Juneteenth: For my family, it's always been personal
Denise Oliver Velez for Daily Kos Community Contributors Team
Most
Black Americans who are dedicated to diving as deep as we can into
our family history will likely run into what genealogists who specialize
in African American family research call “the brick
wall” of enslavement. Prior to the 1870 Federal census,
enslaved Black people were not enumerated. We were property, not people.
For
many years, my own genealogical research centered on my direct maternal
family history in Virginia, followed by my dad’s Black family in
Tennessee and Kansas. I was successful getting back to the late 1700s and
early 1800s in some family lines, but it wasn’t until I expanded my searches to
the families of my first cousins that I wound up in Texas.
It
was then that I hit my “brick wall”—in Galveston.
I’ve
covered some of my research successes in other stories, like 2020’s “Juneteenth:
We're still on the road to freedom and justice,” but I have not
shared many of my thoughts about Texas.
Texas
has a strange history when it comes to Black folks and enslavement, as documented here
in the “Free Blacks” entry in the Handbook of Texas,
from the Texas State Historical Association.
As of 1792 the Black and mulatto population constituted 15 percent of the 2,992 people living in Spanish Texas. Within the Spanish empire, the legal status of free Blacks resembled that of the Indian population. The law required free Blacks to pay tribute, forbade them to carry firearms, and restricted their freedom of movement.
In
practice Spanish officials ignored such restrictions, often encouraging the
manumission of slaves. The small number of Spanish subjects in Texas and the
vast distances between settlements also brought about the intermarriage of
Whites, Blacks, and Indians.
While
most free Blacks in Texas before 1800 were born there, thereafter an increased
emigration to Texas of free Blacks and some escaped slaves from the southern
United States began to take place. After the Mexican War of
Independence (1821), the Mexican government offered free Blacks
full rights of citizenship, allowing land ownership and other privileges.
Mexico
accepted free Blacks as equals to White colonists. Favorable conditions for
free Blacks in Texas in the 1830s led one noted abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy,
to seek authorization for the establishment of a Black colony from the United
States. While the Mexican government expressed interest in the idea, opposition
from Whites in Texas and the United States precluded its implementation. Free
Blacks, as did other frontiersmen, continued to emigrate to Texas seeking an
opportunity for advancement and a better life. [...]
The Constitution of
the Republic of Texas designated people of one-eighth African
blood as a separate and distinct group, took away citizenship, sought to
restrict property rights, and forbade the permanent residence of free Blacks
without the approval of the Congress of the
Republic of Texas.
Interracial
marriages were also legally prohibited. Ironically, local communities and
legislators that favored the new provisions often did not want them enforced
within their districts. Documents show that prominent Whites were known to
intercede on behalf of free Blacks in danger of being prosecuted by the new
regulations. A stricter law passed in 1840, which gave free Blacks two years to
leave Texas or risk being sold into slavery, was effectively postponed by
President Sam Houston. [...]
After annexation,
the legislature passed stricter laws governing the lives of free Blacks. These
new laws called for harsh punishments usually reserved only for slaves,
including branding, whipping, and forced labor on public works. In 1858 the legislature
even passed a law that encouraged free Blacks to reenter slavery voluntarily by
allowing them to choose their own masters.
The
increased restrictions and the rise in White hostility resulted in a virtual
halt to additional free Black immigration to Texas and may have caused a
reduction in the Texas population of free Blacks. The United States census
reported 397 free Blacks in Texas in 1850 and 355 in 1860, though there may
have been an equal number of free Blacks not counted.
That
timeline became particularly relevant when my search for my first cousin’s
Texan family hit that brick wall. They do not appear in any listing of
free Blacks, therefore, they must have been enslaved. I knew that Anna Gibson
was listed in the Freedman’s Bank Records as born in Texas around
1823. 
Idella Gibson
Her daughter Idella was listed as born in 1861, also in Texas. My
uncle Louis—Idella’s grandson—said she was born in Galveston. That’s all I
know. My family is luckier than most Black folks, as we have a picture of
Idella when she was an adult.
What is clear from that photograph is that Idella has white ancestry. What does that mean for Anna, the enslaved woman who was Idella’s mother?
We
may never know. But we do know that many children were born into slavery and
kept enslaved, in spite of having white fathers. We also know that
enslaved Black women were raped and bred for profit. Further, we know that
in parts of the South, mixed-race Black women were often kept as concubines.
Anna
got out of Texas as soon as she could and moved to Maryland, where she opened a
sewing school. She was listed in the 1870 census there.
Now
comes the hard part: Imagining her life under the yoke of enslavement.
None of it is pretty. None of it fits the fairy tales offered to white children
about “happy darkies” on the plantation lazing their days away. Nowhere in
those fabrications are those “massa’s offspring” mentioned.
As
some of you may know, the Black community has problems with “colorism,” an
artificially developed hierarchy based on light-skin and European hair texture.
On the other hand, and less discussed, is the ugly underbelly to which those
fair complexions point; realities which often don’t get openly talked about in
families, or are tales only shared in whispers among the elders.
This
unspoken “downside” of being light-skinned continues to this day. I have a
friend who was much fairer than her parents. She was dubbed “trick
baby” in the school yard, the other kids sneeringly insinuating that her mama
had been a sex worker impregnated by a white “trick.”
There
are thousands upon thousands of Black families with ancestors who were
light-skinned with European-textured hair. Most have long opted to claim Native
American heritage to explain away that great-grandma whose “hair was so long
she could sit on it.”
In
most of those cases, DNA testing disproved those family legends. Think of
the “why” for these narratives: Few people want to loudly proclaim that their
great-grandma was repeatedly raped and brutalized by her owner (or the
overseer), which is why Grandma looked like she did.
In
a quick check of the 1880 census (using my Ancestry.com database) I find
1,017,015 people listed as “mulatto,” and 5,572,280 listed as Black; the
1870 census listed 629,806 “mulatto” people, and 4,140,145 people as
Black.
Census
takers weren’t “race” scientists, of course; they weren’t offering DNA
tests to prove ancestry. Instead, they simply eyeballed a person and determined
whether they were or were not a “full-blooded” Black person, based solely on
their skin color, facial features, and hair texture.
In
2014, I wrote the following in “The 'other'
U.S. slave trade”:
I
once wrote about myself that "I am the product of a bicentennial of
breeding farms." Some of my enslaved ancestors looked whiter than many
"white" people, like my great-grandfather Dennis Williams.
My great grandfather, Dennis Williams,
who was born to an enslaved mother,
Hannah Carter, and freed
They were not descendants of Irish indentured women who had children with Black indentured men. They were born out of the rape of their mothers by overseers and/or owners.
In Slave Breeding:
Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History, Gregory
Smithers takes on the naysayers:
For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history.
From nineteenth-century
abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have
debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual
practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new
generations of slaves for profit.
In
this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how
African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding
practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed
the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget
the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South.
By
placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the
larger context of America’s history of racial and gender discrimination,
Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory,
racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of
racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color.
This
is an ugly history we cannot ignore. So today, though I’ll celebrate
Juneteenth, I’ll continue to think about Anna from Galveston. Maybe one day
I’ll luck out and find someone who also has her in their family tree, and find
out not just more of her story, but more of my kin.
The
nightmare of enslavement finally ended on this day in 1865, but those of us descended
from those who were freed back then have not all had a happy ending. In
fact, the persecution faced by Black Americans has not ended at all.
We
are simply in another chapter of a book that is not yet finished. We will,
however, get to see the impact of Juneteenth being made a federal holiday; it
passed the Senate via unanimous consent on June 15, passed in the House on
the 16th with a vote of 415 to 14, and President Biden signed it into law on
the 17th.
It’s
been a long haul to get to this point in the road, and we still have farther to
go. This victory along the way should lift our spirits and move us forward.