AUSTIN BLACK HISTORY SOCIAL RIDE
RIDE ROUTE AND HISTORICAL INFO
This can be used as a self guided tour of the 12 sites
Follow these accounts on instagram to learn about future Black History Social Rides:
NPR + KUT 90.5 News coverage of Austin’s Black history social ride:
Austin Monthly Article:
https://www.austinmonthly.com/learn-about-the-citys-racial-past-with-a-black-history-social-ride/
CLICK HERE FOR A MAP OF THE ROUTE:
https://bit.ly/AustinBlackHistorySocialRide
LIST OF PLACES AND ADDRESSES IN ORDER:
1. Texas African American History Memorial at the Capitol (11th and Congress)
2. Clarksville: The Haskell House (1705 Waterson Ave)
3. Clarksville: Sweethome Baptist Church (1712 W 11th St)
4. Wheatville: The Jacob Fontaine/Gold Dollar Building (2402 San Gabriel)
5. UT: Barbara Jordan Statue (307 W. 24th St)
6. UT: MLK Statue (In front of Jackson Geoscience Building)
7. Oakwood Cemetery, Section 4 (aka the Colored Section) (1601 Navasota St)
8. Colored Teachers State Association Building (1191 Navasota)
9. George Washington Carver Library (1165 Angelina St)
10. Richard Overton’s home (2011 Hamilton)
11. Huston Tillotson University (900 Chicon)
12. The Victory Grill (1104 East 11th St)
*Info is still currently being updated and reformatted. This is by NO means a comprehensive guide to Austin Black History, merely a starting point.
Additional interesting resources:
Click here for an 1891 map of Austin’s Freedman’s communities
Austin Public Library’s Timeline of local desegregation
1. Texas African American History Memorial
(11th and Congress)
Dedicated in 2016, the newest monument on the State Capitol grounds recognizes the many contributions of African Americans to Texas. The center of the memorial represents emancipation from slavery on June 19, 1865, or Juneteenth. Significant people, events and experiences in Texas, from slavery and emancipation to modern achievements in the arts and sciences are highlighted throughout the two-sided panorama. Buffalo Soldiers, musicians, cowboys, businessmen, legislators, aviators, and sports champions can be found in this rich visual history of African Americans in Texas.
The monuments sculptor Ed Dwight said of the monument: “What I did is, I told the whole story of Texas from the beginning with all the visual details of it. I matched the stories with the visuals. And the story is all laid out for you. We’ve got an African explorer exploring Texas in the 1500s, and we’ve got a Black astronaut from Texas exploring space. And all my stories have happy endings.”
Source: https://txhillcountrytrail.com/plan-your-adventure/historic-sites-and-cities/sites/texas-african-american-history-memorial
http://soulciti.com/texas-black-history-memorial-controversy/
Juneteenth:
As the Civil War came to a close in 1865, a number of people remained enslaved, especially in remote areas. Word of slavery’s end traveled slowly, and for those who were largely isolated from Union armies, life continued as if freedom did not exist.
This was especially the case in Texas, where thousands of slaves were not made aware of freedom until June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued an order officially freeing them. Their celebration would serve as the basis of June 19 — or Juneteenth — a holiday celebrating emancipation in the US.
Ironically, while Juneteenth has become the most prominent Emancipation Day holiday in the US, it commemorates a smaller moment that remains relatively obscure. It doesn’t mark the signing of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which technically freed slaves in the rebelling Confederate states, nor does it commemorate the December 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment, which enshrined the end of slavery into the Constitution. Instead, it marks the moment when emancipation finally reached those in the deepest parts of the former Confederacy.
In many ways, Juneteenth represents how freedom and justice in the US has always been delayed for black people. The decades after the end of the war would see a wave of lynching, imprisonment, and Jim Crow laws take root. What followed was the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration, discriminatory housing policies, and a lack of economic investment. And now, as national attention remain focused on acts of police violence and various racial profiling incidents, it is clear that while progress has been made in black America’s 150 years out of bondage, considerable barriers continue to impede that progress.
Those barriers may remain until America truly begins to grapple with its history. “There are those in this society that still hold on to the idea that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights or Northern aggression against slavery,” says Karlos Hill, a professor of African and African-American studies. “Juneteenth is a moment where we step back and try to understand the Civil War through the eyes of enslaved people.”
Source:
https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/6/19/17476482/juneteenth-holiday-emancipation-african-american-celebration-history
On the left side of the monument, you’ll see Estevanico, the first African man to set foot in Texas.
Mustafa Azemmouri (c. 1500–1539), better known by his slave name Estevanico ("Little Stephen"), was a northafrican explorer from Azemmour, Morocco, servant in Spain, who became the first African explorer of North America and Texas. He has been referred to as "the first great African man in America". In 1527 he was taken on the Spanish Narváez expedition to establish a colony in "La Florida", which at the time was composed of present-day Florida, and all unexplored lands to the north and west, including Northern Mexico.
Very little is known about the early life of Estevanico, but what is very much documented was his imprisonment and sale into slavery in 1513 by the Portuguese in the city of Azemmour, on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Originally born as a Muslim, he was converted to Roman Catholicism before reaching present day Florida. More than decade later, Estevanico was added on the roster of the famous Narváez expedition that was started in 1527. With the crew of over 600 people, the goal of this exploratory mission was to create permanent presence of Spanish crown in the territory of Florida, but after bad weather and attack by natives, only four members of the expedition managed to remain alive including Estevanico, Their only salvation lied in a slow trek across around the Gulf of Mexico. After a month at sea, their raft landed on Galveston Island. By spring 1529 those few men—the only survivors from their craft—had traveled on foot down the Texas coast to the environs of Matagorda Bay.
Estevanico was assuredly the first African to traverse Texas, and, in the company of three Spaniards, reentered Texas from Mexico at La Junta de los Ríos. From La Junta, the trekkers eventually made their way across northwest Mexico to the Pacific Coast. Throughout their travels in both Texas and Mexico, the three Spaniards and Estevanico gained fame and sustenance as faith healers among Indians. After walking south along the Pacific Coast, the four men encountered Spaniards north of San Miguel de Culiacán and then traveled on to Mexico City
Sources:
http://www.famous-explorers.com/explorers-by-location-of-exploration/estevanico/
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fes08
On the Right side of the monument you will see:
Bernard Anthony Harris Jr. (born in 1956 in Temple, Texas). Bernard is a former NASA astronaut. On February 9, 1995, Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk. during the second of his two Space Shuttle flights. He is the 6th African American to travel to Space.
Harris graduated from Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974, where he was actively involved in science fairs, book clubs and other school activities. He received a B.S. degree in biology from University of Houston in 1978. He earned his Medical Doctorate degree from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine in 1982. Harris completed a residency in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic in 1985.
Bernard Harris was the first African American man to go space on a spacewalk as and he was involved in the construction of the space rovers
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_A._Harris_Jr.
2. Clarksville: The Haskell House (1705 Waterson Ave)
CLARKSVILLE, TEXAS (Travis County). Clarksville is just northeast of the intersection of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and West Tenth Street in west Austin, Travis County. The land, containing streams and steep hills, had previously been part of a plantation owned by Governor Elisha M. Pease. It is said that Pease gave the land to his emancipated slaves with the vain hope that they would remain near his mansion and be available for further service.
Clarksville was founded in 1871 by Charles Clark, a freedman who changed his name from Charles Griffin after emancipation. Clark bought two acres of land from Confederate general Nathan G. Shelley and built a house on what is now West Tenth Street. He subdivided his land among other freedmen to start a community outside of Austin. Despite its isolation Clarksville came within the jurisdiction of Austin early in its history.
Clarksville has been described by its older residents as a wilderness broken by an occasional dirt road and train tracks laid by the International-Great Northern Railroad in the 1870s. The Sweet Home Baptist Church served as the community meeting center. The church was organized in the home of Mary Smith on the Haskell homestead sometime before 1882, when the congregation purchased land on which to build a church. Rev. Jacob Fontaine served as the first minister. Elias Mayes, a black state legislator from Grimes and Brazos counties in the Sixteenth and Twenty-first legislatures, lived in Clarksville as early as 1875. He built a home on land purchased from Charles Clark in 1884. Many Clarksville residents worked in the cotton industry or farmed; others held jobs in surrounding communities. Leroy Robertson owned and operated a community store. In 1896 a school at Clarksville had an enrollment of forty-seven. In 1917 a new one-room schoolhouse was built and named Clarksville Colored School. It offered six grades.
Early in the twentieth century developers began to realize the land value of Clarksville, which lay near growing downtown Austin. Austin city policy aimed to concentrate the local black population in the east, and pressured black communities in west Austin, such as Clarksville and Wheatsville, to move. In 1918 the Austin school board closed the Clarksville school. Clarksville residents were later forced to use city services in east Austin or none at all. The 1928 master plan of the city of Austin recommended "that all the facilities and conveniences be provided the Negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the Negro population to this area." Most Clarksville residents endured the lack of services, however, and refused to move. The community did experience two small emigrations to California, the first during World War I and the second in 1943. Clarksville maintained its school, which enrolled sixty-nine students in 1924, sixty-six in 1934, and seventy in 1940. Sometime in the 1960s the school building was moved to O. Henry Junior High School. The Sweet Home Baptist Church was rebuilt for a third time in 1935.
