In January 1928 the Dallas consulting firm Koch and Fowler delivered "A City Plan for Austin, Texas," and the City Council adopted it on March 22. Most of it concerned bridges, parks, a library and an airport. One section concerned where Austin's Black residents should live. The consultants found them in nearly every part of the city except an area just east of East Avenue and south of the City Cemetery, which they described as "all negro population." East Avenue is today's Interstate 35.
The nearest approach
The plan proposed making that area a Negro district, which it called "the nearest approach to the solution of the race segregation problem." The city would provide all facilities for Black residents there and so avoid duplicate parks and schools. Schools, sewers and parks for Black residents were afterward provided only in East Austin. Austin's Black population grew from 3,587 in 1880 to 14,861 in 1940 while its share of the city fell from 33 to 17 percent, and by 1930 it was heavily concentrated on the east side.
The settlements that emptied
Wheatville, northwest of the future university campus, was founded in 1867 by James Wheat, a formerly enslaved man from Arkansas. It held about 300 people at its peak and a school whose enrollment fell from 177 in 1914 to 44 in 1924. A 1913 social survey blamed the lack of city sanitation service for garbage piling up there. The school closed in 1932, New Hope Baptist Church moved east around 1939, and the settlement had practically vanished by the mid-1930s.
Clarksville, founded in 1871 by the freedman Charles Clark, lost its school in 1918. Residents were pressured to move and later found services only in East Austin or none at all; accounts differ on whether most refused or most were made to leave. Kincheonville was started soon after 1865 by Thomas Kincheon, who had been enslaved in Mississippi. His family's dairy supplied Tillotson College, and Zion Rest Baptist Church, founded in 1903, was its church and school. Its history holds that the plan's limits on utilities, with the Depression, drove many out. Thomas Kincheon II sold the land in 1952, and several streets still carry the family name.
What the district held
The plan did not create East Austin's institutions. Tillotson opened on January 17, 1881 with 250 students, and in 1887 Samuel Huston's gift helped buy six East Austin acres for the college that took his name. They merged on October 24, 1952 as Huston-Tillotson College, which became a university in 2005. By the late 1940s Black Austin had about 150 small businesses, thirty-odd churches and those two colleges. In 1945 Johnny Holmes opened the Victory Grill in a converted icehouse on East Eleventh Street, and in 1947 built the club at 1104 East Eleventh, whose Kovac Room became a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit.
Interstate 35 was finished downtown in 1962. Council member Sheryl Cole later described the racial barrier as "set in concrete" by the highway.
To see what the district made for itself, start at the George Washington Carver Museum on Angelina Street, then go on to the Victory Grill at East Eleventh and Waller.