Episode 40 - The Texas Freedom Colonies Project w/ Dr. Andrea Roberts

Amy Barnes40min

Dr. Ian Anson

00:04

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

Dr. Ian Anson

00:40

Perhaps one of the most culturally significant questions that we can ask each other in conversation is a rather banal one. "Hey, where are you from?" For me, as a person who's lived in two countries and four different states during my lifetime, it's possible to answer this question in a few different ways. Where was I born? Where did I spend the most years of my life? Or maybe the years when I was learning the most about who I was? Where do I call home? For some folks, the answer to this question can also be a painful or even an uncomfortable one. We might answer the question by naming a place where we experienced hardship or discrimination or trauma. We might end up naming a place we wistfully long to return to one day, or we might name the place that we are right now. A place we long to one day leave behind us. What I'm driving it is place is a complex and a deeply personal subject.

Dr. Ian Anson

01:35

The significance of place is perhaps nowhere more salient than in the discussion that we're bringing you in today's episode. In just a moment, we'll hear a condensed rebroadcast of a recent lecture the formed part of the UMBC Geography and Environmental Systems Seminar Series. The subject of the talk is the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the fascinating and renowned work of Dr. Andrea Roberts of the University of Virginia. Dr. Roberts uses the project as a springboard to mentor and train future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community based researchers in order to address the biggest challenges facing settlements in Texas and around the country. According to the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, these challenges including visibility, environmental injustice, land loss, heritage conservation and endangered historic structures, and cemeteries. This is a fascinating interdisciplinary project that requires interdisciplinary expertise, which Dr. Roberts possesses in surplus. Dr. Robert serves as Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and co-director of the school's Center for Cultural Landscapes at the UVA School of Architecture. Holding a PhD from the University of Texas, she's 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. Let's dive in and take a listen to what Dr. Roberts has to say about the Texas Freedom Colonies Project right now.

Dr. Andrea Roberts

03:20

So thanks so much for having me. And I'm excited to speak to such a group that's very interdisciplinary because it very much categorizes the research that I do. I'm going to speak today about CO creating counter narratives as a foundation for just planning and preservation. So why narratives and to kind of talk about why I sent her narratives in my work. It's helpful, I think, to read this quote by Toni Morrison. She says if my work is to confront a reality, unlike that received reality of the West, it must centralized an animate information discredited by the West, patient dismissed as lore or gossip, or magic or sentiment. And I would add, I will have to add information that's embedded in narratives, stories, oral tradition. So to give further context, in my work, I've worked professionally in urban planning and government administration. And a lot of my study is, while focused in African American settlements is more broadly, a study of anti blackness of sort of structural racism in public history and historic preservation. So when we look about look at narratives and why they're so pertinent to understanding anti blackness, we would be remiss if we didn't recognize that in the last six years, we've had some notable moments history Work shared historical moments in public history, work and history happening in public, and historic preservation. We have Charlottesville and 2017 1619 project and 2019, the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which all led to a heightened awareness of systemic racism, sexism, and anti blackness more specifically about when we talk about public space and public history. It's also important to examine the lack of recognition of historic spaces associated with people of color. Only 3% of the 96,000 properties on the National Register of Historic Places represent African American heritage, and they're very in proportion to predominantly white, historic local historic districts, much fewer African American and Anglo less than 6% of the National Park Service's 20,000 employees. American African Americans are less than 4% of academic archaeologists 5% of licensed architects and engineers, and those barriers to African American participation, a lack of compensation and validation of African Americans work and what they bring to the table. There's a lot of change that needs to happen in participatory planning and preservation that needs to validate the time and the local narratives and the value of what non experts bring to the table. And neighborhood change makes organizing around particular places often a challenge and difficult. So we have these kinds of structural reasons for a lack of visibility in the field, in the practice, in the process. And in the landscape of an oral tradition. When I use the word narrative. I also want to make sure I'm clear on what I mean. I'm speaking more broadly about oral tradition which comes in a number of forms storytelling testimony, group accounts, oral history, songs, reminiscence and memory. And under that we have personal memory, cognitive memory, and habit memory, which is very much embodied. And narrative forms also have a number of functions. In communities and in our everyday life. There are catalysts for particular actions, they often give us a proof of the resilience of community. They offer us theories of change. Why were we here and how did we get here? There are our practice stories are facilitate facilitate collaboration, create transparency. And the particular focus of my work has been on foundational stories, those stories that tell communities who they are in the process by which they were created and came about. We talk more structurally, about what narratives do in their sphere of influence in let's say, historic preservation, and even any land use planning processes. We have status narratives that shape net national identity and public history, we have narratives embedded in our public discourse that inform allocations of funding policymaking and advocacy. We have all manner of educational and recognition, statements and documentation that help define areas current historic context statements, for example, National Register designations are actually large. well researched documents that are embedded with a narrative of why a particular place site object building or set of structures in a landscape means something. We have ordinances, leadership, organizational cultures, insider, outsider status, determined are largely constructed through narrative and story. We also have dominant planning narratives to be more specific, that are common in how we shape our thinking, think about black communities. So this particular diagram, the source of the information for this diagram is my own experience teaching for several years, not teaching but rather, actually working in cities working for the city of Houston with city and county of Philadelphia. In some of these tropes or ideas that are dominant planning narratives, exercised in black communities. We seeking a one size fits all solution.

