Pleasantville

The Black realtor behind Pleasantville had managed public housing before he built private homes. Judson W. Robinson Sr., born in Crockett in 1904 and a 1926 Prairie View graduate, came to Houston in 1928 as a Southern Pacific waiter and organized a porters and waiters union in 1934. In 1943 he became the first African American manager of Kelly Homes in Fifth Ward, then ran Cuney Homes in Third Ward from 1946. He founded the National Real Estate Association in 1950, and in 1962 opened the state's first FHA-approved Black mortgage company.

What the plaque says

Pleasantville After World War II, African Americans struggled to find housing in much of Houston. Restrictive covenants in some recorded plats specifically excluded African Americans, while in other neighborhoods discrimination was more subtle, yet no less real. In response to the unfair housing practices, Jewish developers, Melvin Silverman and Bernard Paul, collaborated with Black realtor, Judson Robinson, Sr. (1904-1986), to develop a master planned community for African Americans called Pleasantville. This undertaking provided 1,500 homes intended for middle-income African Americans, including veterans and their families. By late 1949, the neighborhood's first residents moved into the Pleasantville apartments, some awaiting completion of their homes. In early 1950, the first home was built. Homeowners could tailor their home to their own personal specifications. Located on Market Street, the first businesses in Pleasantville were a grocery store, dry cleaners, drug store, and barber and beauty shop. In later years, the community established gas stations, a community center, a library, elementary and junior high schools and several churches. The community center became a social gathering place and popular stop for political campaigns. Among other influential figures, Pleasantville produced Judson W. Robinson, Jr. (1932-1990), Houston's first African American city councilmember elected after Reconstruction, along with doctors, lawyers, politicians and business owners. Geared towards successful African American families, Pleasantville was the first master planned community of its kind in Houston in the era of segregation. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 6.0 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 6.1 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 6.7 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 7.7 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• "Constitution" Bend — 1.7 mi
• Houston's Deep-Water Port — 1.7 mi
• Thomas H. Ball, Jr. — 1.7 mi
• Fidelity Schools — 1.7 mi