Dear Rice Community,
We are excited to announce Rice University’s recognition and celebration of Juneteenth with events exploring ideas and questions central to this important holiday.
The university’s annual Juneteenth panel discussion will take place June 15 via Zoom from 8:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The theme this year is leadership. Three panels of experts from Rice and other universities across the state and nation will take on aspects of this larger focus.
The first panel, “On Unity and Black Difference,” will explore the place of consensus, disagreement and conversation in Black thriving. The second session, “Key Questions in Black Leadership,” will addresses the direction of current research on Black authority and influence in organizations. In the final session, “Very Ready for the Year Ahead,” panelists will explore the opportunities for a more equitable higher education landscape that could very well come to define the coming year.
More information about the panel discussions and how to register for the event can be found here.
The second Juneteenth event is set for 7 p.m. June 20 in the Anderson-Clarke Center’s Hudspeth Auditorium. This event, which is being co-sponsored by Humanities Texas along with various departments across campus, features a lecture by Annette Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed will discuss the Juneteenth holiday as well as her childhood growing up in segregated Conroe, where she played a pivotal role in integrating the local public schools.
Gordon-Reed has won 16 book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, both for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” Her most recent book, “On Juneteenth,” is a memoir and history of Texas. A select list of her honors includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.
Gordon-Reed’s lecture is being co-sponsored by Humanities Texas, which will hold an institute for local teachers on the Rice University campus from June 21-23 about teaching the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Other cosponsors include Rice’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice; the Department of History; the School of Humanities; the Office of the Provost; and the Office of the President.
The lecture and the panel discussions on June 15 are the fourth installment in an annual series to commemorate Juneteenth, which began just down the road in Galveston on June 19, 1865. On that day, U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, which informed the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. The order came 2 1/2 years after President Abraham Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation. Since then, communities across the nation have held celebrations on or around June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery.
Rice launched the series in 2020 as part of its efforts to reflect on and discuss the history of racial injustice, and to begin working toward a more diverse and inclusive university community.
Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Alex Byrd and Caleb McDaniel, chairman of Rice’s history department, co-chair the university’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice. Commissioned in 2019, the task force is charged with investigating and encouraging frank and honest discussion about the university’s past and identifying suggestions for its future.
Additional information about Annette’s lecture and how to tune in can be found here. All are welcome and encouraged to join.
Warm Regards,
Reginald DesRoches, President
Amy Dittmar, Provost
Alexander Byrd, Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion