Twentieth-Century Development of Freedman's Town

The plaque says only that development hurt the neighborhood after 1940; the historian Cary Wintz lists what it took. In the 1930s residents were moved out for the City Hall complex. In the early 1940s land north of San Felipe was cleared for San Felipe Courts, later Allen Parkway Village, housing built for White defense workers. Interstate 45 took many leading buildings, and 1960s office towers left Antioch Baptist cut off from its people. About 17,000 people lived in the ward in 1910; fewer than 4,400 remained in 1980.

What the plaque says

Twentieth-Century Development of Freedman's Town Founded on the south banks of Buffalo Bayou soon after the June 19, 1865 emancipation of enslaved blacks, Freedman's Town became the center of Houston's African American community. It originally stretched from Buffalo Bayou south to Sutton Street, and west from Milam and Travis streets to Taft Street. During its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Freedman's Town featured hundreds of houses, many of which were small "shotgun" frame dwellings, a common folk building type found along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas. Most often associated with African American neighborhoods, the shotgun form has been traced to black residents of Haiti, and through them to original homelands in Africa. The neighborhood also featured a number of larger homes built by community leaders, including the Rev. Jack Yates, his son Rutherford B. Yates, Alfred Smith, the Rev. Jeremiah Smith and the Rev. Ned P. Pullam. Churches and schools in Freedman's Town largely formed the basis for a strong and proud community identity. In addition, the neighborhood featured many businesses and institutions, including a high school, library, hospital and newspapers. By the 1930s, Freedman's Town was the economic center for black Houston, the location of a high percentage of the city's black-owned businesses. From 1940 to the present, though, increased area development, including urban renewal programs and highway construction, has adversely affected Freedman's Town. Due to the perseverance of community residents, a large portion of the neighborhood was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.9 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.3 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.3 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.
• The Menil Collection — 1.4 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.

More markers nearby

• New Zion Temple Church - Worldwide Fellowship, Inc. — steps away
• Gregory School — 0.3 mi
• J. Vance Lewis — 0.3 mi
• The Reverend Ned P. Pullum — 0.3 mi