Dr. Andrea Roberts

09:45

A sense of the aesthetics in an African American community are those of needing repair or change, but not necessarily being aesthetics we associate with that the historic People have very complicated ideas about the historic that don't represent the law, or the regulatory complex that tells us what's historic and what's not inner cities. That's commonly how we think about African American places. Not that it's inaccurate. I know a lot of you are in Baltimore. So this is very accurate, accurate to a certain extent. But it doesn't cover the full breadth and width, of the shape of black communities. memorialization that these are places that have a glory in the past that we can remember, but they don't have a future rooted in that past we're doing something different now is often the posture of planning, and blocks and corridors, is the shape of life, rather than the complex landscapes and then sort of a token or gatekeeper sense of engagement of finding someone that's easy, and safe to relate with when engaging in participatory planning. These are all things that I've encountered, that shaped some of my study of trying to seek the appropriate world, rather the appropriate role of practitioners in black spaces in my work. So I mentioned the National Register criteria, the National Historic Preservation Act originally passed in 1966, but amended several times since that time, has two basic criteria, dimensions that help us understand what matters in the landscape and what doesn't what's worthy of national recognition and what's not, is the age and integrity of the structure or the building primarily or object or site. That is is it 50 years or older? And does it still look much the way it did in the past? And then there's significant so we're using the word significance to mean historic, significant significance. And this is the four core criteria is the property associated with events, activities, or developments that were important in the past, with the lives of people who were important in the past, but significant architectural history or engineering achievements, and doesn't have the potential to yield information through archaeological investigation about our past? So you might look at these and say, Well, what's black and white or Latin x? Or? Or why? Why is this at all embedded with any so called structural racism? Well, in many instances, there's various reasons for why the structural integrity itself is compromised in African American communities. And there's several reasons for why the stories in the histories and the evidence of that historic significance is to identify document and aggregate in one space to facilitate the access of not only the resonance of cells, but for practitioners to access to be able to argue significance. So we have an argument here for why counter narratives matter. We've seen over the past six years how some of these narratives have foster Life and Death moments, how narratives reveal or hide injustice and erase or illuminate inequity. Counter narratives from the margins, however, reveal new public's to stare at disparities needs and new policy ideas, as I will argue going forward and counter narratives, I also argue should be harnessed translated to the policy space and treated as data. And it is important to prioritize counter narrative integration into government consultation, and discourse by leveraging technology and grassroots communication pathways. So again, about black spaces and planning just to give you an idea of what type of settlements or places I'm talking about. In our popular imagination, some of you are probably already aware of historic black towns such as rosewood, Florida, or Seneca village, which is now the site of Central Park in New York City, or Eatonville, which we've heard a lot about in the news lately, Nicodemus, Kansas and Unionville. Right there in Maryland, Texas freedom colonies in compass, freedmen's town settlements. They were dispersed communities places unplanted, unincorporated, individually unified by church and school and residents collective belief that a community existed. And that collective belief that a community existence that makes it so difficult often to verify whether or not a given landscape, or place is actually a freedom colony. And they're mostly but not primarily rural due to the growth of Texas, which now is 24 million residents. Some of the formerly rural spaces are now completely urbanized. But in 1870, less than 2% of African American kins are African Americans own less than 2% of all farmland in Texas, and by 1900 had amassed 31% of all farmland in Texas. That number is significantly lower now. But it gives us an idea of how African Americans were able to come together in safe clusters to develop these places. But often all we see left are churches, schools, homesteads and cemeteries.

