden Age of Virginia,” the period from the 1730s to the 1760s? Texas has, however, pushed itself into national and international consciousness in a way that only one other place in the United States—New York City, or perhaps California—can match. So, Texans are not believing things about their exceptionalism (in a good way or bad way) all by themselves. The image keeps returning to them in an endless feedback loop.

My first conscious memory of thinking about Texas as a distinct place was of a tragedy. While I was visiting my grandparents’ house, President John F.

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