(2023) Introduction to The Texas Freedom Colonies Project

THE TEXAS FREEDOM COLONIES PROJECT™ OVERVIEW

Texas Freedom Colonies

From 1865-1930, African Americans accumulated land and founded an estimated 557 historic black settlements or freedom colonies in Texas. Since their founding, freedom colony descendants have dispersed, and hundreds of settlements’ statuses and locations are unknown. While known by several different names (freedmen’s settlements, Black pockets, freedmen’s towns) and existing in urban, rural, exurban, and suburban spaces, freedom colonies all confront similar challenges. Gentrification, cultural erasure, natural disasters, urban renewal, and land dispossession have contributed to their decline. Freedom colony descendants’ lack of access to technical assistance, ecological and economic vulnerability, and invisibility in public records have quickened the disappearance of these historic Texas communities.

What is The Texas Freedom Colonies Project? ™

Founded by Dr. Andrea Roberts in 2014, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™ is a research, educational, and social justice initiative dedicated to preserving the spaces within and heritage of Texas’ historic African American settlements. Our goal is to prevent cultural property erasure, destruction, and decay within settlements in partnership with descendant communities. Cultural properties include homes/farmsteads, churches, schools, lodges, and cemeteries. We are researchers and volunteers who map disappearing places and co-create resilience strategies with endangered communities. To support freedom colonies’ community resilience, the Project Team, operating virtually and physically at Texas A&M University and the University of Virginia (Fall 2022), leverages Roberts’ Place Preservation Framework connecting, collecting, and co-creating solutions. The Project

1) Connects: Hosts and maintains an interactive, publicly accessible Atlas & database of freedom colony heritage, including GIS layers indicating development and ecological threats. Creates events and educational workshops for descendant connection and community building

2) Collects: Ethically records and safeguards stories and materials associated with freedom colonies, and

3) Co-Creates: Identifies resources for and co-develops community resilience strategies and policies with freedom colony descendants using engaged, applied research

The Project engages in several public-facing initiatives that protect endangered African American history, educate the public, and yield valuable research. Our work leverages social media, digital humanities platforms, GIS analysis, archival research, and engaged ethnography, including oral histories, to achieve our aims. Team members create peer-reviewed scholarship, develop project-based learning for students, author reports, and provide evidenced-based support to grassroots and public preservation groups and agencies, which along with the Atlas, make freedom colonies more visible to those who can influence their chances of survival. Team leadership provides specialized training on cultural resource surveying and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in historic preservation to nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies.

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study is an ArcGIS, StoryMap-based platform with supportive material available through a YouTube Channel and Word Press website. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study is the state repository of historical Black settlement data. The Project used Texas Historical Commission historical marker content, National Register of Historic Places listings, USGS maps, and census data to create the core database. The Atlas integrates ethnographic, spatial, and archival data crowdsourced from the public to fill remaining gaps and make visible African American places, schools, churches, cemeteries, and histories in the public record and provides a publicly accessible map and data clearinghouse for descendants. Atlas users can share data, co-research with scholars, and store freedom colony’s historical and contemporary materials, recordings, photos, and interviews about challenges and promising preservation practices. The Atlas is the prototype for a future portal with full-time staff support and the capacity to hold more significant amounts of data than at present and serve stakeholders who want to protect freedom colonies. The Atlas’ layers also illuminate the impact of natural disasters on freedom colonies. After Hurricane Harvey, 229 freedom colonies were in 53 FEMA-designated counties, constituting 64 % of the mapped freedom colonies (Roberts and Biazar 2019).

THE TEXAS FREEDOM COLONIES PROJECT™ OVERVIEW

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project’s Accomplishments

Research

●Built a growing database of 557+ freedom colony names’ and stories, verified and mapped 460+ settlements; 45 # settlements introduced to the Atlas by users, not on original list

●Documented community origin stories, preservation practices, and cultural landscapes

●Detected strategies descendants use to prevent land loss and build intergenerational wealth

●14 peer-reviewed articles

●Recorded oral traditions used to transfer cultural and social memory to youth

●Developed approaches and methodologies that universities and think tanks have referenced when developing similar digital humanities models

●Identified planning and policy issues including land loss, access to social services, exposure to environmental hazards, and structural inequalities

Education

●Led DEI and surveying workshops with state agencies, county historical commissions, universities, professional associations, government leaders

●Lead students in project-based and service learning through urban planning and design coursework.

Practice & Policy Change

●TXFC Project methodologies’ inform establishment of first, historic Black rural districts in Virginia

●Developed strategies for identifying multi-hazard impacts on cemeteries in historic Black communities in Texas and Cancer Alley in Louisiana

●Become a resource for Council of Texas Archaeologists and Texas Department of Transportation professionals conducting desk audits, outreach, Section 106 project reviewers, and cultural resource surveyors to avoid damage to historical sites

Public Engagement

●Extensive state and national media coverage in national print and radio

●Established Adopt a County Program that teaches volunteers to locate missing settlement data and archival material

●Guest curator to state and local museums on freedom colony exhibits (Austin, San Antonio, Brenham)

THE TEXAS FREEDOM COLONIES PROJECT™ OVERVIEW

Founder & Director, Andrea R. Roberts, PhD

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. Before joining UVA, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). She is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship, which raises awareness of the entrenched racial biases impeding documentation, recognition, and preservation of historic Black settlements’ cultural assets. She is also a 6th-generation Texan and freedom colony descendant.

In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the vehicle through which she mentors and trains future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community-based researchers focused on addressing the biggest challenges facing settlements in Texas and around the country invisibility, environmental injustice, land loss, heritage conservation, and endangered historic structures and cemeteries. She and her team richly map these settlements and is presented as the interactive The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™, Atlas and Study, which spatializes 557 sites and histories through participatory action and engaged research methods, including oral histories. The African American Cemetery Assessment Tool and Registry also allows the public to share knowledge of burial ground conditions. Her “place preservation” framework collecting and securing heritage, connecting descendants and resources, and then co-creating applied research solutions enables student researchers, partner sites, and Adopt-a-County volunteers to extend The Project’s reach from its beginnings in East Texas to the entire state. The Texas Department of Transportation and the Council of Texas Archeologists use The Atlas to identify African American historic resources at risk. The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, and Environmental Justice have published her peer-reviewed scholarship.

She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association. Roberts was a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant recipient, and a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition. She is the Project Director for the NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty "Towards a People's History of Landscape, Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital.” Dr. Roberts is also the Consultant/Owner of Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, which provides research and DEIA services to preservation organizations. She served as a Texas State Board of Review member and a National Monument Audit Advisory Board member.

Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College (1996). She is currently writing a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences identifying Black planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience within settlements founded by formerly enslaved Africans for The University of Texas Press.

Contact: Dr. Andrea Roberts at freedomcoloniesproject@gmail.com Web: andrearobertsphd.com

The Team (2017 – 2023)

Founder and Director Andrea Roberts, PhD Student Researchers & Volunteers

• Samantha Veth (research assistant 2023)

• Valentina Aduen (volunteer 2023)

● Hannah Bowling( web consultant 2023)

● Christian Heinemann (volunteer 2023) Alumni

● Natalie Franz

● Van Anh Pham

● Sarah Vegerano

● Joshua Brown

● Jennifer Blanks

● Muhammed Biazar

● Maria Campos

● Kendall Girault

● Sophia Godfrey

● Grace Kelly

● Samina Limkhedawala

● Ashok Meyyappan

● Chelsea Parada

● Taylor Siskind

● John Yeary

● Myresha Waters

● Shanielle Veazi