Between the Lines: City Planning and Segregation

A map showing the approximate location of Freedman communities in Austin in 1881 and the district "recommended" for Black Austinites in the 1928 Plan. 

Before the Plan

In the immediate wake of emancipation and the upswing of Reconstruction, Freedpersons (Black individuals released from enslavement) established thriving communities in cities like Austin, founding neighborhoods like Clarksville and Wheatsville. People who lived in these neighborhoods were not restricted exclusively to these areas, meaning that they had agency in living choices that the 1928 plan later denied them. These areas were not discriminated against in city law yet, either. This upset Austin’s white city government, who commissioned the 1928 plan with the full intention of solving the “racial segregation problem.” Texas’s Supreme Court had made racial zoning illegal, so the city could not officially require all Black people to move. Austin wanted to erase Black communities outside of East Austin in order to exercise discriminatory and prejudiciary control.