Daily Archives: June 27, 2021

Once again, the international community commemorates the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture in the last week of June.

A global phenomenon, torture prompted the international community to adopt the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).

It entered into force 34 years ago on June 26, 1987. With 171 state parties and 81 signatories, the treaty has successfully garnered universal ratification. But has it resulted in universal implementation?

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As a member of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, I have interacted with many victims of torture who lived to tell their stories.

My husband, Edsil Bacalso, is one of them. Taken by seven armed men and forced inside a red car with no license plate, he was taken to Camp Lapulapu in Cebu City where he was interrogated day and night for his alleged involvement in the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Later transferred to a safe house owned by a former general, he was deprived of food, water and sleep and stripped naked with his feet and neck tied like a pig.

He was forced to sign a document stating that he was the finance officer of the National Democratic Front in Central Visayas. He and another disappeared were ordered to dig their own graves. The other person escaped when the guards were drunk and informed me of my husbands whereabouts.

Knowing that the other person had escaped and fearing that he would testify, the military released my husband in a cemetery near his parents house. This happened two months after our marriage in 1988.

In faraway Argentina, a former Society of the Divine Wordpriest, Patrick Rice, was made to disappear on Oct. 11, 1976, at the height of the dictatorship.

He was taken to the Naval School of the Mechanics (ESMA)in Buenos Aires where he was brutally tortured. To get a glimpse of his torture, one can read an excerpt of his testimony in Case 2450 of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to wit:

They took me inside a building and put on more handcuffs, chaining me to the wall at floor level with my arms outstretched They began to interrogate me, accusing me of collaborating with the terrorists, and asking me about people involved with these groups ... I explained to them that I was a priest, that I did my pastoral work there, but that I spent most of the day working on a construction project on the Avenida La Plata/Estados Unidos, and that I didn't know anything about what they were taking about. One of them then told me to lie down (my handcuffed hands were behind my back). As soon as I got into this position, one of those who had been sitting at the side began to beat me all over my body and to put something hard like a pistol against me, and so on. I asked them who they were to be treating me this way, and they told me that they were the Triple A. Then they told me that they were going to wash out my mouth, and one grabbed hold of my head and nose and they began to pour water into my mouth from a hose or a kettle until they choked me

With international pressure, Patrick was freed but deported. He later returned to Argentina and spent the rest of his life working with families of victims of enforced disappearances until his untimely death in 2010.

I visited the torture chambers of the former ESMA that witnessed the torture of Argentinas desaparecidos, or disappeared, during the dictatorship. The basement was the place where pregnant victims were made to deliver their babies and drink the colostrum before being taken away by helicopter to be thrown into the ocean.

A decade after Patricks death, Fatima Rice Cabrera, a church worker who was tortured with him and who later became his wife, testified in court.She recognized one of six perpetrators on trial, Guglielminetti Raul. The six were convicted:Raul was sentenced for reclusion perpetua,Gallone Carlos received 25 years house arrest,Comesana Eduardo got house arrest for life, while Grosso Juan, Mingorance Fausto and Romero Rafael were all jailed for seven years.

Fatima recalled that two years earlier, in 2008, Patrick gave a detailed testimony. Sad that he did not live to witness victory in the final judgment, Fatima likewise felt accompanied by his indefatigable struggle for memory, truth and justice.On the last day of the trial, I felt a release and a healing sensation that I am still processing.

A friend from El Salvador, Neris Gonzales, testified before the Federal Court of West Palm Beach in July 2002 that she was repeatedly raped, burned with cigarettes and given electric shocks.

She was forced to lie under a metal bed while four soldiers sat on the sides and rocked back and forth trying to crush her unborn baby. Pregnant during the torture, she said: I was feeling my own torture, but I was also feeling the torture of my son."

Worth commending was Neris courage to face two retired Salvadoran generals, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, whom she holds responsible for her torture in El Salvador.

While the CAT and the International Declaration of Human Rights both provide that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, torture persists globally.

In 2020, the UN secretary-general revealed that the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture visited more than 1,000 prisons and other institutions and interviewed 1,000 detainees, officials, law enforcement people and medical staff, which confirmed that torture continues to happen in all nooks and corners of the world.

Innumerable nameless torture victims cry out for justice. Many more are being victimized in the context of the pandemic. The universal implementation of the Convention Against Torture that entered into force 34 years ago still remains a dream to be realized.

Reminiscent of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ several centuries ago, torture continues in an age when there is no room for torture in a supposedly civilized world.

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole Roman cohort around Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they knelt down before Him and mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! They spat on Him, and took the reed and began to beat Him on the head. After they had mocked Him, they took the scarlet robe off Him and put His own garments back on Him, and led Him away to crucify Him. (Matthew 27: 27-31)

End torture NOW!

Mary Aileen D. Bacalso is the president of the International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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Torture is a scourge that refuses to go away - Union of Catholic Asian News

Charlie Chubby Manning Walker learned to play guitar after being hit by a car. He was 15 when the car popped the pavement, slammed into him from behind, and left him with a broken arm and shoulder. Confined to a bed for a couple months, there was little he could do. But he somehow had just enough range of motion left to hold a guitar, make chord shapes, and strum. Fuck, he figured, Im just gonna practice guitar.

Some 15 years later, Manning Walker found himself confined again, this time to his London flat during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the U.K. The band he fronts, Chubby and the Gang, had released their debut, Speed Kills, in January 2020 on the local punk label Static Shock Records; there was good chatter at home and abroad, the kind you could spend a full year touring off of, until that became impossible. Not all momentum was lost the band signed a new deal with Partisan Records, home of Idles and Fontaines D.C., last spring but Manning Walker, whod spent well over a decade touring in bands from Londons punk and hardcore scene, was now holed up at home unable to do any of that. He couldnt even fall back on his day job as a union electrician on film sets.

I had six weeks to just fucking I dont know, the singer, 30, remembers on a recent Zoom call. I was lost for six weeks like, What am I gonna do?'

The answer was obvious when it came along: Fuck, he figured, Ill write some songs.

Speed Kills was like 2,000 mile-per-hour rock & roll, one ballad, one acoustic song, says Jonah Falco, the drummer for Toronto hardcore heroes Fucked Up, who now lives in London and produced both Chubby albums. The Mutts Nuts, theres four or five stations of total musical relief. Its like these rolling hills of taste, and its really great to see that flow going through.

Though Chubby and the Gang demoed, developed, and fine-tuned The Mutts Nuts over several months, the songs still feel tied to Manning Walkers flat. Theres a pervasive sense of being trapped trapped in dead-end jobs, in an unfair criminal justice system, by longing, depression, and expectation, the illusion of meritocracy, and circumstances beyond ones control that those in power have determined will seal your fate anyway.

On early single Lightning Dont Strike Twice, Manning Walker fumes at the inequality of opportunity, capturing the way so many are screwed no matter what they do by mixing his metaphors: They say lightning dont strike twice/But these still feel like loaded dice. Coming Up Tough takes aim at the carceral states lack of interest in rehabilitation, inspired by a family member who, at a young age, got into a fight that went wrong, then spent 20 years in prison and re-entered a world that wanted nothing to do with him: How can you prove them wrong/If no one even gives you a chance? On Its Me Wholl Pay, one of a couple of anthems for this era of stagnant wages and crushing productivity demands, Manning Walker bellows what could be a Chubby and the Gang thesis statement: Sell my soul to the fucking job? No way/If time is money then its me wholl pay/And all the coppers and politicians keep it all in place.

Maybe I felt like the world was closing in, Manning Walker says. Wed just had Brexit cant leave an island now. Cant leave my room because theres Covid. It just felt like the worlds shrinking and I got a lot of time to reflect on things I dont like, so I expressed my dismay by writing songs about that.

