Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Race relations have come a long way. Also, they haven’t.

“Legalized separation is over,” Annette Gordon-Reed said Tuesday. “Separation by law is done, but there are still disparities in (opportunities) for African-Americans versus white Americans. Slavery has created a racial hierarchy and taught people how they are supposed to deal with one another, and some of those things still linger. Very much so.”

Gordon-Reed is a Harvard professor and author of six books, including On Juneteenth. A book she wrote about the family of Sally Hemings – a Black woman who bore a child by Thomas Jefferson – won a Pulitzer prize for Gordon-Reed, who is now working on a follow-up.

She spoke Tuesday at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum.

On Juneteenth, she says, is really a history of Texas as viewed through the eyes of Gordon-Reed’s ancestors, who lived there in the 19th Century.

“They were happy to have emancipation,” Gordon-Reed said, “but there were many people who resented emancipation and unleashed a torrent of violence on African-Americans, so it was a hard place. It’s still in many ways a tough place for Blacks,”