African American History

Jefferson, TX

In 1842 Captain William Perry deeded land to local enslaved people to establish a place of worship, and a sanctuary raised here in 1847 stands among the earliest Black churches in Texas. After the Civil War the congregation became a center of Loyal League, Radical Republican, and Freedmen's Bureau activity, and during the violent Reconstruction occupation of Jefferson the church was burned and members, including Albert Browning, were killed. Rebuilt in 1883 and rescued from demolition by restorers in 2003, it remains a cherished emblem of the community.

Baltimore County, MD

In 1872, African American residents of the Loreley area of Baltimore County organized the Union of Brothers and Sisters of Ford's Asbury Lodge, a benevolent society whose members pooled their dues to care for the sick and bury the dead. Two years later, in 1874, the community raised this building to serve both as the society's home and as a school for its children. It stands as a testament to the self-reliance of Black Marylanders in the first decade after emancipation.

Paris, TX

After decades of effort, competing railroads finally met at Paris in 1887, and by 1912 five lines converged on the growing Lamar County town. The present Union Station, opened that year in a Prairie and Italianate style crowned by a 77-foot campanile-like tower, served Frisco, Santa Fe, and Texas Midland passengers through segregated waiting rooms. Rail travel peaked during World War II with nearby Camp Maxey, then faded after the 1950s until the depot was donated for restoration in 1997.

Russellville, KY

Methodism took root in Russellville in 1808, when ten charter members gathered in a private home on the Kentucky frontier. The congregation raised its first church around 1819 and completed the present sanctuary in 1854, later earning the name "temple" when a 1917 renovation's stained-glass windows drew public praise. The building even gained a pipe organ funded in part by Andrew Carnegie, and in 1872 the community also saw the formation of an A.M.E. Zion congregation.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Founded by Marcus Garvey in 1917, the Universal Negro Improvement Association grew into one of the largest Black mass movements in American history. It championed racial pride, economic self-reliance, and a vision of independent nationhood in Africa, spreading its message through newspapers and chapters across the country. Its Philadelphia presence tied the city into a global network of Black activism.

Palo Alto, CA

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church traces its roots to 1796 in New York City, born of the Methodist movement and long a pillar of independent Black worship in America. In 1918 four founders organized a congregation in Palo Alto as University A.M.E. Zion Church, which served the community for decades. It offered spiritual and social anchoring for African Americans on the mid-Peninsula.

Yorktown, TX

Ann Friar formally established this cemetery in 1872, burying her rancher husband, local Masons, and others on the family's ground. Its rolls read like a cross-section of frontier Texas — Anglo, German, and Hispanic settlers, victims of an 1876 feud, a Union sailor, and war veterans — and in 1949 an added acre made room for the community's African American residents.

Van Vleck, TX

As the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Matagorda County around 1899, the community of Hardeman was renamed Van Vleck for a railroad superintendent, and a school for white students followed in 1901. Bonds in 1918 funded buildings for both the white and African American schools, and in 1938 residents organized an independent school district and won a Public Works Administration grant for a new building. Smaller community schools consolidated into the district, which offered voluntary integration of Black students in 1966.

Freeport, TX

In 1891 the Brazos Investment Company set aside these 2.5 acres as one of the county's few public cemeteries, deeding the plots for use without charge. The earliest surviving grave marker dates to 1893. The dedication notably acknowledged an earlier slave graveyard near Clute, a reminder of the enslaved labor that had worked the surrounding Brazoria County plantations.

Baytown, TX

Victoria Taylor Walker climbed from a church-run school in Cedar Bayou to Prairie View College and back home to teach at the segregated Cedar Bayou Colored School in 1933, where she promptly won a full nine-month term and a safe water well for her pupils. For decades she taught children by day and adults by night, saw a school named in her honor, and after desegregation became the first Black teacher at previously all-white Stephen F. Austin Elementary. Goose Creek CISD later named yet another school for the educator who declared no one could love teaching more than she did.

Austin, TX

During World War II, segregation barred Black servicemen from most Austin restaurants and recreation, prompting local leaders to seek dedicated sites for soldiers on leave. Johnny Holmes answered that need, opening the original Victory Grill in a converted icehouse on East 11th Street to mark VJ Day in August 1945. Its Kovac Room became a celebrated stop on the "Chitlin' Circuit" of Black music venues, hosting blues and jazz until desegregation and changing tastes led to its 1973 closing; Holmes's children later reopened the landmark.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1973

Laid out at the close of the Civil War, the village originally called Camptown rose on the grounds of Camp William Penn. From 1863 to 1865 the camp trained African American soldiers—among the largest such training stations in the North—preparing thousands of United States Colored Troops for service in the Union Army. The community that grew here carried forward the legacy of those who fought for freedom and their own citizenship.

