The History Of Juneteenth / Remembering Philip Baker Hall

Fresh Air

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4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Juneteenth, formerly Emancipation Day or Jubilee, celebrates the day slavery ended in Texas, June 19, 1865. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed studies the early American republic and the legacy of slavery. "It was a very, very tense time — hope and at the same time, hostility," Gordon-Reed says. Her book is On Juneteenth.

Also, we remember actor Philip Baker Hall, who died June 12. He appeared in the Paul Thomas Anderson films Boogie Nights and Magnolia. He also played a cop on the trail of overdue library books on Seinfeld. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2006.

Justin Chang reviews two films streaming now: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. Sunday marks the holiday of June
0:05.9	Taint commemorating the day the abolition of slavery was announced in Texas on June 19, 1865.
0:13.3	Texas was the last state to free enslaved people. Juneteenth is now a national holiday observed
0:20.0	just a couple of weeks before July 4, which celebrates America gaining its independence while
0:25.5	enslaved people remained in bondage. Our guest, Annette Gordon Reed, is a Pulitzer prize-winning
0:31.2	historian and Harvard professor who's written a book called On June Taint. It's part history,
0:37.3	part memoir. She's from East Texas and she's a historian of slavery and the early American
0:43.0	Republic. Her other books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American controversy,
0:48.9	and the Hemings of Monticello, an American family. She also edited the book Race on Trial,
0:55.2	Law and Justice in American History. Terry Gross spoke with Annette Gordon Reed last year
1:00.8	when her book was published. Annette Gordon Reed, welcome to Fresh Air. I learned a lot that I'm
1:07.2	really happy I learned from your new book. So let me ask you to give a fuller version of what Juneteenth
1:14.5	represents. Well, Juneteenth represents the end of slavery, technically the end of slavery in
1:21.7	Texas in 1865. And it has been a day to commemorate what we know and we know from the way they acted,
1:31.5	the joy of people who were enslaved in Texas when they heard the news that slavery was over.
1:38.4	And being treated as chattel, those days were behind them and they were supposed to be then
1:45.8	go forward as equal people in the place where they lived. So how does Juneteenth 1865 fit into the
1:56.2	end of slavery, the abolition of slavery in the US? Well, it was emancipation was a process. There
2:04.4	was not any one day that made everything okay, made it all over until we get to the ratification
2:11.7	of the 13th Amendment which was in December of 1865. But what happens in Texas is
2:20.5	there was a delay from when the emancipation proclamation was put forth. And when Lee surrendered
2:29.6	at Appomattox in April of 1865, the Army of the Transmississippee kept fighting. And the last
	...

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