Until 1930 Clarksville residents used kerosene lamps, and the community remained surrounded by woods. In later years Clarksville began to feel the pressure of Austin's expanding white community, which filled the surrounding area with spacious, middle-class homes. In 1968 Clarksville residents unsuccessfully protested a state and local plan to build a highway along the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which extended along the western boundary of Clarksville. The completed MoPac Expressway cut through the community, causing twenty-six families to be relocated. Twenty-three families left of their own accord. The number of homes in Clarksville decreased from 162 in 1970 to less than 100 in 1976.
Source: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hpc01
3. Sweethome Baptist Church (1712 W 11th St)
Chec out the historical plaque in front of the church!
Great read:
Austin Statesman: Revitalizing the Church
Related:
Austin 1928 Master Plan (excerpt)
4. The Jacob Fontaine/Gold Dollar Building (2402 San Gabriel)
*This is my favorite building on the tour!
WHEATVILLE, TEXAS (Travis County). Wheatville, the first black community associated with Austin after the Civil War, was located at the western edge of Austin on former plantation land. The boundaries of Wheatville corresponded to present 24th Street to the south, 26th Street to the north, Shoal Creek to the west, and Rio Grande Street to the east. James Wheat, a former slave from Arkansas, brought his family to the area and founded the community in 1867. In 1869 he bought a plot of land at what is now 2409 San Gabriel Street and became Wheatville's first landowner. Wheat raised corn in a site now bounded by Guadalupe, West 24th, and San Gabriel streets. Wheatville residents worked mainly as domestics in white households, merchants in the community, and as semiskilled laborers in the Austin construction industry. A few blacksmiths lived in Wheatville, and some residents farmed and raised livestock. George Franklin, a former slave and a carpenter, purchased land at the site of present-day 2402 San Gabriel in 1869 and constructed a stone building with walls four stones thick. Now known as the Gold Dollar building, it became the center of the community as subsequent owners used it to house families, grocery stores, various other businesses, and churches. Jacob Fontaine, a prominent Baptist minister, settled at Wheatville in the late 1860s.
FONTAINE, JACOB (1808–1898). Jacob (Jake) Fontaine, Baptist preacher, political and civic leader, and newspaper publisher in Austin, was born into slavery in Arkansas in 1808. His several owners included the Tuttle and Isaacs families, but his best known and most influential master was Rev. Edward Fontaine, a great-grandson of Patrick Henry, who moved to Austin, Texas, in 1839 as the personal secretary of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar.
Jacob was Edward Fontaine's sexton at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin in 1855, but in 1860 he was attending the First Baptist Church, which Sam Houston attended. While serving as Edward Fontaine's sexton, he would preach in the afternoons to blacks in the basement of the old Methodist church at Brazos and Tenth streets. Jacob Fontaine and other members of the black congregation began to meet secretly in 1864 to organize a break from the white church. In 1867, after emancipation, Jacob founded the First (Colored) Baptist Church in Austin. He was a janitor in the old Land Office Building, became active in Republican and Greenback party politics during Reconstruction in Travis County, operated a grocery, laundry, book, and medicine store, and in 1876 established the Austin Gold Dollar, one of the first black weekly newspapers in the South and the first newspaper under black ownership in Austin.
In 1867 Fontaine helped to found the St. John Regular Missionary Baptist Association, originally known as the Travis County Association, and was elected its first moderator. He also founded five churches in addition to the First (Colored) Baptist Church: Mount Zion (Williamson Creek), 1873; Good Hope (Round Rock), 1874; Sweet Home (Clarksville), 1877; New Hope (Wheatsville), 1887; and St. Stephen's (Waters Park), 1887. He and his minister son Israel Jacob Fontaine II later founded a local chapter of the Colored Brothers of the Eastern Star.
The Fontaine family lived on the Woodlawn plantation near the Austin home of ex-governor Elisha M. Pease. Jacob's wife Melvina (Viney) was a housekeeper there and had cooked at the Governor's Mansion, where their daughter Melissa married a custodian, Joe Gordon, on March 18, 1870. They had two other daughters. From 1875 to 1898 the Fontaines lived in a two-story structure at twenty-fourth and Orange (San Gabriel), now an Austin landmark. Fontaine started his newspaper there, with sixty dollars he earned from the investment of a gold dollar given to him in 1872 by his sister, Nelly Miller, when they were reunited in Mississippi after a separation caused twenty years before by slavery. In 1881–82 Fontaine emerged as Austin's leading black advocate for the establishment of the University of Texas in Austin. He traveled to San Antonio, Seguin, and Marlin to secure the black vote for his cause.
Soure: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ffo30
AUSTIN GOLD DOLLAR.
The Austin Gold Dollar was one of the first black newspapers west of the Mississippi and one of forty-eight commercial black newspapers published in Texas between 1870 and 1900. It was founded in August 1876 in the Wheatsville area of Austin by Jacob Fontaine. Copies are extremely scarce, and records on circulation are scanty, but the Gold Dollar certainly existed in 1878 and maybe as late as 1880. The newspaper emphasized needs of freed slaves-family ties, education, frugality, moral and religious instruction, the discipline of youth, and racial justice. It struggled with black illiteracy and poverty, and supported the political and social causes of its founder, a leader in politics in Travis County. Fontaine named his paper for a gold dollar given him by his sister Nelly Miller in 1872, when they were reunited in Mississippi after a separation caused by slavery twenty years before. Fontaine earned sixty dollars (which is roughly $1200 in todays money) to start the newspaper in his home, a structure set afire by arsonists in August 1879 but designated an Austin landmark in August 1977.
Source: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eeajh
5. UT: Barbara Jordan Statue, UT Racial Geography Tour, and Heman v. Painter (307 W. 24th St)
-Racial geography tour by Dr. Edmund Gordon:
https://racialgeographytour.org
The Racial Geography Tour is an interactive guided exploration of the historic origins of the University of Texas at Austin’s buildings, landmarks, and spaces. Through 360º videos learn about how ideas of race and gender are sedimented in the architecture, landscape, and layout of the campus.
Request to take a guided walking tour of UT Racial Geography:
This happened before Brown v Board at UT!
Heman v Painter:
In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, a black man, applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School. State law restricted access to the university to whites, and Sweatt's application was automatically rejected because of his race. When Sweatt asked the state courts to order his admission, the university attempted to provide separate but equal facilities for black law students.
In a unanimous decision, the Court held that the Equal Protection Clause required that Sweatt be admitted to the University of Texas at Austin. The Court found that the state "law school for Negroes," which we now know as Texas Southern University in Houston, would have been grossly unequal to the University of Texas Law School. The Court argued that the separate school would be inferior in a number of areas, including faculty, course variety, library facilities, legal writing opportunities, and overall prestige. The Court also found that the mere separation from the majority of law students harmed students' abilities to compete in the legal arena.
Source: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/339us629
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/339us629
Barbara Jordan statue:
Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) rose to the national stage from Houston’s largely African American Fifth Ward, becoming a public defender of the U.S. Constitution and a leading presence in Democratic Party politics for two decades. She was the first black woman elected to the Texas state senate and the first black Texan in Congress. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she gave the influential opening speech of Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment hearings. She retired after three terms in Congress to become a professor and policy advocate.
Barbara Jordan: Early Life and Education
Barbara Charline Jordan was born February 21, 1936, in her parents’ home in Houston. Her father, Benjamin Jordan, was a Baptist minister and warehouse clerk. Her mother Arlyne was a maid, housewife and church teacher.
Jordan was a member of the inaugural class at Texas Southern University, a black college hastily created by the Texas legislature to avoid having to integrate the University of Texas. There Jordan joined the debate team and helped lead it to national renown. The team famously tied Harvard’s debaters when they came to Houston.
Jordan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University in 1956 and was accepted at Boston University’s law school. Three years later, Jordan earned her law degree as one of only two African American women in her class.
Barbara Jordan: Texas State Senator
Jordan volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, heading a Harris County voter drive. She twice ran unsuccessfully for the Texas House before winning the 1966 contest for a newly created Texas State Senate district.
In Austin she won the respect of her colleagues and worked to pass a state minimum wage law that covered farmworkers. In her final year in the state senate, Jordan’s colleagues elected her president pro tem, allowing her to serve as governor for a day—June 10, 1972—in accordance with state tradition.
Barbara Jordan: Years in Congress
Five months later Jordan ran for Congress as the Democratic nominee for Houston’s 18th District. She won, becoming the first African American woman from a Southern state to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. With support from her close advisor Lyndon B. Johnson, Jordan was appointed to key posts including on the House Judiciary Committee.
On July 25, 1974, Jordan gave the 15-minute opening statement of the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing for Richard Nixon. Her speech was a staunch defense of the U.S. Constitution (which, she noted, had not initially included African Americans in its “We, the people”) and its checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power. She said, “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
The impeachment speech helped lead to Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal and won Jordan national acclaim for her rhetoric, intellect and integrity. Two years later she was asked to deliver the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention—another first for an African American woman.
While in Congress Jordan worked on legislation promoting women’s rights, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and cosponsored a bill that would have granted housewives Social Security benefits based on their domestic labor.
Barbara Jordan: Retirement
Jordan retired from Congress in 1979 to become a professor at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She became an active public speaker and advocate, amassing 25 honorary doctorates.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/barbara-c-jordan
6. MLK Statue (In front of Jackson Geoscience Building)
Instead of talking about MLK directly, I want to read some excerpts from an article that was published in the Washington Post last week, written by Dr. Peneil Joseph - an acclaimed UT professor with a focus on African American Studies.
