African American History

Austin, TX

This log cabin was built about 1863 as the East Austin homestead of Henry Green Madison, a Black policeman and farmer, and his wife Louise, who raised eight children here. Madison later enclosed the cabin within a frame house in 1886, hiding it until a demolition crew rediscovered the logs in 1968. Donated to the city, the structure was dismantled and reassembled on this site in 1973 as an exhibit dedicated to Austin's Black heritage.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Henry L. Phillips traveled a remarkable spiritual path—baptized Catholic, raised Moravian, and ultimately ordained an Episcopal priest—before turning the Church of the Crucifixion into far more than a house of worship. Under his leadership it became a Black cultural center renowned for its social outreach in Philadelphia. He also helped found the American Negro Historical Society, an early effort to document and preserve African American history.

Tyler, TX

Born in Tyler in 1895, Henry Miller Morgan worked as a barber before confronting a Jim Crow system that licensed barbers while shutting African Americans out of the required schooling. In 1933 he opened a barber college for Black students, and within two decades it had branches from Houston and Dallas to Manhattan, at one point reportedly training a majority of the nation's Black barbers. Morgan also helped found professional associations and a local Democratic Progressive Voters League before his death in 1961.

Lancaster, PA · est. 2018

Barney Ewell of Lancaster was one of the fastest men alive in the years when there were no Olympics to prove it—the 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled by World War II, robbing him of his athletic prime. A star at McCaskey High School and Penn State, he refused to quit, and in 1948 at age thirty he tied the world record in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials. At the London Games that summer he came home with a gold and two silver medals.

El Paso, TX

Born into slavery in Georgia in 1856, Henry Ossian Flipper broke a color line at the nation's premier military school, becoming West Point's first African-American graduate in 1877. Commissioned into the 10th Cavalry — the celebrated Buffalo Soldiers — he served across the western frontier and engineered the drainage system at Fort Sill still known as "Flipper's Ditch." A racially motivated court-martial ended his Army career in 1882, but he rebuilt his life as a mining engineer, surveyor, and author across the Southwest, living a decade here in El Paso. Vindication came only long after his 1940 death, with an honorable discharge in 1976 and a full presidential pardon in 1999.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Henry Ossawa Tanner lived here while training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of the few Black students at the prestigious school. His early canvases portrayed the dignity and quiet humanity of ordinary African-American life. Seeking wider acceptance, he moved to Paris, where he turned to religious subjects and earned international acclaim as one of the most celebrated American painters of his generation.

Huntsville, TX

Built in 1880 as a lodge hall, John Henry's building soon housed a store below and a fine theater above, where touring companies staged Shakespeare and the popular dramas of the day. The famed magician Hermann the Great made his Texas debut here, and the celebrated blind Black pianist known as Blind Tom once performed on its stage; the hall later showed Huntsville's first motion picture around 1909.

Oxford, NC

Born into slavery in 1857, Henry P. Cheatham rose to serve as a United States Congressman from North Carolina from 1889 to 1893, part of a brief flowering of Black political power after the Civil War. He later devoted decades to leading the Colored Orphanage of North Carolina until his death in 1935.

Brenham, TX

Henry Villars Robertson first came to Texas in 1826 alongside his cousin, the empresario Sterling Clack Robertson, then returned to Tennessee to marry Rebecca Oldham. In 1838 the couple brought their family and enslaved workers to this site and established a plantation, building a dogtrot-style home of native materials in the 1850s. Their homestead was part of the organized colonization that peopled early Anglo Texas.

Carroll County, MD · est. 2016

In 1925, two years after Maryland opened a tuberculosis sanatorium at Henryton, a training school for Black nurses was created to help care for its growing patient population. Revised in 1945 to meet licensing standards, it reopened as the Henryton School of Practical Nursing, gaining a nurses' home in 1952 with labs, lecture rooms, and a library. The school closed in 1963.

Princeton, NJ

This heritage-tour marker recalls the 1923 founding of a Princeton congregation by Elder Danie Culp Thomas, planted as a local church of the Church of God in Christ. COGIC, headquartered in Memphis, is one of the largest historically Black Pentecostal denominations in the United States, born out of the Holiness revival at the turn of the 20th century. A single storefront or home congregation like this one was often the spiritual and social anchor of a Black neighborhood in the Jim Crow era.

