Mapping to Recover Black Places in Texas

The maps shown here are from The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Study, which uses ArcGis StoryMaps to map historic Black settlements in Texas.

Texas was slow to abandon slavery – slave owners in the state had refused to inform their slaves of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and it wasn't until 19 June 1865 that union soldiers arrived in Galveston to enforce Emancipation, an event now marked in the annual Juneteenth celebration. A backlash swiftly followed with the political and economic repression of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, and many Black Texans were left in debt bondage, reliant on sharecropping and subject to racialised violence. In response, they sought to buy land on which to form their own, self-reliant communities and carve out independent lives, founding settlements called freedom colonies; the project has so far recorded 557 of these settlements formed between 1865 and 1930, and has mapped 357 of them. The name freedom colony is unique to Texas along with other distinctive characteristics, including that many of Texas's freedom colonies were never incorporated and their populations exert little power over planning decisions.

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a digital humanities project and social justice initiative, was established in 2014 with its stated goal of putting the freedom colonies “on the map, on policy agendas, and at the centre of Texas history”. Headed by Dr Andrea Roberts, assistant professor in urban planning and associate director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development at Texas A&M University, it works in partnership with descendant communities to document the stories of the freedom colonies, and make visible resources and communities under threat due to factors ranging from gentrification to natural disasters and land dispossession.

The Atlas shown here, which – importantly – is both publicly accessible and interactive, is central to the project's aim to put the freedom colonies “on the map”. The welcome screen (above) shows an overview of Texas with the freedom colonies marked as different coloured dots and a graphic display that shows viewers how to navigate the map and how to interact with it – for instance, it's possible to add a new freedom colony or to drill down to find out more information on a particular one. Move through the site to the Atlas itself and it reveals the map of Texas with its patchwork of multicoloured, clickable dots – zoom in for a closer view of any county or freedom colony – and the option of hiding or exposing layers that show, for example, state and country boundaries, population by county and the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. The latter, a category 4 hurricane that swept through Texas and Louisiana in August 2017 causing catastrophic floods, $125bn of damage and more than 100 deaths, is significant as it particularly devastated south-east Texas where the freedom colonies are concentrated. Like Katrina in 2005, Harvey disproportionately harmed African American neighbourhoods and socially vulnerable communities.

Through tracing Harvey's wake, the Atlas illuminates the impact of natural disasters and lays bare a dimension of history: the freedom colonies are concentrated in the eastern half of Texas as the coastal and floodplain areas were some of the few places where African Americans could obtain land through adverse possession or squatting. This was also the area of the majority of farmland and plantations where the formerly enslaved once worked (in rare cases, former plantation owners willed land to their Black offspring). The effect is that freedom colonies are in areas particularly vulnerable to flooding and the climate crisis. Hurricane Harvey led to 229 freedom colonies being federally designated for disaster assistance – 64 % of the 357 freedom colonies that have been mapped so far. 

Typically of digital mapping projects, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Study has multiple purposes that are not available to traditional paper maps. It is not just a source of information, it is a destination for information, and it provides a way for users to share data and co-research with scholars in a crowdsourced resource. Members of the public are invited to contribute at multiple points on the website and in different ways: completing a short survey form on the Storyteller Portal or a longer form in the Black Settlements Study Survey; adding a point on the map to show an as-yet unmarked freedom colony; or emailing the project directly. People can also download and print out PDF versions of the forms and post them back in an effort to open up the collaboration with the community as widely as possible. Information sought are stories, locations, and detailed information about each freedom colony, as well as archival material such as photographs, recordings, and interviews. 

Freedom colonies are not static landscapes, but active communities made up of committed social and kinship networks who may be dispersed, returning to preserve historic buildings such as churches, schools, and cemeteries, and gathering for festivals, family reunions and funerals. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project uses the Atlas and database to help co-develop community resilience strategies and policies with freedom colony descendants, and to provide evidence-based support to grassroots groups. As a means to preserve the heritage of the state's historic African American settlements, it is extremely valuable, and the project leverages that heritage to address contemporary threats to historic places.

So far online crowdsourcing and offline surveys have enabled the project to find names and locations for 50 settlements that were not originally listed, with the Atlas now identifying 557 place names of freedom colonies including 357 locations verified by a remaining feature, census status, or other public database. While most of them are in the east of the state, the true distribution is not yet known.

This research is a chance to reshape the narratives surrounding African American history in Texas and the US, one that includes the voices and perspectives of Black Texans. By its existence in the digital realm, the Atlas is an example of the map-as-doorway – an entrance to an inclusive documentation of placemaking and continuing African American stories of survival, resistance and community building, and evidence of a culturally specific relationship to land ownership.

Note:

The first in a regular series on digital maps that challenge official narratives and drive change. This article draws on text about the Texas Freedom Colonies Project by Dr Andrea Roberts and her students. For more information, see the website. Contact: freedomcoloniesproject@gmail.com

Links: 

Texas Freedom Colonies Project: http://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com/

The Atlas & Study: http://bit.ly/txfcpatlastwo

ArcGis StoryMaps https://storymaps.arcgis.com/

Juneteenth http://juneteenth.com/