DIASPORA, DISPOSSESSION, & NEW COLLECTIVITIES IN TEXAS’

FREEDOM COLONIES

Andrea Roberts, Sustainable Cities Fellow/Doctoral Student University of Texas, AustinSchool of Architecture, Community & Regional Planning ProgramAfrica Conference 201April 6, 2014

GOALS OF PRESENTATION• Texas’ Freedom Colonies are

unique, increasingly intangible, African American geographies facing unique threats to not only their existence but also their memory.

• These settlements, however, are a rhizomatic Diaspora, whose sites endure and are awakened through celebrations that constitute expressive deterritorialization.

• Homecomings and like events represent Diaspora as process, meaning making, and possible political project for a dispersed, invisible Black identity.

“The 1867 Settlement National Register District Celebration,”

Texas City, Texas (2010)

OVERVIEW

• Goals of Presentation

• What Are Freedom Colonies, And What Happened To Them?

• What Makes Them Endure?

• Shankleville Homecoming: Celebrations As Return

• What Makes Texas Freedom Colonies Diaspora?

• Contributions/Further Research

ORIGINS: WHAT ARE FREEDOM COLONIES?

Texas’ Freedom Colonies arose after news of emancipation (1870-1890)

Also known as “settlements”, “The Bottom”, and Freedmen’s Towns (Urban)

Cluster of land-owning African American families

Often associated with former plantations

Informal, agrarian

Purchased, given by slave masters, “squatting”

Anchors: cemeteries, lodges, churches, & schools

Peak: 1890, 31% owned land

Decline: 1930

Ghost towns, no longer on map

Pre and Post Slavery Population in Texas

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF FREEDOM COLONIES • 248 counties in Texas

• 500 settlements*

• No longer predominately populated by African Americans

• Austin Region, 35

• Houston Galveston Region, 57

• Central Texas, Waco, 61

• Deep East , 91

• East Texas, 150

57

150

916135

*Top 5, Highest concentration of settlements, compiled from database in progress (Andrea Roberts, 2014)

CURRENT STATE OF FREEDOM COLONIES IN TEXAS• Few Existing incorporated FC (7)

• Most ghost/annexed/unknown status (455)

• Many Unincorporated (38)• Experience municipal underbounding/spatial inequality

• Often low income

• Boundaries maintain racial balance of power (majority white)

• Unplatted, run by county

• Unified by church/school

• Exclusion from mainstream voting, zoning, land use

• Blocks full participation in governance, poor access to utilities

New Hope Rosenwald School, Fifth Street, Stafford, Texas

NEW DISPOSSESSION: CURRENT THREATS

Old Dispossession: Violence, White intimidation, theft

Covert and overt approaches to dispossession, & state accumulation by dispossession (Harvey)

• Development – Normative constructions of Texas property rigts rule (highest best use)

• Suburbanization/sprawl

• Lack of knowledge – about estate planning, land as investment

• Higher taxes

• Title Status/Absent land owners

• Poor family communication, intra-family transparency

Resource Extraction

• 102 year old Ida Finley and her family in Dirgin, Texas won’t sell to coal mining company

• Without a will she only owns the property and not the land

WHAT MAKES THEM ENDURE?

Memory transfer occurs through Commemoration, rituals Bodily practices

Memory transferred in Freedom Colonies through Reunions Homecoming Friends and Family Day Cemetery maintenance All represent rituals of return, commemoration of survival and triumph Space in which to create and reproduce counternarrative against tropes of Black Identity

*How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989)

*“How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989)

DIASPORIC RETURN: SHANKLEVILLE’S HOMECOMING

Shankleville, unincorporated town in Newton County, Texas was named after Jim and Winnie (Brush) Shankle.

Born in Kentucky and Tennessee Were both the slaves of Isaac Rollins in Wayne County, Mississippi When Winnie and her 3 children were sold to her owner's daughter and son-in-law in Texas

Jim embarked 400 mile journey to East Texas to be with his wife Found Winnie in Newton, County Her master purchased Jim After emancipation, Shankle purchased and gave land for town cemetery, school, and church

DIASPORIC RETURN: SHANKLEVILLE’S HOMECOMING

Homecomings held since 1941, first weekend of August annually

Shankleville Historical Society founded (1988)

Shankleville Historical Society's Larethea Odom

• Lives in Dallas, never lived in town, but it is home

• Family origins grounded in land ownership, oral history

• Plans homecoming

• Wants to see association of Texas Freedom Colonies

WHAT MAKES THEM DIASPORA?CONSTRUCTIVIST/POSTMODERN CONCEPT OF DIASPORA Routes of choice -- descendants’ identity grounded in FCs, even though they never lived thereNot one origin, dispersal and return variedReproduced episodically Process

Identity formation

Becoming

Self-naming of settlements and remembering those names generation after generation

Political project Disrupt normative conceptualizations of Black needs, concerns, identity, interests

Disrupts narrative of “changing same” of Black oppression in new forms (Social Memory) with shared celebrations and commemorations of ingenuity and survival

DELEUZIAN FRAMEWORK: FREEDOM COLONY DIASPORA AS RHIZOME

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.” - Carl Jung 12

DELEUZIAN FRAMEWORK: FREEDOM COLONY DIASPORA AS RHIZOME Gilroy, Black Atlantic, rooted in French philosopher Giles Deleuze’s work, Thousand

Plateaus

Principle concepts relating to Freedom Colonies as Diaspora: Rhizome and Assemblage

“Rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (Deleuze 25).

FC’s have no central origin, spring up near plantations but not one centralize location or locus of control

Rhizome emerged at dispersal points in time (emancipation, depression, reverse migration)

Alive beneath the surface

Ephemeral events remind us of their existence, arise seasonally or episodically via celebration

Not strict causality, stories of settlements’ origins varied, based on folklore and oral history

Lie Rhizomes, nomadic system of growth and propagation in urban, suburban, rural transects

DELEUZIAN FRAMEWORK Assemblage Recognizing the presence of freedom colonies is an ongoing inchoate

process of assemblage Boundaries and boundary processes that explain how these nearly forgotten

places are constituted, formed, originated, revealing the agency and ingenuity of originators and their contemporaries. Categories, borders and boundaries, by Reece Jones, 2009)

Bounding/boundaries are discovered via ephemeral processes and oral tradition, and performance in these communities

Meetings under trees Church services and singing Reunions Homecomings

These periodic assemblages become a way to deterritorialize current boundaries that erase these identities and their memory (unincorporated, officially not a town)

DIASPORIC RETURN: SHANKLEVILLE HOMECOMING AS EXPRESSIVE TERRITORIALIZATION • Identity is performed, remembered,

affirmed at Homecoming• Storytelling ritual. Homecoming

started in 1940s with ancestors sitting under tree, telling Shankle family story.

• 100 - 150 people attend church services

• Assemblage “New Collectivities”• Saturday night is when surrounding

communities bring choirs. “Sing all night long.”

• Ecumenical. Have community-wide Sunday school (COGIC, Baptist, Methodist)

• Guest minister Shankleville descendant

REPRODUCING DIASPORA: HOMECOMING AS ASSEMBLAGE Assemblage is a function of territorialization & deterritorialization. Deterritorialization occurs as declining settlements build symbiotic relationships with other settlements, that change them into new manifestations of Diaspora. Homecomings are ephemeral, yet substantive, expressive processes that deterritorialize past settlement boundaries and create assemblage among multiple settlements at a single event. Diaspora as process.

CONTRIBUTIONS/FURTHER RESEARCH

Planning & Preservation The state or traditional planning apparatus defines place and identity in ways that fail to include these alternative identity formations and planning approaches, increasing the invisibility of these spaces and their concerns.

Explore policy implications of Black phenomenology of space, territory, especially significant in a state obsessed with ownership and privileging the developers

Bring attention to existence, condition, plight of residents and associated Diaspora that want to create ownership continuity within these communities

Create fractures in hegemonic interpretations of ownership and citizenship.Bring desire to form socio-political associations or mobilize cultural assemblages around issues to the attention of academics and practitioners

CONTRIBUTIONS/FURTHER RESEARCHResearch and praxis has constructivist approaches/aims Contest normative constructions of identity, ownership, and historical significance

Homecomings and preservation projects using an implicit Black/African Diaspora frame multiply the sites, spaces, and moments in which persons connected to these settlements can manifest, imagine, claim, or re-call “home.”

Balances constructivism with realistic need for some essentialist consciousness and organization

Women at core of these constructions (women like Mrs. Clay catalyze produce assemblage)

Promotes transdisciplinary praxis, co-production of knowledge

Diaspora TheoryNew shapes, manifestations, translations Expand “utility” of Diaspora