Austin, TX

Clarksville was founded in 1871 by freed slave Charles Clark as a place where former slaves could reunite their families, govern their own lives, and worship freely after emancipation. Around 1879 former slave Peter Tucker built this board-and-batten Cumberland-style house, later home to Hezikiah Haskell—a Union soldier and Buffalo Soldier who married into the family. Standing on its original site with high physical integrity, the house was deeded to the city of Austin and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.

Petty, TX

Hickory Grove is the resting place of former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants who made Lamar County home in the 1800s. Samuel and Dicie Lucinda Swann bought the land including this site in 1881, and in 1899 Samuel deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground; the earliest marked grave, from 1883, belongs to Dicie's mother Cherry Lee, who had come from Alabama in bondage. Among those buried here are veterans, a preacher, Masons and Eastern Star members, and families rooted here for generations.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 2003

Established in 1807 in what was then called Abington Center, Hickory Grove Cemetery is among the oldest known burial grounds tied to African Americans in northeastern Pennsylvania. Many of those laid to rest here were fugitives from slavery who reached Waverly by the Underground Railroad, part of a community that numbered some 75 former slaves by century's end. The cemetery remains the enduring trace of that vanished community.

Yeadon, PA · est. 2006

From 1910 to 1932, the Hilldale Athletic Club played its home games here at Hilldale Park, becoming one of the powerhouse franchises of Black baseball. Known as the Darby Daisies, the club won three Eastern Colored League pennants and captured the 1925 Negro League World Series. Its rosters read like a Hall of Fame ballot, featuring Pop Lloyd, Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, and Biz Mackey, while owner Ed Bolden helped organize the Eastern Colored League itself.

Cuero, TX

The town of Cuero was surveyed and incorporated in 1873 as the railroad reached inland from the doomed coastal port of Indianola. In 1875 the land company set aside twelve acres here for a municipal burial ground, and by 1880 local women had formed a cemetery association to maintain it, hiring a groundskeeper and later endowing its upkeep. The grounds grew to absorb the once-segregated African American cemetery, Evergreen, and hold veterans back to the Mexican War alongside victims of the Indianola hurricanes.

La Porte, TX

Before La Porte built a public school for its Black children, they learned in a local church that doubled as classroom and sanctuary. Around 1909 a former Methodist church was moved to this site to serve as a one-room schoolhouse for grades one through eight, older students traveling eight miles to high school in Baytown. For decades it was known simply as "Mrs. Dewalt's school" after its devoted teacher Viola Dewalt, until a new brick campus opened in 1953.

Town of North Elba, NY

In 1846 the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith gave away 120,000 acres of his Adirondack land in 3,000 parcels to Black New Yorkers, a deliberate "scheme of justice" designed to help them meet the $250 property requirement that the state imposed only on Black men before they could vote. A cluster of these grantees, among them Lyman Eppes, settled this rugged high country near North Elba and called their community Timbuctoo. The land was hard and the growing season short, and few families stayed long, but the settlement drew the abolitionist John Brown to buy a nearby farm so he could aid his Black neighbors. Today the fields have returned to forest, and this marker stands to remember who once tried to make a home and a vote here.

Georgetown County, SC

In 1718, when the Carolina Lowcountry was still a young proprietary colony, the Lords Proprietors handed a vast 12,000-acre grant on Waccamaw Neck to John, Lord Carteret — one of the great baronial tracts of early South Carolina. As the barony was carved up after 1766, its tidal marshes and riverbanks were reshaped into some of the region's celebrated rice plantations, an agricultural empire built on the skill and forced labor of enslaved Africans. That plantation economy thrived for nearly a century until the Civil War brought it to an end.

Levelland, TX

When the Santa Fe railroad reached Hockley County in 1925, the population exploded and drew many minority laborers to work the land in an era of strict segregation. In 1927 the county set aside two acres for a segregated cemetery for indigent and minority residents; the first recorded burial, in 1930, was of Jerry McHenry, an African American man. Little used after Levelland's cemetery was desegregated in the 1960s, it holds fourteen marked graves and over 100 unmarked burials.

Brenham, TX

In 1914 educator Columbus H. Hogan helped found what became the only funeral home serving African Americans in Washington County. Because local hospitals were segregated, the business also ran ambulance service to Houston and Galveston, carrying Black patients to care they could not receive at home. Hogan, a civic and religious leader, later gave land for a nearby cemetery, and his son Booker T. Hogan, Sr. carried on the family enterprise.

Azle, TX

In the hard years after the Civil War, a Confederate widow named Sarah Hoggard set aside part of her North Texas farm to bury a Black child who had died passing through with his family — an act of grace that seeded a burial ground. Over the following decades the Hoggard and Reynolds families, joined by marriage and rooted in the area's first cotton gin and grist mill, filled the plot with the graves of Parker County's pioneers. Formally deeded in 1899 and renamed in 1984, the cemetery reads today as a chronicle of frontier settlement.

Carthage, TX

When emancipation came, freedpeople across the South built their own communities from the ground up, and land like this—deeded by Spearman Holland to former slaves after the Civil War—became the anchor for a church, a school, a lodge hall, and a cemetery. More than 500 graves rest here, though only a fraction are marked, among them fraternal-order members and veterans of every war from World War I to Vietnam. Still serving its community today, the burial ground is a living monument to a settlement that has endured for well over a century.

Austin, TX

In 1936 Father Francis R. Weber celebrated the first Mass of Holy Cross, the first Catholic parish to serve Austin's African American community, in the home of William M. Tears—just as the city's 1928 plan pushed Black residents into East Austin. Parishioners built the church in 1937 and went on to found a second parish, a school, and Holy Cross Hospital, the first in Austin to let Black physicians practice, staffed by physician-nun Sister Mary Celine Heitzman. Its members shaped civic and political life, including the first Black speaker pro tem of the Texas Legislature.

Galveston, TX

Holy Rosary began not as a church but as a school: in 1886 Bishop Nicholas Gallagher opened a one-room classroom for African American children in Galveston, staffed first by Dominican sisters. The congregation that gathered there became one of Texas's first African American Catholic parishes, with Fr. Philip Keller appointed pastor in 1889. The Sisters of the Holy Family—the first African American sisters to teach in the state's diocesan schools—took charge in 1898, and the parish sheltered more than 200 people during the deadly 1900 storm before opening Texas's first Catholic high school for African Americans in 1927.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Founded in 1787 by German-speaking Catholics who wanted to worship and pass on their traditions in their own language, Holy Trinity became the first German national parish in the United States. Its church rose in 1788–1789, and within a few years its congregation and cemetery included African Americans and refugees from the upheaval in Saint-Domingue, buried alongside parishioners of European descent. The model of the ethnic 'national parish' it pioneered would shape American Catholicism for generations before the parish finally closed in 2009.

Dripping Springs, TX

Dr. Joseph M. Pound and his wife Sarah raised the first log rooms of this Hill Country home in 1853, using hand-hewn timbers, square nails, and enslaved labor. The house served the frontier as church, hospital, and waystation — Methodist circuit riders preached here, and the sick came rich or poor. Pound had soldiered as a private in the Mexican War and would serve as a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War.

Homestead, PA · est. 2000

Founded by Homestead steelworkers around 1900, the Homestead Grays grew into one of the most dominant franchises in all of baseball history. Under the leadership of Cumberland Posey Jr., the Grays captured twelve national titles — including nine in a row from 1937 to 1945 — and fielded Hall of Famers like Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Smokey Joe Williams. Playing in the segregated Negro Leagues, they were a source of fierce pride for African Americans in Pittsburgh and far beyond before disbanding in 1950.

Atlanta, GA

These words echo the creed of nonviolence that powered the modern civil rights movement, whose spiritual and organizational heart was Atlanta. In the 1950s and 1960s, activists here and across the South insisted that love and moral courage — not retaliation — were the surest weapons against injustice, a conviction most famously voiced by Atlanta's own Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A monument carrying this message in the city where that philosophy took root turns a quiet spot into a reminder of how ideas, not just events, shape a nation.