If rock & roll is good for anything, its detonating futility with sound and digging up a feeling of possibility from the wreckage. Chubby and the Gang, just two albums in and barely two years old, are already a crack demolition and excavation crew. Manning Walker built the Gang with musicians from his community: He and Tom Razor Hardwick played together in the hardcore band Violent Reaction; Meg Brooks Mills, who joined last year, was a bass shredder around London; drummer Joe McMahon and guitarist Ethan Stahl came out of the hardcore scene in Brighton, an hours drive away. All were seasoned musicians in their own right, and they made it feel like Chubby and the Gang arrived on this Earth fully formed as a band. Speed Kills does not betray the fact that it was recorded in two days, only months after Chubby and the Gang played their first show (Mills predecessor, Luke Austin, was on bass). Unable to spend much time cutting their teeth live due to the pandemic, they stayed sharp last year by practicing and, by Falcos count, doing three rounds of demos over six months before recording The Mutts Nuts.

Falco remains proud of Speed Kills, but credits the work Chubby and the Gang put in with transforming the band into so much more than even just a catalyst for [Manning Walkers] ideas they are their own force. The crux of their sound remains hard and fast rock & roll, but versatility is in their DNA. Pressure is a pitch-perfect pastiche of Manning Walkers beloved Mtorhead; Life on the Bayou lifts some New Orleans boogie for an ode to the deindustrialized docks of Brentford; and closer I Hate the Radio is one of the best songs Nick Lowe never wrote.

When you start off in a subculture, you want to emulate everything, and then the more time you spend in that subculture, the more you try and push the boundaries, Manning Walker says. I spent 15 years doing punk music. I cant shake it off, so anything I do that sounds like Buddy Holly is gonna sound like Buddy Holly as if he was a punk. I just make music that I like, and if they like it, they like it, and if they dont, well Ill be in exactly the same position as I was before.

When Manning Walker was growing up, his parents filled the house with Studio One reggae records and bands like the Ramones. By the time he was a teen, he was already sporting charged hair and a fucking sleeveless jacket. Even with such a punk-friendly upbringing, there was a need to rebel, and Manning Walker found his outlet one day while walking through Camden: a flier for a hardcore show.

I went in, I saw these people jumping on each other, the tempo was up here, and I was just like, This is it, he says. Im sure thousands of people have the same thing, where they just kind of stumble on something. (The artist Spoiler, who would go on to design the memorable, R. Crumb-esque covers for Speed Kills and Mutts Nuts, was, coincidentally, playing in a band that night.)

Manning Walker became a fixture in this hardcore scene, which centered loosely around labels like Static Shock and La Vida Es Un Mus Records. He played in, toured with, and helped out with songwriting for a litany of groups Violent Reaction, Arms Race, Abolition, Crown Court but Chubby and the Gang marked his first time recording tunes that were all his own. I wanted to show people I could do this, Manning Walker says.

That desire was almost monomaniacal, the idea of Chubby and the Gang burning bright in his mind long before the band actually existed. Falco remembers the first time Manning Walker told him about Chubby the Gang: The singer had it all planned out, down to the title of the first record.

Every time we were at the pub, a party, a gig, hed look over at me and be like, Speed Kills, mate, Falco recalls with a laugh. And then eventually it was, Speed Kills, youre gonna record it.

Manning Walker had honed his instincts as a songwriter over the years, but vocalist was a new role for him. When Chubby and the Gang recorded their first single, All Along Uxbridge Road b/w Moscow, Manning Walker went to hit the first note and his voice cracked like a teenagers. Manning Walker admits hes quick to bin something that doesnt immediately work, and he credits Falco with keeping him focused and committed to finding his voice.

The songs on Speed Kills were a level up, sound-wise and writing-wise, Falco says. They were fast, they were reckless, but they needed that Charlie howl. The personality of his ideas sometimes was presenting itself larger than what he was projecting as a vocalist. We had to get that up to the same level, and that was the big challenge.

That howl is deeper and gruffer on The Mutts Nuts, but its also more dexterous, and theres a jolt of new melodic confidence when Mills and Hardwick back him up. To Falcos point, as Manning Walkers voice gets bigger and more assured, so do his ideas. One of the albums most ambitious tracks is White Rags, a sludgy, sinister march with lyrics written after the murder of George Floyd. Institution rotten to the core/Treating prison like an abattoir, Manning Walker sings, voice rough with scorn. Where are all the singers? Theyre quiet, thats strange/When it comes to talk of real change.

