Library works to make Black history, archives more accessible
The African American Library at the Gregory School isn’t your typical library.
In place of books available to borrow, the Fourth Ward library offers a view into Houston’s past through archives.
The building, which once housed the city’s first public school for Black students, now holds narratives of former slaves, memorialized love letters written by beloved pastor Rev. Bill Lawson and his late wife and photographs of everyday life in Freedmen’s Town, a prime destination for African Americans after emancipation that today is in Fourth Ward, just west of downtown. To put it simply, “it’s a treasure trove,” says Houston Public Library director Rhea Brown Lawson. And in recent years, the African American Library has worked to become the first stop for Houston’s Black history.
In 2021, the Houston Public Library system received $100,000 in grants to help with its archiving and preservation efforts, including $50,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to assist in the reformatting of the African American Library’s oral history collections.
Another $50,000 will help the African American Library digitize around 5,000 items related to Freedmen’s Town, including photo collections by former Houston Chronicle photojournalist Ben Tecumseh DeSoto and Vietnam War veteran and photographer Elbert Howze. A partnership with Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy, a nonprofit that preserves and educates the public about the history of Freedmen’s Town, also is underway.
Miguell Ceasar, the library’s manager and lead archivist, said the recent initiatives could help fill gaps within the city’s history.
“African American history is everyone’s history, but a lot of African American history and the history of marginalized communities has not been well documented by the majority of institutions,” Ceasar said. Members
of the Black community have also commonly kept their archive-worthy documents in their own safekeeping or have passed on histories by word of mouth, which can make collecting archives difficult for many institutions.
“Now, we have a place to collect them,” said Ceasar.
With three galleries — one dedicated to Freedmen’s Town, a second dedicated to Greater Fourth Ward and a third to a traveling exhibit focused on social clubs and economics — the library boasts around 500 collections and additional inhouse resources such as reference books, newspaper clips on microfilm, and a reading room with Wi-Fi, where people can study the archives.
The library’s recording studio — home to its oral histories project — often invites community members to record accounts of their lives and experiences in Houston, Ceasar said. The library’s 80 processed audio archives include a race and social justice collection that most recently documented Houston residents’ thoughts about police brutality and the murder of George Floyd.
Launched in 2009, the library has accumulated thousands of photos, letters, flyers, old Bibles and other documents from everyday Houstonians, local churches and other organizations with close ties to the Black community. In some cases, Ceasar said people have relinquished the original forms of their archives entirely for the library to preserve, while others have allowed the library to make digital copies to add to their online collections.
Some of the most insightful submissions to date have been obituaries and funeral programs, documenting the lives of everyday Houstonians or those with city connections, Ceasar said. More than 100 were donated from Wheeler Baptist Church.
“They give us so many leads,” Ceasar said of the 10,000 obituaries collected so far. “Often, they are the first and only time people from the African American community sit down to document family life, stories and lineage, including who is kin to who, education levels, military records.”
Zion Escobar, director of Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy, is hoping to put the library’s digitized archives to use when telling the stories of Freedmen’s Town.
Planned projects include an augmented reality app, which will offer a self-guided tour of Fourth Ward and curated content using archives; a web-based atlas project that will create a timestamped story map depicting Freedmen’s Town between 1865 and 2021; and public discussions on genealogy and family history led by the conservancy’s anticipated Visitor Center, she said.
Additionally, the conservancy will use archives to aid in its research on the 51mile Emancipation Historic Trail, from Galveston’s Reedy Chapel to Houston’s Fourth Ward, potentially helping the National Park Service map communities and settlements along the historic migration route once used by newly emancipated African Americans.
“We hope this inspires (residents) to look at their own family collections as an incredible treasure chest that can be shared, and that their legacy should be represented in perpetuity and celebrated as part of the story of Freedmen’s Town,” Escobar said.
Lawson agreed, emphasizing that every Black Houstonian likely has a story that could be archived as history.
“There’s an organized way to be a part of the fabric of our entire community by donating and allowing for your histories to be digitized either at the Houston Public Library or other archives of the city,” Lawson said.
“The point is for the history to be preserved.”