Tyler, TX

Hopewell Baptist Church grew out of open-air preaching in a post oak grove in the late 1850s, organizing formally in 1858 with the Rev. J. S. Bledsoe as its first pastor. Harvey Yarborough deeded land, and a meetinghouse rose in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War. Notably, during Reconstruction its members helped freed people establish churches of their own, and the congregation has worshiped continuously for well over a century.

Denison, TX

Hopewell Baptist Church was founded in 1874 to serve the Black community of the booming railroad town of Denison, with help from ministers across the county and members transferring from St. John Baptist Church in Preston Bend. Fire, growth, and rebuilding carried it from a first meeting place to a frame church, a brick edifice in 1891, and the present building begun in 1915. In 1950 it hosted an NAACP regional convention where future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall spoke.

Cuero, TX

The Hopkins family came to DeWitt County in 1854 enslaved by Judge Henry Clay Pleasants and returned after the Civil War as free people. In 1872 Henry Hopkins bought 42 acres and founded the Hopkinsville community, where residents organized the Antioch Baptist Church in 1873 and started a school about a decade later. Though the school closed in 1956, the congregation Hopkinsville's founders built still gathers to worship nearby.

Fairfield, TX

Hopson Burleson brought his family from Goliad to Freestone County in 1835 on a land grant issued by the Mexican government, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. He set aside two acres for a family burial ground that in time gathered the graves of neighboring settler families and, near his own, several people he had enslaved. The oldest marked grave dates to 1872, though the ground had been in use since the earliest days of the community.

West Chester, PA · est. 1979

Horace Pippin returned from World War I with a wounded right arm and, undeterred, taught himself to paint by guiding his brush with his other hand. From this West Chester house he produced some of the most powerful American folk paintings of the 20th century, including his searing meditations on abolitionist John Brown and his radiant "Holy Mountain" series. Discovered by the art world in the late 1930s, he became one of the most celebrated self-taught Black artists of his era.

Upper Oxford Township, PA · est. 1992

Built by free Black families in the Chester County countryside, this meeting house grew from an informal "African Meeting House" into a formally organized African Union Methodist Protestant congregation in 1843. It doubled as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers on their way north. Among those who spoke or passed through were Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

When the Houston East and West Texas Railroad reached Angelina County in 1882, a settlement called Bitterweed Flat grew up along the line. W. E. Hoshall bought land and timber rights in 1913 and began shipping logs from a switch there, and in 1917 Luke E. Wright built a sawmill and a company town — named Hoshall — complete with churches, schools, and a commissary, home to both Anglo and African American workers. When the mills closed, the town emptied, until by 1940 only a cemetery and a mill pond remained.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Founded in 1883, the Hotel Brotherhood USA was a benevolent society of Black hotel workers that grew into one of the most influential early organizations in the hospitality trade. In an era when Black laborers had few protections, it championed fair treatment, dignity on the job, and economic self-reliance, pooling resources to support its members. It has been headquartered at this Philadelphia location since 1906.

Houston, TX

In September 1935, in the teeth of both the Depression and Jim Crow, Houston's Black community leaders founded the Houston Negro Chamber of Commerce to build economic power where segregation had walled it out. With J.E. Robinson Sr. as its first president, the chamber promoted Black-owned businesses, pushed residents to pay poll taxes so they could vote, and championed fair housing and employment. During World War II its office even doubled as a rations headquarters. In 1964, under Mack H. Hannah Jr., it became the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce, which endures today.

Houston, TX

In March 1960, thirteen students from Texas Southern University formed the Progressive Youth Association and planned Houston's first sit-in. Marching in pairs to Weingarten's Supermarket, they occupied the lunch counter in silent shifts as employees refused service and onlookers hurled insults. Their nonviolent protest sparked weeks of demonstrations that led Houston's lunch counters to quietly desegregate that August.

Houston, TX

Built in 1880 beside a new railroad junction, the Howard Oil Company was among Houston's earliest cottonseed-oil mills, and the community of Chaneyville rose around it. Largely peopled by freed slaves and their descendants who labored in the mills and rail yards, Chaneyville became a center of Black Houston. Rebuilt twice after devastating fires, the plant grew into the largest cotton-oil mill in Texas, shipping oil worldwide for margarine and soap until the early 1920s.