The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 52 years ago sparked a national uprising in ways that echo the demonstrations for George Floyd taking place around the country. The massive and multiracial character of the racial demonstrations erupting nationally in the wake of Floyd’s public execution by now former Minneapolis police officers represent a kind of bitter, unspoken racial progress in our nation.
There is a tragically poetic symmetry in the waves of national rebellion that the deaths of these two black men triggered over a half-century apart.
Martin Luther King was the most famous black man on the planet at the time of his assassination. King’s death roiled the nation, sparking widespread protests, demonstrations and marches in 125 cities. Violence and political rebellion contoured these events, which reached the nation’s capital and worried White House officials enough to post thousands of military troops outside the official residence of the president. Sound familiar?
The increasingly bleak racial and economic conditions King marched, protested and organized against in his era have flourished in our own time. The contemporary breadth and depth of institutional racism are no accident. Black lives continue to be devalued through the thousands of policy and political choices that have been made between King’s assassination and Floyd’s death.
The aspirational historic moment that led to President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society asked the nation enormously important questions about the value of black life in America. Programs to offer early-childhood education, clean drinking water, child care, after-school care and nutritious food showcased the way in which policy could be guided by racial justice and compassion. Efforts to allow poor black Americans to design the keys to their own freedom through the Community Action Program stalled after a short time, felled by bipartisan protests from elected officials, bureaucrats and others who believed in top-down solutions that would allow mayors and elected officials to dole out anti-poverty funds to their local political machines.
The flames that engulfed large portions of America during the 1960s helped to extinguish the promise of the Great Society by turning the War on Poverty into a dehumanizing war against poor black communities. America has, in the ensuing five decades, deployed state of the art technology to criminalize, surveil, arrest, incarcerate, segregate and punish black communities. Floyd’s death represents the culmination of these political and policy decisions to choose punishment over empathy, to fund prisons over education and housing and to promote fear of black bodies over racial justice.
America proved stubbornly resistant to King’s dream of a “beloved community” free of racial segregation, economic injustice and violence. Watershed legislation passed during the civil rights era proved more limited in social impact than when originally conceived. Dreams of racial integration spurred by the court-ordered desegregation of public schools in the 1970s have died a slow, agonizing painful death. Instead, court decisions since the 1980s have interpreted even voluntary efforts at racial integration as reverse discrimination or the denial of parents’ rights to choose where to send their children to school. Voting rights, perhaps the civil rights movement’s signal achievement, received almost fatal wounds as a result of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that eliminated a requirement that states with a history of voter discrimination and suppression to seek approval from the Justice Department before passing rules that could negatively affect black and other historically marginalize voters.
Massive national disruption for racial justice in honor of Floyd, a black man who was not famous, rich, nor well connected, represents a kind of progress for the nation. Not the progress we proclaim during annual MLK celebrations, the practiced racial tolerance and co-optation that is on public display during Black History Month, or the unearned congratulations and pats on the back in the aftermath of the Obama presidency.
The Floyd protests are evidence of a racial progress in national understanding of the depth and breadth of white supremacy and institutional racism. Americans of all colors and backgrounds have taken to the street in demonstrations that reflect an understanding that black life is inextricably connected their own. This movement recognizes the long journey ahead to achieving genuine racial justice in this country. Outside of the bubble of black success, talent and genius that we see scattered across America, institutional racism and white supremacy have flourished rather than diminished.
There is also significant progress in the fact that an ordinary black man’s public execution has sparked so many white Americans to join in demanding racial justice. George Floyd serves as a literal and figurative embodiment of the thousands of black men who have been killed by law enforcement over the course of American history who are destined to remain anonymous.
The thousands of white people who have taken to the streets alongside black demonstrators — and Latinx, Asian, indigenous peoples — reflect a small sample of even larger numbers of ordinary citizens, politicians, activists, faith leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes and businesses that have issued statements of support and solidarity for racial justice in the wake of Floyd’s death.
Fifty-two years after King’s assassination we have arrived at another crossroads in the country’s long troubled racial history. Collectively, we can make a different choice than the 1968 Generation, which chose fear over love, President Richard Nixon’s law-and-order “silent majority” over King’s “beloved community” and racial segregation over openness and inclusion.
Black Americans, having already suffered the premature death, unemployment, and indignity triggered by the covid-19 pandemic, received another unconscionable measure of grief with the tragedy of Floyd’s death on video. Yet, this generation of black women and men continue to shine incandescent light demanding justice and equality in ways that have inspired millions of people around the world.
The racial justice demonstrations inspired by Floyd’s death offer this nation a generational opportunity to correct past mistakes while creating a future that is not only anti-racist, but dedicated to the promotion of racial justice. We can build MLK’s “beloved community” in our lifetime, but only by acknowledging the depth and breadth of our contemporary racial conflicts, the legacies of our troubled history and the blood of famous and more obscure martyrs who have galvanized Americans to make black citizenship and dignity the beating heart of this nation.
