Zoom meeting will discuss African-American history preservation in Gonzales

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A two-hour Monday, April 10, Zoom meeting will discuss the efforts of Preservation Gonzales and the Edwards Association to preserve local African-American history during the past five years in Gonzales County.

Titled “A Work in Progress: Local Preservation & Race in Gonzales County,” the event will feature Gonzales County Historical Commission chair Glenda Gordon; Edwards Association president David Tucy; and Dr. Andrea Roberts with the University of Virginia and the Texas Freedom Colonies Project (TXFC).

It will be held online from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday. Interested parties may sign up to join the meeting through https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdO2upj0tGdegTzbp1vlYgSeG0FaNi54F.

With Dr. Roberts serving as facilitator, Tucy and Gordon will discuss “how co-writing new public histories, transforming public spaces, and power-sharing helped diversify local preservation practice and leadership over the past five years in Gonzales County” during the first hour of the meeting.

During the second hour of the meeting, Dr. Roberts will provide an update on the TXFC Project Atlas & Study, talk about expanding the project’s work across both state and national borders and even give a brief training.

According to the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, Freedom Colonies are “historically significant communities” that were settled by formerly enslaved people during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras in Texas following Emancipation. From 1865-1930, African Americans accumulated land and founded 557 historic black settlements or Freedom Colonies in Texas. Freedom Colonies were intentional communities created largely in response to political and economic repression by mainstream white society.

So far, six Freedom Colonies have been identified and located by the TXFC in Gonzales County. Those include Mount Eden (aka Hickston), Elm Slough, Terryville, Dement, Harris Chapel and Bascom. Other colonies which still need more information are in Gonzales, Lone Oak and Hood’s Point.

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. Before joining UVA, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU).

In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the vehicle through which she mentors and trains future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community-based researchers focused on addressing the biggest challenges facing settlements in Texas and around the country — invisibility, environmental injustice, land loss, heritage conservation, and endangered historic structures and cemeteries.

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