Manning Walker admits he was initially unsure about weighing in as a white man from the U.K. But he felt that it was important not only to express solidarity with Black Lives Matter, but to respond to those in England who seemed to see police brutality and systemic racism as a largely American problem.

It wasnt that long ago that Mark Duggan was killed, Manning Walker says, mentioning the 29-year-old man who was killed by police in 2011, setting off an uprising in London. The Independent Police Complaints Commission in the U.K. has a zero percent conviction rate [for murder or manslaughter of a person in police custody]; thats the body that essentially polices the police. You cant tell me, straight-faced, theres no racism in the U.K. within our police system. I wanted to say not only that were in solidarity with everyone in America, but you cannot feel like were free of guilt. (At the time of this interview, the last time a U.K. police officer had been successfully prosecuted for the death of a person in custody was 1971; on June 23rd, a police officer in Birmingham was convicted of manslaughter in the death of former professional footballer Dalian Atkinson.)

Manning Walker traces the political fervor of The Mutts Nuts to those six weeks of lockdown songwriting, when he could reflect and tease things out instead of tossing off some drunken tirade about how I dont like cops or something. Perhaps more than anything else he writes about, Manning Walker is uncompromisingly clear about his politics. The world is so politically charged, he says. Sometimes you need someone to just fucking tell you, thats how I feel, unapologetic, bang.

Chubby and the Gang in London, June 2021.

Owen Harvey for Rolling Stone

Years ago, on tour with his old band Abolition in Hungary, Manning Walker played a show to a room he describes as half-full of fascists. As he told the 101 Part Time Jobs podcast, he neither wanted to compromise, nor let down the other half of the audience. So Abolition hung up a banner behind them onstage that read Fuck Fascists, and, afterwards, spray-painted something similar on a wall outside. The next morning, their photo was plastered on a far-right website and the fear of retribution followed them the rest of the tour. Manning Walker says hes never had to deal with such elements at home, the once frighteningly robust fascist punk contingent in the U.K. having been largely stamped out by older generations. The U.K.s far-right now, Manning Walker says, hides more behind soft nationalism, insidiously careful to avoid being as overt as what he encountered in Hungary.

Those guys were wearing swastikas. They werent gonna say, No, no, Im not like that, Manning Walker says. They were like, This is what we are. Thats why Im so blatant. These guys dont give a fuck, so Im gonna tell you why Im pro-trade-union, or why Im such a fucking lefty. Im not gonna apologize.

Work, in particular, feels central to Chubby and the Gangs politics. The Speed Kills bonus cut Union Dues is characteristically direct Union rock, union roll/Keep scabs on the dole! and on The Mutts Nuts highlights like On the Meter and Beat the Drum, Manning Walker tells vivid stories about the moonlit charms and dark alley dangers that defined his time as a minicab driver in London. He can also go in on the never-ending exploitation and degradation of the working class: On Overachiever, a dizzying hit of Chubby and the Gangs more madcap side, Manning Walker twists glue-sniffing la the Ramones from an act of boredom into a better use of ones time than working to death for an exploitative boss.

In this way, Chubby and the Gang are an important reminder that rock & roll despite decades of bloat and excess is rooted in music made for working people, by working people. The bands music feels in tune with an inflection point for labor movements everywhere, including the music business, where the pandemic has spurred organizing efforts from the National Independent Venue Association to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers to the employees of the indie label company Secretly Group. Manning Walker, for his part, just started paying dues to the Musicians Union in the U.K., but hes quick to note hes never viewed his music as a job, let alone a career: If I was trying to make some money, the last thing Id jump into is music. Im definitely going to put in the work, but thats because I love to do it. It makes things in this world bearable, so fuck it, lets do it.

Its a rational view. The vast majority of artists make a fraction-of-a-fraction of a cent each time their songs are streamed, and the cost of entry for bands in cities like London remains on the rise. Manning Walker notes that practice space rates in London are up to 50 for a couple hours, while venues, clubs, squats, and DIY spaces have been totaled by gentrification, to say nothing of the still unknown toll of the pandemic: If I was a kid in London and I was into punk music, its like, how could you afford this shit?