Author: Dr. Peniel Joseph
Published June 6, 2020
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/06/protests-wake-mlks-assassination-george-floyds-death-show-what-hasnt-has-changed-since-1968/
7. Oakwood Cemetery Section 4 (1601 Navasota St)
Oakwood Cemetary is the oldest city owned cemetery in Austin. This area of the cemetery (quadrant closest to I-35 and and MLK intersection) served as the area where colored folks were buried in the 1800’s. There is no doubt that some of the residents of the Clarksville and Wheatville communities are now at rest here.
I reviewed the cemetery’s registry, and found that one of the first recorded burials was a young African American man.
His name was Henry, last name unknown.
He was around 20 years old, Buried July 26, 1866. Died of Drowning
The only remarks are the he was a laborer who came here with the army.
He lived for only 1 year after being freed from slavery. Isn’t that wild?
Graves were marked in a variety of ways besides wood or stone slabs. Sometimes unusual carved wooden staffs, thought perhaps to represent religious motifs or effigies, were used. Some graves were marked using plants, such as cedars or yuccas, and anthropologists have suggested this tradition may reflect an African belief in the living spirit. This tradition can be traced at least to Haiti, where blacks, probably mixing Christian religion with African beliefs, explain that, "trees live after, death is not the end." Yuccas and other "prickly" plants may also have been used "to keep the spirits" in the cemetery. Other graves were marked with pieces of iron pipe, railroad iron, or any other convenient object.
This brief overview of African-American cemeteries has revealed that there are a lot of differences between traditional African-American and traditional Euro-American cemeteries. Some of these differences can be traced to different religious beliefs. Some are probably only the by-product of one group being enslaved by the other.
The location of African-American graveyards in marginal areas, for example, was probably the result of blacks being enslaved. Not only did owners not want to lose valuable land to slaves, but controlling even where the dead might be buried was yet another example of the power plantation owners had over their slaves.
The use of plants to mark graves, however, is likely related to African antecedents. Marking the graves was important, regardless of what was used, at least for the current generation. The predominance of temporary items – plants and wood planks, for example – suggests that it wasn't particularly important for future generations to know the location of any specific grave.
In fact, the use of temporary markers helps, in its own way, to ensure that the cemetery is always available to those who want to be buried with their kin. As one modern black man explained, "there is always room for one more person." This, of course, sounds impossible to many whites, who see cemeteries in terms of a finite number of square feet. But this is simply not how African-Americans have traditionally viewed graveyards.
***Take a brief moment of silence for all of the people who were once living in their prime who we have lost.
8. Colored Teachers State Association Building (1191 Navasota)
The building that housed the Colored Teachers State Association building, serving African American teachers from 1952 until 1966, is significant not only for the group’s central role in desegregating Texas public schools and winning equal rights and wages for the state’s African-American teachers; it was also designed by John S. Chase, was the state’s first African-American architect. The family of Ella Mae Pease purchased it for her use as a hair salon in 1972, and it became a social center for the the neighborhood. In 2017, the University of Texas purchased it to preserve Chase’s and the organization’s legacy and to function as a community engagement center.
9. The George Washington Carver Library (1165 Angelina)
The Carver Museum and Cultural Center and the Carver Branch Library grew out of one of the first library buildings in Austin, which later became the "colored branch" of the Austin Public Library system. The small frame structure with wood siding was constructed in 1926. The building was then moved to the current location in 1933, where it was renovated with brick veneer and reopened shortly thereafter. In 1947, it was named in honor of Dr. George Washington Carver, the famous African American agricultural scientist, who dedicated his life to improving agronomy throughout the nation and is known as one of the greatest inventors in American history. After the completion of the larger branch library to the south, the historic facility was rededicated in 1979 as the first known African American neighborhood museum in Texas. In 2005, a new museum and cultural facility was added to the campus, housing four galleries, a conference room, classroom, darkroom, dance studio, 134-seat theater and archival space. The galleries feature a core exhibit on Juneteenth, a permanent exhibit on African American families in Austin, an artists' gallery and a children's exhibit on black scientists and inventors. Returning to the library roots of this historic building, the facility is developing extensive research opportunities through the genealogy center.
Source:
https://txhillcountrytrail.com/plan-your-adventure/historic-sites-and-cities/sites/george-washington-carver-branch-library-and
10. Richard Overton’s House (2011 Hamilton)
Richard Arvin Overton (May 11, 1906 – December 27, 2018) was an Americansupercentenarian who at the age of 112 years, 230 days was the oldest verified surviving U.S. World War II veteran and oldest man in the United States. He served in the United States Army. In 2013, he was honored by President Barack Obama.[2][3][4][5] He resided in Austin, Texas, from 1945 until his death in 2018.