Bay City, TX

After emancipation, many of the more than one hundred people once enslaved on John L. Thorpe's cotton and sugar plantation stayed on the land and formed the Live Oak community. In 1867 a white schoolteacher, Joseph Yeaman, helped them organize the Grapevine church—first a dirt-floored log cabin—and served as its first pastor. By 1895 it had grown into the Mission Home School, later renamed the Vine Grove Christian Church.

Yellow Springs, OH

Virginia Hamilton grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small town with deep roots in the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist tradition of nearby Antioch College. Over a career spanning the late 20th century, she wrote more than forty books that placed African American history, folklore, and family memory at the center of children's literature. She called her project "Liberation Literature," and her honors made her one of the most decorated authors ever to write for young readers.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995

In 1896 and 1897 the young scholar W.E.B. Du Bois lived in a Philadelphia settlement house while conducting the door-to-door research for "The Philadelphia Negro," published in 1899. That study was one of the first rigorous sociological portraits of an African American community in the United States. Du Bois went on to help found the NAACP and to become one of the most influential Black intellectuals and activists in American history.

Montgomery County, VA

In the rolling farmland of Montgomery County, Virginia, the community of Wake Forest grew from the descendants of people enslaved at nearby Kentland Plantation. This memorial honors those men, women, and children whose forced labor, skill, and endurance built and sustained the plantation through generations of bondage. After emancipation, freed families put down roots in the surrounding area, founding a lasting community that carried their memory forward.

Silsbee, TX

As the railroad turned Silsbee into a busy mill town at the turn of the 20th century, Black settlers organized a school for their children, guided by Reverends J.R. Dunbar and W.H. Jermany. Under principal Waldo Mathews it grew from two teachers to eight, and in 1922 a new six-room building rose with help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. By 1939 it was the only African American school in Hardin County to earn eleventh-grade classification, and Silsbee's schools integrated peacefully by 1967.

Richards, TX

This family burying ground began on land the Wallers bought in 1872, when young Alexander Waller became its first grave shortly after helping choose the site. His father John, a veteran of the 15th Texas Cavalry, and other Confederate veterans of the Sulphur Branch community lie here, alongside two African American families and many neighbors. The cemetery still serves the descendants of those early residents.

Hempstead, TX

Carved from Austin and Grimes counties in 1873, Waller County was named for Edwin Waller, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and first mayor of Austin. Its soil holds a dense history: the rich Groce plantations of 1831–1874, the later home of celebrated sculptor Elisabet Ney, and the railroad town of Hempstead that became the county seat. Since 1876 it has been home to Prairie View A&M, one of Texas's foundational institutions for Black higher education.

Richmond, TX

Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1840 and brought to Texas around 1860, Walter Moses Burton learned to read and write from his enslaver and, after emancipation, bought land from that same man. He became a successful farmer and in 1869 was elected sheriff of Fort Bend County; in 1873 he won a seat in the Texas Senate, serving four terms for a multi-county district before returning to farming and local politics.

Utopia, TX

The Waresville Cemetery is nearly all that remains of the Old Waresville Settlement on the Sabinal River, founded by Captain William Ware, a San Jacinto veteran who brought his family to the Sabinal Canyon in 1852. Ware fell ill and died within months, and his 1853 burial started the graveyard. By 1880 Waresville had grown into a thriving village of mills, gins, churches, and a school before being renamed Utopia in 1886. Among those buried here are the Ware family, Henry Fuller—a former slave of Captain Ware—early settlers, and victims of conflicts with local Indians.

Concord, NC

Warren Clay Coleman (1849–1904), born into slavery, rose to become a prosperous Concord merchant and entrepreneur. In 1897 he founded what is recognized as the nation's first textile mill owned and operated by African Americans, running it until his death in 1904. The mill building stands about 350 yards north.

Longview, TX

On this site from 1861 to 1865, settler Joseph M. Sparkman ran a shop making shoes for the Confederate Army, directing the work from his cot because arthritis had left him unable to stand. The actual shoemaking was supervised and taught by "Uncle Ben," an enslaved craftsman who had come with him from Georgia and who trained the boys and old men left behind by the war. Both men are buried in the family plot nearby.