As assertive, assured, and bold as Manning Walker is, these arent the qualities that make Chubby and the Gang a great band. Despite the bravado, there is a lot of humility there, Falco says. That might sound laughable, but theres a subtle humility that evades other rock & roll acts.

Theres humility in Manning Walkers politics: an understanding of power, what the individual can achieve and whats more possible with the whole gang behind you. But theres also a humility in the way Chubby and the Gang approach rock & rolls most innate pleasures. As serious as the content can get, its always balanced by a rough and tumble energy, a cheeky swagger, and a sense of fun. Trouble always follows me, Manning Walker belts on The Mutts Nuts, But theres no place Id rather be.

Every two or three years, youll get this band thats reinvented hardcore, reinvented punk music, and its like fucking hell, how many times can you reinvent something? Manning Walker cracks. Its not even broke, why do you need to reinvent it? Sometimes you just want to hear some rock & roll. Sometimes you want to go to an art gallery to see some abstract painting that really makes you think, and sometimes you want to see a picture of a guy on a horse. And I feel like were just that. This isnt some abstract, make-you-think, whoa-Ive-fucking-had-an-epiphany. Its just a fucking cold pint on a Sunday, which is nice!

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Chubby and the Gangs Radical Rock & Roll Kicks - Rolling Stone

Emancipation Day celebration band, 1900. (Photo by Mrs. Charles Stephenson / Courtesy of Austin History Center)

The publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019 pushed many Americans to reconsider what they assumed they knew about African American and, more generally, US history. The project, whose title refers to the importation of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619, sought to show how, in the introductory words of its special issue, no aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.Books in Review

There were good reasons to start the project in 1619many African Americans trace the beginnings of Black America to this momentand to focus on Virginia, but it could have started earlier, too. The story of Africans in North America can, in fact, be traced as far back as 1526 and the creation of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony in what would become South Carolinaa colony that was likely destroyed by a mutiny of the colonists and a slave revolt. More than 140 years later, the colony of Carolina would be founded by English settlers from Barbados who hoped to create a settlement purely for the purpose of plantation slavery.

Annette Gordon-Reeds new book, On Juneteenth, considers another set of bifurcating paths in African American historythis time in her home state of Texas, where both her own history and that of Juneteenth began. Texas, she argues, provides a key to the history of Africans in North America, and, coupled with the rapidly popularized holiday of Juneteenth, offers a different perspective from the one to which most Americans are accustomed. For her, the history of Black Texas, in fact, allows one to tell the larger history of Black America. The history of Juneteenth, she writes, which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any [other] state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.

This is a bold statement. Others might alternately cite the Low Country of South Carolina or the Mississippi Delta or the South Side of Chicago. Yet Gordon-Reeds contention, by the end of her book, proves hard to dismiss. By using the history of Black Texas, she is also able to tell the story of Black America, and by doing so, she places Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans at the forefront of US history. If nothing else, she shifts its focus away from the East Coast origin stories of Jamestown and Plymouth and toward the West. Everything is bigger in Texas, and in the hands of Gordon-Reed, the history of Texas becomes large enough to encompass the fullness of the American story.

Gordon-Reed has spent her career studying the majestic and often confounding contradictions of American life and how we memorialize them. Her two best-known works1997s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and 2008s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Familytold the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was forcibly involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings offered a thorough account of the relationship between the two, a subject that had long been ignored by many Jefferson scholars. The book also proved to be something far more: an analysis of those historians who refused to reckon with the centrality of slavery in the founding of the United Statesand in particular its importance in the lives of the countrys founding fathers.