Overton was born in Bastrop County, Texas. Overton enlisted into the U.S. military on September 3, 1940, at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.[8]
He served in the South Pacific from 1940 through 1945, including stops in Hawaii, Guam, Palau, and Iwo Jima. He left the U.S. Army in October 1945 as a technician fifth grade.[9]
Overton worked at local furniture stores before taking a position with the Texas Department of the Treasury (now part of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts) in Austin.
Overton gained media attention during the 2013 Memorial Day weekend when he told a national news station he would spend his Memorial Day "smoking cigars and drinking whiskey-stiffened coffee."[11] Overton has been known to smoke about a dozen cigars a day. Overton was later invited to the White House where he met with President Barack Obama.
At his ceremony in Washington DC, President Obama said this of Overton: "When the war ended, Richard headed home to Texas, to a nation bitterly divided by race. And his service on the battlefield was not always matched by the respect that he deserved at home. But this veteran held his head high,"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arvin_Overton
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/11/us/oldest-world-war-ii-veteran/
11. Huston-Tillotson University (900 Chicon)
Huston–Tillotson University (HTU) is a private historically black university. Established in 1875, Huston–Tillotson University was the first institution of higher learning in Austin. Huston–Tillotson University awards bachelor's degrees in business, education, the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, science, and technology and a Master's degree in educational leadership.
The history of Huston - Tillotson University lies in two schools: Tillotson College and Samuel Huston College.
Tillotson College
The roots of Tillotson College date back to 1875 and build upon work of the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the American Missionary Association of the Congregational churches (now United Church of Christ). Chartered in 1877 as Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute, the school began classes on January 17, 1881. Many of Tillotson’s first students had no prior formal education. However, the eager students, who numbered 100 by the end of the first year, understood that their admission to Tillotson made them among the elect of their race and placed upon them the responsibility to enrich others through the skills they would derive from their education.
On June 2, 1909, a new charter was issued and the school was renamed Tillotson College, a “normal school” for the training of teachers for the black community. The school was reorganized in 1925 as a junior college; in 1926 as a women’s college; and again in 1931 as a senior, co-educational institution. Renowned for its departments of education and music, the college received class A accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1943.
Samuel Huston College
In 1876, the Reverend George Warren Richardson, a Methodist minister from Minnesota, leased St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church of Dallas, Texas, as the site for a school for the African American youth of the city. In 1878, the school was moved to Austin, Texas, and housed in what is now Wesley United Methodist Church.
As was the case with Tillotson College, Samuel Huston underwent various configurations throughout its developmental years. Before the end of its first year, the fledgling school had been adopted by the West Texas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and renamed Andrews Normal College in honor of a church leader. In December of 1887, however, Samuel Huston, a farmer from Marengo, Iowa, donated property estimated to be worth $10,000, with the understanding that the school would bear his name. Samuel Huston College was chartered in 1910 as a private educational corporation under the laws of Texas. In 1926, it was approved as a senior college by the State of Texas Department of Education and in 1934 was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
The Merger
Throughout the history of Samuel Huston College and Tillotson College, moral and religious instruction undergirded the curriculum at both institutions. The schools also contributed significantly to the social and civic life of Austin’s black citizens. Located less than one mile apart in East Austin, the institutions enjoyed healthy competition and rivalry in athletic programs, cooperation in student activities, and collegial relationships among the faculty, staff, and students. These features became distinguishing traits of the two campuses, while the corresponding commitment to community service affirmed the institutions’ concept of the responsibilities that befell educated persons.
However, despite periods of relative prosperity, neither college enjoyed a wealth of material or financial resources. Consequently, and because of their mutual interests, values, and constituencies, the trustees of Samuel Huston College and Tillotson College met jointly on January 26, 1952, and agreed to detailed plans for merging the two institutions on the site (then known as “Bluebonnet Hill”) of Tillotson College. The merger was consummated, and the new Charter of Incorporation for Huston-Tillotson College was signed on October 24, 1952. The merged institutions adopted “In union, strength” as their motto.
Following the merger, Huston-Tillotson College became the sole provider of higher education for African-Americans in Central Texas until the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which launched the period of desegregation. Today the College continues to both honor and foster its relationship with its founding denominations as well as its ethnic heritage.
Before the merger, future baseball legend Jackie Robinson accepted an offer from his old friend and pastor Rev. Karl Downs [8] who was president of the college, to be the athletic director at Samuel Huston College, then of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC).[9]
Before joining the Kansas City Monarchs, Robinson coached the school's basketball team for the 1944–45 season. As a fledgling program, few students tried out for the basketball team, and Robinson even resorted to inserting himself into the lineup for exhibition games. Although his teams were outmatched by opponents, Robinson was respected as a disciplinarian coach
Azie Morton was one of Huston Tillotson’s many successful graduates.
