Clarksville, Henry Madison's cabin, Huston-Tillotson and a city plan that East Austin outlasted.
Freedmen's Towns
After emancipation, freed people built their own communities around Austin. In 1871 the freedman Charles Clark founded Clarksville, a mile west of the city, and it is the oldest surviving freedmen's town in the area. Sweet Home Baptist Church, founded before 1882, is still a cornerstone of the community, and in 1976 Clarksville joined the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.
In 1871 Governor Edmund J. Davis appointed Henry Green Madison an Austin city alderman, the city's first African American city councilman. The log cabin he built on what is now East 11th Street was later hidden inside a larger house, found by a wrecking crew in 1968 and rebuilt in Rosewood Park.
The 1928 Plan
The 1928 city plan proposed a Negro district on Austin's east side. Explicit racial zoning was no longer legal, so it told the city to put all public amenities for Black residents there, and the city withheld sewers and paved roads from freedmen's communities elsewhere and cut off services like trash collection in Wheatville. Redlining did the rest, and by 1932 nearly all of Austin's Black residents lived in East Austin. In 1928 the city had also bought the land for Rosewood Park, a segregated park for Black Austinites.
Huston-Tillotson
Founded in 1875, Huston-Tillotson University was the first institution of higher learning in Austin. Tillotson College opened its doors on January 17, 1881, and Samuel Huston College grew out of an 1876 Methodist Episcopal conference. The two merged on October 24, 1952, and the campus stands in East Austin, between Seventh and 11th Streets.
The Carver
In 1933, at the Black community's request, a 1926 library building was moved to East Austin to become the city's first branch library for Black residents. Renamed the George Washington Carver Library in 1947, it became a museum around 1980, described as the first African American neighborhood museum in Texas, and a much larger museum and cultural center was later built beside it.
Black Austin Today
East Austin, from the Carver to Huston-Tillotson and Rosewood Park, carries this history, and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Austin.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Austin on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The Doris Miller Auditorium in Rosewood Park. Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons Huston-Tillotson University. Photo: 2C2K Photography, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons The George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center. Photo: 2C2K Photography, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons