DECEMBER 5 – 6, 2024  |  Slavery was foundational to the formation and growth of Texas. Ode to Juneteenth: Slavery in Texas will broaden our understanding of the ongoing legacies of slavery in Texas.

The 2024 Conference on Texas at the Witte Museum will reveal the foundational role of chattel slavery in the formation and growth of Texas. This 2-day museum-wide conference is led by a Steering Committee chaired by Aaronetta Pierce, who will curate panel discussions featuring scholars from around the United States focusing on slavery in Texas, including Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and with a keynote address from Annette Gordon-Reed, MacArthur Genius and the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in History. Through new scholarship, the conference will broaden our understanding of the ongoing legacies of slavery, which continue to impact African Americans in Texas.

The conference will center on the lives of the enslaved people, especially as mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers.

Every facet of the expanding Texas economy was impacted by slavery and enslaved labor. Enslaved people not only labored on cotton and sugar plantations, they also worked as artisans such as blacksmiths, seamstresses, and as enslaved cowboys.

In 1834, there were approximately 5,000 enslaved people in Mexican Texas. During the Republic of Texas, slavery increased so that by 1845, there were at least 30,000 enslaved women, men and children in the new state of Texas. When Texas voted to join the Confederacy in 1861, the enslaved population was 182,566 people, the fastest growing demographic in Texas. The economy of Texas was so dependent upon slavery that not until June 19, 1865, now celebrated as Juneteenth, were enslaved people freed from bondage in Texas, two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Ticket sales available in August.

Conference Program
Two-day museum-wideconference including:

• Panel discussions from scholars around the United States focused on Slavery in Texas
• Anticipated attendance from throughout Texas and beyond
• 500+ attendees expected
• 100 scholarships for college students
• Keynote speaker Annette Gordon Reed

Keynote Speaker

Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Her most recent book, On Juneteenth, provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.