Much of this previous scholarship was criticized by Gordon-Reed as a rejection of black peoples input and black peoples participation in American society. Along with an emerging new generation of historians, she sought to correct this. As David Walton argued in his review of the book in The New York Times, Gordon-Reed provided a devastating and persuasive critique of those who have rejected the possibility of Jefferson having sex with Hemings and is sure to be the next-to-last word for every historian who writes about this story hereafter.Current Issue

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The Hemingses of Monticello was arguably even more groundbreaking, shifting the traditional lens on Monticello from Jefferson and Hemings to the family tree they produced. The book, for which she became the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for History, was also part of a larger goal at the center of her career: to push Americans to rethink their nations pastin particular, its origin myths. Her scholarship, Gordon-Reed explained in an interview, sought to establish black peoples participation as American citizens from the very beginning. For her, this was more than a matter of the historical record; it was also an assertion of citizenship. Because white supremacy had so deeply influenced the telling of US history, she noted, you have to be able to help write the history of the country in order to establish your right to be here, to say that youre legitimately here.

This quest to re-center American history around the experience of those who are not white is also at the core of On Juneteenth. By focusing on Texas, Gordon-Reed can tell not only the story of Black America but also of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is the American story, told from this most American place. She does have a point: Nearly every great movement in American history did, at some time, touch Texas. Everything from the rise and fall of slavery in antebellum America to the Populist movement to the civil rights movement and the white backlash against it has left an imprint on the history of Texas, and, in turn, Texas impacted each of them in ways the entire United States had to deal with.

The origin of Juneteenth exemplifies the central role Texas played in the history of Black America. When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston on June 19, 1865, and informed the enslaved that they were free, the Civil War had ended across much of the South, and the regionand most of the nationwas convulsing with the beginnings of Reconstruction. If the Confederacy had won the Civil War, Texas would likely have become the chief example of what that government would have stood fornot only as a bastion of slavery but as a harbinger of its expansion throughout the Western Hemisphere via white settler colonialism and violent confrontation. But with Grangers emancipatory declaration, and in the aftermath of the Souths defeat, Texas became an arena in which those pursuing a more inclusive idea of American freedom battled those seeking to restore the subservient relationship of African Americans as close to the old form of slavery as possible. Before the Civil War, Texas took steps in its Constitution to prevent the movement of free African Americans into the state. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery, Gordon-Reed writes, put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves.

For Gordon-Reed, the history of East Texas, which was the nexus of slavery in the state and where much of the fight over the terms of emancipation raged, helps tell this story of American contradictions in microcosm. Reconstruction was a bloody affair across the South, but in Texas it was especially grimin part because, Gordon-Reed notes, the white population still remembered that the state had been a republic. The struggles over civil and political rights that roiled the nation during Reconstruction were magnified in Texas by the contradictions of self-governmentof a white majority seeking to impose its will on a large Black minority.

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The pursuit of emancipation was frustrated almost from the start. Gen. Philip Sheridan, the military commander of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana), created by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, worked hard to protect the rights of newly freed African Americans, but as a result he drew the ire of former Confederates and eventually was fired by President Andrew Johnson. (Sheridan purportedly said, If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.) His replacement, Winfield Scott Hancock, was far more lenient toward white Southerners who resisted giving Black Americans any rights whatsoever. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction in America, citing a report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence in Texas, Charged by law to keep the peace and afford protection to life and property, and having the army of the United States to assist him in so doing, [Hancock] has failed.

For generations afterward, African Americans would fight to save Texas from the hell it had been turned into by white supremacy. Black Texans like Norris Wright Cuney would play a pivotal role in helping other Black citizens get involved in their native states politics. Cuney himself would become the Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party in 1886 and as president of the Union League led the national fight against the attempts of the partys conservative wing to purge what was left of the Southern Black leadership. Like Sheridan, however, Cuney found that his leadership of the Texas GOP was one of the last hurrahs of the emancipationist spirit of the 1860s. Even if Texas was the state in which Juneteenth and the celebrations that followed were born, so, too, was it a state of stalwart resistance to Reconstruction and Black freedom.

For Gordon-Reed, who was born in 1958, this grim past was never dead. Growing up in East Texas, she saw living reminders of it all around herboth the struggles for freedom and the institutions created by African Americans to survive in a cruel Jim Crow system. Just as in the years after the Civil War, the power and dogged determination of white supremacy persisted.