Azie Taylor Morton was born in Dale, Texas, in 1936. She served as Treasurer of the United States during the Carter administration from September 12, 1977 to January 20, 1981. She remains the only African American to have ever held that office. Her signature was printed on US currency during her tenure..[1]
Before becoming treasurer, she served on President John F. Kennedy's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. From 1972 to 1976, she was a special assistant to Robert Schwarz Strauss, the chair of the Democratic National Committee.[2] She was also an election observer for the presidential elections in Haiti, Senegal, and the Dominican Republic; a member of the American Delegation to Rome, Italy for the Enthronement of Pope John Paul II; chair of a People to People Mission to the Soviet Union and China; and a representative to the first African/African American Conference held in Africa.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azie_Taylor_Morton
12. Victory Grill (1104 East 11th St)
Johnny Holmes, a booking agent and band manager, opened the Victory Grill on August 15th, 1945 as a restaurant and bar for black soldiers returning from the war. In the segregated south of the 1940s, these servicemen could not walk into just any place to have a beer. The first incarnation of the Victory was a small "lean-to" building, but Holmes soon moved to a larger building next door.
Holmes was also familiar with both the burgeoning Texas blues and jazz scenes, and soon, the club became known for its music as well as its food and drink. The club began attracting music lovers, no matter what their race. During its heyday in the 1950s, most of the popular national blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz acts that played Austin performed at the Victory Grill. Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Etta James, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry and Janis Joplin were some of the artists who graced the stage. A resident of the area later quoted, "The street was so crowded you could barely walk. It was like New Orleans."
The Victory Grill is one of the last remaining original Chitlin' Circuit juke joints. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, archived by the Texas Historical Commission, and dubbed a "Texas Treasure" by the statewide organization Preservation Texas. It stands as an artifact to the development of a distinct American music tradition. The restoration of the Victory Grill bridged the era of the Chitlin' Circuit to today's urban contemporary sounds. The café serves southern cuisine, provides blues, jazz and urban contemporary entertainment, and provides educational opportunities that link past African-American musical forms and culture with the present. The venue is open for private events, educational opportunities and cultural tourism.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Grill
Bonus:
Wesley United Methodist Church (1164 San Bernard St)
The Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, United States, was founded in 1865, at the end of the American Civil War. Its original members were Austin-area freedmen, and it remains a predominantly African-American congregation. On March 4, 1865, the Reverend Joseph Welch, Presiding Elder of the Texas District of the Mississippi Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presided over the meeting at which Wesley was founded. This historical meeting was held in the basement of the old Tenth Street M. E. Church, South in Austin, Texas.
TWhen the church was opened for membership at least 275 persons joined. Assisting Wright were the ministers Friend, Spencer Hardwell, and John Boyd, each of whom subsequently served as pastor of Wesley. These ministers and the Rev. B. F. Williams led the congregation during the nine years from the founding of the church until the organization of the West Texas Conference in 1874.
The first church building was erected under the leadership of Bishop Abraham Grant and the Rev. B. F. Williams, who served as pastor in 1874-75. This church was located in what is now downtown Austin, on the corner of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue. One historical account of the Wesley of that day includes the following description:
"The dimensions were about 40x60 feet." The floor was of dirt. The steps were logwood. The seating capacity was small. The benches were made of slab board. There was a lamp irregularly kept, fastened to the side of the wall. When this lamp was installed in place of the individual candles, there was great rejoicing."
As Wesley progressed, it broadened its scope and attracted new members, and in less than two decades a larger building was needed; in the spring of 1882, the cornerstone was laid for a new church at the corner of Ninth and Neches Streets. This building, containing approximately twice the floor space of the "First Wesley," was completed at an estimated cost of US$22,000, exclusive of church furniture valued at over $2,500.
The new church had a pastor's study, a library for Sunday School books and literature, choir materials, and a six-room parsonage for the minister. For several years Samuel Huston College (now Huston–Tillotson University) held most of its classes in the church.
By the end of the second decade of the 20th century, not only had Wesley Methodist Church grown, but also the city of Austin had become a major urban community in Central Texas. There was a need to expand the facilities of the Austin Public Schools. Therefore, in 1928, the Austin School Board acquired the properties of the church for $17,500. Earlier, under the ministerial leadership of the Reverend L. H. Richardson, the church purchased a plot of ground facing Hackberry, Navasota, and San Bernard Streets for future use.
Under the pastoral administration of the Rev. W. L. Turner, a new church ("Greater Wesley") was built at this East Austin location at a cost of approximately $50,000, supported by the members of the church with the cooperation of the citizens of Austin.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_United_Methodist_Church_(Austin,_Texas)