Mark Karlin: Juneteenth Is a Rebuke to the Racism of Greg Abbott and the Slave State History of Texas

The white heroic “noble cause” myth of the Alamo is a lie (Jonathan Cutrer)

June 19, 2021

BuzzFlash:“Making Good Trouble Since May of 2000”

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash Short Takes

If you think that Juneteenth is merely a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln signed in January of 1863, then please be advised that Juneteenth had its origins in the state of slavery in Texas. Needless to say, it would be a challenge to find Southern slaveholders who released their slaves as a result of Lincoln’s decree. Lincoln was assassinated on April 15 of 1865, but it was not until June 19 of that year that Union General Gordon Granger notified, in person, enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, through “Order Number 3,” that they were now free.

It is not widely noted in news accounts of the newest federal holiday that Juneteenth is named after the date that the last significant group of these slaves, numbering some 250,000 in Galveston, were informed of their freedom, two months after the Civil War had ended. Those “chattel property” were finally given back their lives, even though some plantation owners still delayed the liberation.

Governor Greg Abbott’s latest affront to America’s original sin, slavery, comes via his forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory while promoting a fictional account of why Texas fought a war with Mexico, “The 1836 Project.” It ennobles Texas’s (which was part of Mexico at the time) successful effort to become an independent republic in 1836 as a heroic cause. There were a number of reasons for the war, but the key motivation was to ensure Texas could continue slavery, which was forbidden by Mexico. “The Republic of Texas” joined the United States, as a slave-owning state, in 1845, taking up arms with the Confederacy in 1861. “The 1836 Project” is a stunning whitewash of these facts and others concerning the brutality of slavery in Texas.

Abbott doesn’t want it to be known that slave owners in Galveston didn’t tell the Black Americans whom they “owned” that they were free even two months after the Civil War. There’s a lot Abbott wants to cover up.

As NPR noted in an article about the origins of Juneteenth:

When Gen. Granger arrived in Galveston, there still existed around 250,000 slaves and they were not all freed immediately, or even soon. It was not uncommon for slave owners, unwilling to give up free labor, to refuse to release their slaves until forced to, in person, by a representative of the government, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in his explainer. Some would wait until one final harvest was complete, and some would just outright refuse to submit. It was a perilous time for black people, and some former slaves who were freed or attempted to get free were attacked and killed.

For Confederate states like Texas, even before Juneteenth, there existed a "desire to hold on to that system as long as they could," Walsh explained to NPR.

Before the reading of General Order Number 3, many slave owners in Confederate states simply chose not to tell their slaves about the Emancipation Proclamation and did not honor it. They got away with it because, before winning the war, Union soldiers were largely unable to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in Southern states. Still, even though slavery in America would not truly come to an end until the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation still played a pivotal role in that process, historian Lonnie Bunch told NPR in 2013.

In short, Abbott, by promoting “The 1836 Project” and banning Critical Race Theory is boosting a false history that diminishes how slavery motivated Texas’s war with Mexico while bestowing great nobility on the likes of those who fought and lost at the Alamo.

Three critics of Abbott’s attempt to inculcate the fiction of the “noble heroic cause” in Texas schools recently wrote a book appropriately entitled, “Forget the Alamo.” A review of their attempt to recover the true motivation behind the battle to create “The Republic of Texas” notes:

The book challenges what the authors refer to as the “Heroic Anglo Narrative.” The traditional telling, which Texas public schools are still required to teach, glorifies the nearly 200 men who came to fight in an insurrection against Mexico in 1836. The devastation at the Alamo turned those men into martyrs leaving behind the prevailing story that they died for liberty and justice. Yet the authors of Forget the Alamo argue that the entire Texas Revolt—“which wasn’t really a revolt at all”—had more to do with protecting slavery from Mexico’s abolitionist government. As they explain it, and as Chicano writers, activists, and communities have long agreed, the events that occurred at the Alamo have been mythologized and used to demonize Mexicans in Texas history and obscure the role of slavery.

By creating an independent Texas, white patriarchal racist rule was allowed, as blacks remained enslaved and Mexicans became third-class residents on their own land.

Juneteenth informs us of so much about the state of Neo-Confederate politics in 2021. We are besieged by Red State denialists who once again wish to treat Blacks and Mexicans as non-citizens or “infectious” migrants.

Juneteenth also reveals how the white “lost cause” Neo-Confederates will lie, as the case of Juneteenth in Galveston exemplifies, to preserve white power over people of a different skin pigment.

So, celebrate Juneteenth as a day when 250,000 slaves, the last large population in the South, learned of their freedom. Then and now, through the likes of Greg Abbott and other white patriarchal supremacists, nefarious efforts to rewrite history continue. Juneteenth reveals the betrayal of the Texas antebellum oligarchs, who kept the news of liberation from the people whom they enslaved.

Greg Abbott would have fit right in. Abbott, through his punitive voter suppression laws, wants to treat the descendants of the 250,000 Black Americans freed in Galveston as ghosts who don’t merit the right to vote.

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