Giddings, TX

After the Civil War, landowner Henry Wenke Sr. deeded this ground to Charlie Washington, a formerly enslaved man, giving rise to a cemetery, two churches, and the growing Center Union Community of freed people seeking to buy their own farmland. Burials here span from 1882 to 1954. In 1975 nearby development damaged much of the cemetery and many of its headstones, but a preservation project has since reclaimed and protected the site.

High Point, NC

Laid out and named in 1850, Washington Street grew into the beating heart of High Point's African American community. Through the long decades of segregation, its blocks filled with Black-owned businesses, churches, doctors' offices, theaters, and gathering places—a self-sustaining commercial and cultural district built when Jim Crow shut Black residents out of the white downtown. By 1960 it stretched across a broad swath of the city, a point of pride and independence forged in the face of discrimination.

Paducah, KY

Organized in 1855 in a log cabin, this congregation was among the earliest African American Baptist churches in Paducah. Enslaved workers built its second, frame home under the Rev. George W. 'Pappy' Dupee, its first pastor, and a brick church rose in 1893. Rebuilt after a 1942 fire and again in the 1960s, the church has anchored its community for well over a century.

Temple, TX

In 1883, A.M.E. missionary elder George Connor organized this congregation in Temple, and two years later trustees Dock Lacy and Green McGrew helped build a frame sanctuary here. Growing membership in the early 20th century led to the present brick church, completed in 1927. For generations Wayman Chapel A.M.E. has been a wellspring of leadership and service within Temple's Black community.

Ennis, TX

Named for African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Alexander W. Wayman, this Ennis congregation was organized in 1880 by area residents, many of whom had come from the community of Telico. Under the leadership of the physician-pastor Dr. C.A. Harris, the church moved in 1905 from a site called Biggins Hill to its present location. Through the decades it has remained a steady source of support for the surrounding community.

Webberville, TX

This Colorado River community grew from a land grant received in 1827 by John F. Webber, who settled here with his African American wife and children at a time when such a family faced deep hostility in the region. A post office opened for 'Webber's Prairie' in 1846, and by 1853 the town had taken the name Webberville. Built on cotton farming, it grew to include grist and cotton mills, stores, schools, churches, and a ferry crossing that operated into the 1920s.

Austin, TX

This church grew out of the story of John F. Webber, an Anglo settler who, with his African American wife and children, moved to this prairie in 1839 to escape the racism they faced in town—though prejudice eventually drove the family to Mexico by 1851. After emancipation, Matthew Duty donated an acre here in 1868, and the Webberville Ebenezer Baptist Church was organized that year for the area's freedpeople, with the Rev. Wesley Barrow as its first pastor. Still gathering its scattered families for holidays and special occasions, the congregation carries a nearly century-and-a-half legacy.

Victoria, TX

Organized just after the Civil War to serve Victoria's newly freed people, this congregation formed in 1871 when nine Black trustees purchased land here for a sanctuary. Many of its first members had worshiped at Victoria's First Methodist Church while enslaved, and the church took its name from its first pastor, the Rev. N. Webster. A frame sanctuary rose in 1889, and the congregation grew through the 1930s and 1940s as rural families moved to the city for work.

Marshall, TX

Virginia-born John Johnston Webster brought his family to the Republic of Texas in 1842 and petitioned for land to build a home. The cemetery at Mimosa Hall Plantation began in 1844 with the burial of Webster's son-in-law, and its graves include five of Webster's slaves or freed people alongside family members and veterans of several wars. The wall surrounding the oldest graves was built by plantation labor.

Alto, TX

After the Civil War, freed African Americans built the Weeping Mary Community on land bought by two formerly enslaved sisters, Nancy Lockhart and Emily Skinner. Named—likely—for Mary Magdalene weeping at Christ's tomb, the settlement grew along a stretch of El Camino Real, its families farming and, later, working area nurseries. A school by the late 1800s and the Weeping Mary Baptist Church, rebuilt here after a 1957 flood, kept the community bound together for generations.

Brownwood, TX

Welcome William Chandler is remembered as Brown County's first permanent settler and farmer, arriving in 1856 with his wife Sarah, their children, and several enslaved people. Their log cabin became a gathering place for area pioneers and housed the county's first post office and store; Chandler served as county judge and postmaster, though his daughter Jane actually ran the mail. Around 1868 he moved to a new site north of Brownwood that stayed in his family for more than a century.