Lindale, TX

This hilltop once overlooked the East Texas plantation that Richard B. Hubbard and Serena Carter established after arriving from Georgia in 1854, working 720 acres with 44 enslaved people. Their son, Richard Bennett Hubbard—a Harvard-trained lawyer who served in the Confederate army and later as governor of Texas—buried twin daughters here in 1863. Family members and, marked with ironstone, enslaved people lie in this plot, while the governor himself rests in Tyler's Oakwood Cemetery after a career that included service as U.S. Minister to Japan.

Jefferson, TX

Built between 1855 and 1867 by William P. Hudgins in the thriving riverport of Jefferson, this house with its 13-foot ceilings and wide-board floors passed through several owners before W. L. and Mattie A. Blake, respected teachers at the Jefferson Central (Negro) School, purchased it in 1897 and kept it in their family for six decades. Its later preservation ensured the survival of a rare antebellum-era home tied to Black educators of the post-emancipation South.

Austin, TX

Built in 1886 in East Austin's Robertson Hill neighborhood, this Victorian home was constructed for Hugh B. Hancock, a successful Black businessman during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era. It later passed to a German-born railroad engineer's family, who kept it until 1959, and was moved to its present site in 1979. It carries a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation.

Elizabeth City, NC

Hugh Cale served in the North Carolina legislature during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years, winning seats between 1876 and 1891. In 1891 he sponsored the bill that created the state-supported school for Black teachers that grew into today's Elizabeth City State University. His grave lies about six-tenths of a mile west of this marker.

Baltimore, MD

Judge Hugh Lennox Bond was a Baltimore jurist who stood firmly for the Union and for emancipation during the Civil War era. Later, presiding over federal cases against the Ku Klux Klan, he handed down sentences so severe that he became known as "the curse of the K.K.K."

Martindale, TX

The Jennings and Humphreys families settled around Martindale in the 1850s and established this hilltop cemetery on land Joseph Humphreys bought in 1855. Randolph Reed Jennings, said to have died of yellow fever on his way to the area, was the first buried here, and tradition holds that a number of unmarked graves belong to people once enslaved by the pioneer families. Descendants still gather to maintain the grounds, which were enlarged in 1946.

Farmersville, TX

Allen Daniel brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1847 and bought 480 acres here in 1851, only to die and be buried on his own land the following year. His daughter Tennessee, who married D. E. Huson, later gave the ground around her father's grave to the community as a public cemetery. Among the hundreds of marked and unmarked graves lie town founders, pioneer families, and many former slaves and their descendants, including the Nelson, Sneed, Glass, and Bryson families.

Hutto, TX

This corner of Williamson County was settled in 1855 by J. E. Hutto and Adam Orgain, a former slave, near the early village of Shiloh. When Hutto sold land to the International & Great Northern Railroad in 1876 a town took shape, and he became its first postmaster the next year. Fueled by the railroad and by Swedish immigrants who turned nearby farms over to cotton, Hutto grew from a single church and school in 1882 to a bustling town that incorporated in 1911.

Fort Worth, TX

When Fort Worth opened its first free public school for Black children in 1882, it began a decades-long institution that would grow far beyond its humble East Ninth Street start. Isaiah Milligan Terrell, one of the city's first Black teachers, shaped the school as principal until 1915, when he left to lead what is now Prairie View A&M University. In 1921 the school was named in his honor, and it moved to its long-standing 18th Street home in 1938. It remained the anchor of Black education in Fort Worth through the segregation era.

East Fallowfield Township, PA · est. 2004

Ida Ella Ruth Jones, the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, took up her brushes late in life and produced more than 300 works in her seventies and eighties. Working in watercolor, oil, and pencil in a plain folk-art style, she painted the rural Chester County she knew—family and farm life, landscapes, early machines, and memories of slavery. She lived out her long life on a nearby farm.

Castroville, TX

Early Castroville colonists—Dutch and German immigrants who arrived on Henri Castro's ships in the 1840s—rest in this small family plot, where Marie Becker Ihnken was buried in 1847. Her son Gerhard, a leading citizen, farmed vast lands and ran a sawmill, store, and orchard, and is credited with bringing the area's first reaper and binder. One of Medina County's oldest cemeteries, it holds eight marked Ihnken graves and, by tradition, a freedman who worked for the family; it has stayed inactive since 1950 to protect unmarked graves.