As Gordon-Reed recounts of her own childhood, she initially attended an African American school, as so many of her friends and family had, before becoming one of the first Black students in her area to desegregate an all-white school. Entering first grade in the mid-1960s, she was enrolled in the Anderson Elementary School, leaving behind her all-Black school, Booker T. Washington. While some Black parents frowned on the Gordons sending their child to a previously all-white school, Gordon-Reed remembered the moment as one that was as much about practicality as politics. Her father, Alfred Gordon Sr., simply believed it made more sense for a school to have students correctly separated by age. Anderson Elementary provided that; Booker T., as it was affectionately known, did not. But it also meant that Gordon-Reed would be the only Black student there.

Gordon-Reed excelled in school, both at Booker T . and at Anderson. At the time, she felt that she never experienced any different treatment. In fact, I felt nothing butsupport. Still, she knew and understood that she was different from the other studentsand that she had to excel on behalf of the Black community. This period was intense, she writes. My mother remembers me breaking out in hives at one point, a thing I dont recall.

Gordon-Reeds experience of desegregation is a valuable one. Often, the story of school desegregation follows a student or studentsthe Little Rock Nine of Arkansas, for exampleup to the school door and then leaves them to be immortalized in history. There is little consideration about the short- and long-term consequences of the experience on the children. There was an oddity of being on display, Gordon-Reed recalls, but few considered the effects of desegregation on the Black students who entered the formerly all-white schoolsespecially those, like Gordon-Reed, who were on their own. Not to take anything away from the teachers and administrators at Anderson, but I did make things easy for them, she adds. Her intellect certainly helped, but so did the fact that, because she was the only Black person enrolled at the school, she was not seen as an invasion of Black students. The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers, she notes.

Gordon-Reeds experiences after high school were like those of other African Americans who came of age during the civil rights and Black Power eras: increased opportunities for education at the finest of American universities. For Gordon-Reed, that meant attending Dartmouth College in the late 1970s and, eventually, Harvard Law School. But the experience of desegregating a schooland understanding what that desegregation meant for other African Americanslingered, both for her and, more broadly, she argues, as a feature of the history of Texas and Black America.

Like her earlier work on the Hemingses, On Juneteenth is determined to force us to rethink our origin stories. As Gordon-Reed notes, for example, the push for desegregating schools did mark the beginning of a new turn in Black freedom, but it was also greeted ambivalently by more African Americans than classic narratives of the civil rights movement would have us believe: Some members of the Black community felt that my parents were making a statementalas, a negative oneabout the quality of teaching and education at Washington. Leaving Booker T. for a formerly all-white institution was seen in her African American community as equal parts heroic and bordering on betrayal. For most, Black schools were symbols of community empowerment and self-determinationsymbols that, in the aftermath of the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision, would eventually be degraded and destroyed by an education system that had previously ignored them.

Eschewing nostalgia, Gordon-Reed demands that her readers reexamine their assumptions about American history and their commitments in the present. Focusing on the history of African Americans in Texas helps her make this compelling argument for an update to the story of America: She welds a new narrative onto the one we already have. Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations, she explains, but we also need to separate out the origin stories we tell ourselves from actual history, making it clear that the two are often not the same.

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Gordon-Reed challenged the infallibility and the mythology of the founding fathers through her work on Jefferson and the Hemingses, and in On Juneteenth, she spends a considerable amount of time demarcating the differences between the origin story that places the beginning of the United States in Plymoutha founding story about valiant people leaving their homes to escape religious persecutionand the one that places it in Jamestown colony: It is difficult to wrest an uplifting story from the doings of English settlers who created the colony for no purpose other than making money or, at least, to make a living for themselves. Starting before 1619 and beyond Jamestown colony, she argues, also gives the African American experience a longer and more international origin story, touching as it would on the presence of Estebanico, an enslaved African explorer who was part of the Spanish expedition of what is now Texas in the 1530s.