Dr. Andrea Roberts

15:23

Why the decline? Why do we not see if there were five and 57 at least named places? At any given time that were founded 1865 to 1930? Why don't we see them all now on the map? population decline, mass exodus, in several waves associated with escaping racial violence. The Great Migration in many ways was a flight to areas in which African Americans could more freely exercise the franchise, land dispossession, infrastructure projects, bifurcating destroying communities, and various forms of displacement, and the list goes on. So the current threats to those that remain would be best characterized as vulnerability, whether it be vulnerability due to gentrification, or environmental vulnerabilities. Many of these settlements were founded in particularly low lying areas, because that was where the land was mostly available. The visibility of these places they were invisible in the beginning to facilitate safety and security, but that visibility is clawed away at if you will, by increasing growth and expansion and sprawl. And access whether it be descendants access to historic preservation resources, or historic preservation. Preservation is access to tools and information to properly protect places from demolition sprawl, disaster. So this is a tall order, then, for narratives to say that narratives could do anything to protect, grow, secure, or have us understand the power of historic black places, but I saw narratives in action. And it began in 2011 2012, when I worked on a project called the Austin historical wiki survey wiki, where we were attempting, as a student was attempting to document black places that were already determined to be landmarks. And this is at a time when there was increasing demolition of Historic Places in black and eat in Austin. And what we found in our research is that more and more communities of color expressed interest in a mechanism for telling stories about lost places, and less interested in what our enterprise was, which is really documenting the architectural elements to prove that these places mattered. So we were doing something very important, we wanted an easy, cheap way for people to document historic significance and integrity. Meanwhile, people wanted a mechanism for telling people about what was lost, and talking about more locally grounded constructions of significance, they wanted that documented as well, in terms of invisibility, I also found that, you know, often the narratives are what I encountered as a professional and and our ways of talking about vulnerability was to simply get US census data of African Americans and overlay them with whether it be water quality issues, or incidence of disasters, or heat island effect, or whatever it is. But if we look here, the green points are freedom colonies, and they're not always on top of the yellow areas. And the yellow areas are communities of color, majority communities of color. So what that tells us is that freedom colonies, because of the low population, and their placement of landscape very often are dealing with water quality and access issues. But because they're not, they don't have the highest concentration of black residents. You're not seeing the disparity affecting all of these landscapes as well. And there's the issue of being able to recover after disaster. That means being able to access public recovery funds, you have to prove up often land ownership, which you can do in a variety of ways. Now, FEMA passed something in 2022 to provide four different ways that you can prove up your residency. But still, title status is required in most instances, to access disaster recovery funding. In East Texas, I saw a way that people were able to leverage narratives in ways that supported their own planning and preservation aim. So the deep East East Texas area, those two shaded counties, Jasper Newton County were the focus areas of my dissertation scholarship. Research was started in 2014. We know this more commonly is an area associated with the Jasper dragging death and Jasper County. But what many people don't realize is that the road on which he's thought he was dragged, was actually Huff Creek Road, which was not just a road, but actually was a freedom colony. So there's the need for the obvious visibility and need to tell the story and the power of the story of the hate crime story. But actually a sublimated in the telling of the story is the attempted persistence of African American independence and self sufficiency in the form of cemetery. And this chapel, which was what's a Rosenwald school.

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