Sugar Land, TX

After emancipation ended slavery on the rich Brazos bottomlands around Sugar Land, planters turned to leasing convict labor, and in 1908 the State of Texas opened the Imperial State Prison Farm on land beside the new Imperial Sugar company town. With more than 400 inmates, this was one of the state's first prison farms — a place so brutal it was dubbed the "Hellhole on the Brazos" until public outcry forced reforms in 1912. The cemetery holds 31 marked graves of inmates and guards from 1912 to 1943, some bearing stark descriptions of how they died.

York County, SC

On October 7, 1780, the wooded ridge of Kings Mountain saw one of the Revolution's decisive Southern battles, where a force of frontier militia — the famed 'Overmountain Men' — surrounded and overwhelmed a Loyalist command in barely an hour. This memorial remembers that African Americans stood among those Patriots, naming Esias Bowman, John Broddy, and Andrew Ferguson alongside the others who fought. Their presence is a reminder that Black Americans, both free and enslaved, shared in the fighting and the risk of the War for Independence, even as the liberty they helped win was long denied to many of them.

Houston, TX

Beginning about 1908, Black families bought lots from the Wright Land Company just north of Houston and built a town of their own—homes, churches, stores, a school, and fraternal lodges. In 1915 the roughly four hundred residents voted to incorporate, electing George O. Burgess as mayor and paving streets, laying plank sidewalks, and installing municipal water. The community dissolved its charter in 1928 and was annexed by Houston the following year, but the name Independence Heights endures.

Newcastle, TX

With frontier defenses stripped thin during the Civil War, the Texas borderlands suffered repeated raids, and one of the worst struck near here at the Fitzpatrick Ranch on October 13, 1864. Comanche raiders killed seven ranch people and five Confederate soldiers, carried off six women and children, and drove away thousands of cattle. Among those who lost family that day was Brit Johnson, an enslaved man who later won the raiders' trust, recovered captives, and eventually died at the hands of Indians on the plains.

San Augustine, TX

Inlow and Jeanette Mathews came from Alabama to San Augustine County in 1849, bringing their family and enslaved workers to establish a prosperous plantation. A leading planter, Inlow also served as county commissioner, and the family built this frame house before the Civil War in a vernacular style touched by Greek Revival—its symmetrical form, gabled central porch, and transom-and-sidelight entry. The home has stayed in the family ever since.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Beginning as a farm school, this institution grew in 1852 into one of the first schools in the country to train Black students in skilled trades and teaching. Under the leadership of Fanny Jackson Coppin, principal from 1869 to 1902, it earned national distinction for the rigor of its education. Later relocated, it survives today as Cheyney University, among the oldest historically Black colleges in America.

Austin, TX

New Hampshire–born Ira Hobart Evans rose to major in the Union Army during the Civil War, earned the Medal of Honor, and stood in the honor guard at President Lincoln's funeral in 1865. Sent to Texas and later returning as a Freedmen's Bureau agent, he won election to the state legislature and in 1870 became the youngest and first Republican Speaker of the Texas House. He went on to lead Texas railroad and land ventures and served for nearly a decade as president of the board of Tillotson College, a forerunner of today's Huston-Tillotson University, remodeling this Austin house with architect Alfred Giles.

Kennett Township, PA · est. 2018

Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall were Quaker abolitionists whose Chester County home, Oakdale, sheltered freedom seekers moving north on the Underground Railroad. When their Old Kennett Meeting split over slavery, they helped found the reform-minded Longwood Progressive Meeting in 1853. Dinah joined a delegation that pressed President Lincoln in 1862 to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and the couple championed women's right to vote as well.

Port Arthur, TX

In 1903 Frederick Shepherd founded this African Methodist Episcopal congregation in his Port Arthur home, with the Rev. Napoleon Harris—whom he had helped establish a nearby A.M.E. mission the year before—as its first pastor. The sanctuary built in 1904 also housed the area's first public school for African Americans. As the congregation grew it built ever-larger sanctuaries, taking the name Israel Chapel A.M.E. Church in 1959.