Spanish St. Augustine, Gordon-Reed writes, had long existed partly as a settlement for Africans whod escaped slavery in the English colonies, and ignoring the presence of Africans in other European settlements in North Americawhether established by the Spanish, the French, or the Dutchled to what she calls an extremely narrow construction of Blackness. By considering the other Black Americasthose formed outside the reach of the English-speaking coloniesGordon-Reed also helps us better understand the relationships among African, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans and reminds us of the non-Anglophone influences on the formation of what became the United States. By incorporating so much recent scholarship on the Atlantic world and the early encounters among various ethnic and racial groups in North America, she argues, we can understand that the origin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than the story of twenty Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619.

As readers come to the end of On Juneteenth, they begin to realize that as much as the emancipation in Galveston and the original holiday of Juneteenth frame the book, contrasting these different origin stories is one of its central premises. Even the origin story of Texas comes under scrutiny. Building on the scholarship of others, Gordon-Reed notes that the early days of Texass struggle for independence from Mexico were also tied to the institution of slavery. Rather than pursue freedom, the white Americans who fought for Texan independence sought to create a slaveholding republic. Growing up in Jim Crowera Texas, a young Annette Gordon was not taught this. When it came to the Alamo, the birthplace of modern Texas, she writes, I didnt know that an enslaved person was there. For Americans who wish to avoid the unpleasantness of racism in our countrys past, Gordon-Reed points to the documents themselves. Race is right there in the documentsofficial and personal, she writes. Texass own constitution, promulgated after independence in 1836, explicitly excluded free people of African descent from citizenship. Black people in Texas were to be there for one reason: enslavement.

Gordon-Reed also writes of how Texass oft-recounted origin story elides the plight of Indigenous peoples. The early Republic of Texas under Sam Houston could potentially countenance living side by side with Indigenous groups like the Alabamas and Coushattas, but later Texas leaders insisted on the familiar American pattern of driving Indigenous groups from their lands. This experience of oppression also linked the fates of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples: Both had a common enemy in white supremacy, one that was around after slaverys abolition. As a young girl coming of age during not only the civil rights and Black Power eras but also the rise of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, Gordon-Reed wondered why Indigenous and African groups had not joined forces against the Europeans in North America. One complicating factor was certainly that some Indigenous peoples also held Africans in slavery. There was no natural alliance between the groups, Gordon-Reed writes, reminding us once again of the problem of crafting myths about the past, as opposed to cold, hard actual history. Writers, and consumers, of history must take great care not to import the knowledge we have into the minds of people and of circumstances in the past, she warns.

On Juneteenth begins and ends with the holiday of the same name, and here too Gordon-Reed reminds us that like origin stories, our regional and national holidays say a great deal about the stories we wish to tell about ourselves. While at the beginning of the book Gordon-Reed expresses surpriseand a little consternationthat a holiday celebrated primarily in Texas during her life has become nationally known, at the end she reminisces about how Juneteenth was an important part of her life, and one that incorporated cultural traditions from other groups.

Juneteenth celebrations, Gordon-Reed tells us, included the traditional red soda-watera delicious strawberry-flavored drink that some argue traces its origins to the hibiscus tea of West Africaseen at so many African American holiday gatherings, but they also included the preparation of tamales, a dish originating with Mesoamerican civilizations, and pointed to the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americas intersected in Texas. Such a set of culinary rituals, Gordon-Reed writes, made the day so very Texan. But as she goes on to argue, it also made the dayand its historyso very American.

Making Juneteenth into a national holiday not only nationalizes Texass history but, Gordon-Reed argues, also serves as a moment of national reflection on the effort needed to destroy slavery and, in its aftermath, the struggle to affirm a new birth of freedom. With Republican politicians pushing to abolish critical race theory and the continued assaults on use of the 1619 Project in the classroomnot to mention the raging debates about Confederate statues and other Lost Cause memorialsit is clear that powerful leaders in society also understand the importance of historical memory. Besides origin stories, Gordon-Reed reminds us, history provides us with a way to think about the present and futureand, just as with the past, the remaking of our contemporary world will likely be messier, if potentially more emancipatory, but also more tragic than any of us is willing to fathom.

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Annette Gordon-Reed's Personal History of Juneteenth - The Nation