This article is part of a special series about preservation in Houston, edited by Helen Bechtel, published in connection with two national preservation conferences in Houston in November.
In Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston depicts her childhood in Eatonville, Florida — the first all-Black incorporated town in the United States — as both Edenic and rough. It is a story more about the will of a people to achieve self-determination than one of subjugation by a White majority. Communities like that of Eatonville were built across Texas, as well — streets, houses, shops, city halls, and parks built by former slaves and their descendants — in landscapes we routinely drive by without noticing.
“I didn’t know Independence Heights was the first African-American incorporated community in Texas until I was 40, even though I have family living in the community, and I grew up in the church in Independence Heights,” says Tanya Debose, a lead organizer of the Preserving Communities of Color Workshop, an international gathering and weeklong series that culminates November 19 in Houston.
The workshop will expand the tent of the historic preservation movement. Preservationists, in our imaginations, busy themselves saving classical buildings fronted by columns and Corinthian capitals. The reality has always been more complex, but there is truth to the perception of a movement dominated by White elites preserving a Eurocentric history. For example, less than one percent of the National Historic Landmarks are connected to Latino history. (See Sarah Zenaida Gould’s essay in Bending the Future.)
“I don’t think our ancestors were trying to make history,” says Debose. “They were trying to make a home and they went through a lot of stress. My drive comes from wanting to build on those legacies.”
That drive to preserve communities of color resonates across the United States and the African diaspora. The conference has drawn participants from Costa Rica, Panama, Barbados, Cote d’Ivoire, Canada, Angola, and Trinidad. Keynote speakers include leading preservations like Brent Leggs, who is in Houston for the National Trust for Historic Preservation Conference. Ny Nathiri, the organizer of the ZORA! Festival in Eatonville, will share how preservation and cultural tourism have worked in tandem there.
Bexar County, Texas road map, c.1890, identifying “Negro settlement” and “Baptist church.” Photo: Everett L. Fly.
Everett Fly brings to the conference schedule several decades of documenting and preserving African- and Native-American community sites. Based in San Antonio, Fly is a licensed architect and landscape architect who studied with J.B. Jackson at Harvard and is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal of Honor.
When Orange County, Florida, was planning to put a four-lane thoroughfare through Eatonville, Fly was brought in to do an independent assessment of the impact when the initial survey found nothing of significance.
“I did my usual search for records,” Fly told Cite in a phone interview. “I found a map from the 1850s. The road through Eatonville was marked as an indigenous or Native American trail. The light bulb went off in my head. Zora Neale Hurston wrote about the role of the road in the cultural life of Eatonville. It is like [Henry David Thoreau’s] Walden Pond.” This connection and documentation not only stopped the road widening, it helped residents of Eatonville recognize their own cultural landscape and spurred the creation of the ZORA! Festival, which now draws more than 125,000 people annually, according to the festival website.
Tanya Debose sees Eatonville as a possible model for places in Houston like Fifth Ward, Independence Heights, and Borderville. The preservation and celebration of history, she argues, can go hand-in-hand with development that includes rather than displaces long-time residents. Managing change starts with memory. She says, “It is about renewing these communities both as cultural destinations and as places where people can afford to live.”
The social, political, and economic changes roiling our cities and towns appears to be driving a new urgency to this work.
“The conference shows that the interest is there, the interest is real and authentic,” says Fly. “People are not coming just for the sake of nostalgia. People are coming to learn practical tools, ways to see and understand the places they live, and how to protect them. It is a major sign. The shift isn’t coming, it is already here.”
The Preserving Community of Color Workshop has been in the making since about 2012, and is the first major conference of the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance. Johnny Ford, a founder of the alliance, is the outgoing Mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama and will address the workshop.
Orange County, Florida township map, c.1856. Photo: Everett Fly.