Rethinking Juneteenth

The Truth About Juneteenth
by Thavolia Glymph

Juneteenth, widely celebrated throughout the United States, is now a commemorative holiday in 31 states. On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and the long century of segregation and discrimination that followed its end. This, for some, long-awaited, and for others, disappointing, resolution appears to have been deliberately timed to pass on the eve of Juneteenth. It is unsurprising given the popular history of Juneteenth. And it is also troubling.

Juneteenth has in popular renderings come to be understood as the date Union Gen. Gordon Granger, arriving in Galveston on June 19, 1865, brought the news of emancipation and set Texas slaves free. From a strictly historical point of view one might think January 1, 1863, the date the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, or December 6, 1865, the date the 13th Amendment was ratified, would be more appropriate dates to commemorate.

Today, Juneteenth is celebrated as something even grander, a "holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States" or as the state of Virginia's 'Juneteenth State Holiday Observance Resolution of 2007,' put it, Juneteenth represents the day Gordon notified "the last enslaved Americans of their new status almost two and one-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation." Other state, senate and congressional resolutions and media accounts all offer up similar narratives. Strictly speaking, Juneteenth does not represent any of these things.

Read the Full Essay @ THE GRIO

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Thavolia Glymph is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Duke University, specializing in Southern History. Her most recently published work is Out Of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize.

Duke Professor Wins Philip Taft Labor History Book Award

from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
2009 Award Recipients

Thavolia Glymph & Jana K. Lipman

The Taft Labor History Prize Committee is pleased to announce the winners of the 2009 prize for the best book in labor and working-class history published in 2008. This year, the Committee is particularly happy to announce that we have co-winners of the prize. We believe that these two books represent the growth of labor history both temporally and geographically. Both books are deeply researched, beautifully written, and powerfully argued.

Thavolia Glymph's Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press) reconceptualizes the planter household as a workplace with labor and class as well as gender and race relations. Detailing the day-to-day relations between black and white women and how those relations changed, Glymph offers a telling critique of the limits of such notions as patriarchy, domesticity, and private versus public spheres.

Jana K. Lipman's Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (University of California Press) examines how United States labor practices in a military outpost maintained neocolonialism. Foregrounding the women and men who lived and worked under the empire, Lipman demonstrates the importance of a transnational perspective and opens a window to a virtually unknown chapter of United States labor history.

This year the Taft Prize comes with a cash award of $1,000 for each winner. It is named in honor of Professor Philip Taft, an eminent labor historian and economist, who made outstanding contributions to the field of labor and working-class history during his lengthy career. The prize competition is administered by the ILR School at Cornell University in collaboration with LAWCHA (Labor and Working Class History Association) and has been held annually since 1978. The members of the 2009 Prize committee were: Jefferson Cowie, Ileen DeVault (chair), Nancy Gabin, Gilbert Gonzalez, and Joe Trotter.

NBM Booknotes: December 2008

The Hip Hop Wars
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why it Matters
by Tricia Rose
Published by Basic Civitas Books

Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and ’hos. The controversy surrounding hip-hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States. In The Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.



Ain't I a Feminist?
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette M. White
Published by SUNY Press

Interview-based study of contemporary African American feminist men.

Ain’t I a Feminist? presents the life stories of twenty African American men who identify themselves as feminists, centering on the turning points in their lives that shaped and strengthened their commitment to feminism, as well as the ways they practice feminism with women, children, and other men. In her analysis, Aaronette M. White highlights feminist fathering practices; how men establish egalitarian relationships with women; the variety of Black masculinities; and the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality politics in American society. Coming from a wide range of family backgrounds, ages, geographical locations, sexualities, and occupations, each man also shares what he experiences as the personal benefits of feminism, and how feminism contributes to his efforts towards social change. Focusing on the creative agency of Black men to redefine the assumptions and practices of manhood, the author also offers recommendations regarding the socialization of African American boys and the reeducation of African American men in the interest of strengthening their communities.

“This powerful book makes a unique and substantive contribution to the fields of women’s studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, psychology, and sociology. It will surely garner a great deal of attention in the academy.” — Aída Hurtado, author of Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity

Aaronette M. White is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.


Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household
by Thavolia Glymph
Published by Cambridge University Press

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where ‘gentle’ mistresses ministered to ‘loyal’ slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Focuses on the plantation household as a site of production and thus class relations and violence • Unique analysis of the precise forms of struggle and negotiations that led to the transformation of the plantation home in the Civil War era • Places black and white women at the center of an analysis of the plantation household

Thavolia Glymph is Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies at Duke University.