Welfare, TX

Built around 1878 to serve the rural Welfare community near Comfort, this one-teacher schoolhouse originally stood west of Joshua Creek before being moved to its present site around 1902. After 1907 separate classes were held for African American students, and parents pooled funds around 1912 to add a room and porch. Enrollment peaked at 25 before students transferred to Comfort in 1952, leaving the little wood-frame building as a reminder of country schooling.

Newmarket, NH

Wentworth Cheswell was a remarkable figure of Revolutionary-era New Hampshire — a schoolteacher, town official, and patriot of African and English descent. Widely counted among the first Americans of African ancestry elected to public office, he served his town of Newmarket for decades and is remembered for a Revolutionary alarm ride carrying word of British movements. He bridged the worlds of scholarship, public service, and the fight for independence.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2020

Founded in 1820, "Big Wesley" was central to the birth of the A.M.E. Zion denomination and, at its first home, hosted anti-slavery gatherings in the decades before emancipation. The congregation has stood at this site since 1885, carrying its founding spirit into a long record of leadership in civil rights, equal employment, and social justice. It remains one of Philadelphia's historic African American churches.

San Marcos, TX

Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church traces its roots to 1875 and is believed to be the oldest African American congregation in San Marcos, with its first sanctuary built on this site in 1879. In the years just after emancipation it ran a Freedmen's school, teaching formerly enslaved people and their children to read and write. Through a succession of buildings, it has remained a center of worship and community aid for generation after generation.

Georgetown, TX

This congregation was organized in 1869 by the Rev. Richard Robert Haywood, an early Texas missionary of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the hopeful years just after emancipation. Trustees bought this land in 1881, and worshippers gathered in a small wooden building until the present sanctuary was raised in 1904. Its Carpenter Gothic form, with a corner tower and lancet windows, still marks a cornerstone of Georgetown's Black community.

Frost, TX

Organized in 1877 at the forks of Richland and Ash creeks by an itinerant Methodist preacher, this congregation first gathered in a log schoolhouse before building its own sanctuaries, rebuilt in 1911 and again in 1934. It became a cornerstone of the rural, historically African-American Pelham community—home to the Sunday school where the area's children learned and the outreach that sustained its members young and old.

Galveston, TX

Galveston's African American Methodist community reaches back to 1848, and after the Civil War the congregation that became Reedy Chapel A.M.E. spawned a lineage of churches — among them Wesley Tabernacle, organized out of a split in 1868. Its sanctuary survived fire in 1879 and the catastrophic 1900 hurricane, only to be rebuilt by a Black carpentry crew and later refaced in brick when the city's grade raising reached the neighborhood. Beyond worship, the church became a center of Black civic life and, in 1914, home to what is described as the first anti-lynching society in Texas.

Austin, TX

As the Civil War ended and emancipation came to Texas, freedpeople across Austin sought to worship in congregations of their own rather than in the segregated pews of their former enslavers. Wesley United Methodist grew out of exactly that moment, founded through the joint efforts of a white missionary and a Black minister and first meeting in the basement of the very church many members had attended as slaves. From an 1867 stone sanctuary with a dirt floor it grew into one of the leading Black churches in Texas, hosting classes for Samuel Huston College and a home for community and mission work.

Waco, TX

Founded in 1902 as the East Side Mission by the Rev. B.J. Goff, this Methodist congregation first met in a storefront and an old county school building before settling into Jones Chapel on Paul Quinn Street in 1911. In 1961 it moved a half-mile south to its present home, a brick sanctuary with an open-concept basement and a balcony. Wesley United Methodist has served east Waco for more than a century.

Akron, OH

By the 1950s, West Akron was a neighborhood on the rise, its streets filling with new middle-class homes as the rubber-boom city spread outward from downtown. Locals gave this prospering district the affectionate nickname "Sugar Hill" — the same name carried by celebrated Black middle-class enclaves in Harlem and other American cities — a shorthand for hard-won comfort and upward mobility. The name marked more than geography; it signaled a community that felt it had arrived.

Beaumont, TX

West Beulah Baptist Church was founded during the "Black Church Expansion" of 1875–1925 in a shotgun-style house, a form common across the South after the Civil War, where its first pastor held prayer meetings in his home. The congregation acquired property on Cedar Street in 1912, weathered decades of growth and repair, and in 1968 moved to a new home on Bigner Road. Having survived flood, fire, and relocation, it added "Missionary" to its name in 2013 to reflect its work supporting missions in Africa.

Smithville, TX

In the segregated Jim Crow South, West End Park was one of the last Texas stops on the "Chitlin' Circuit" — the network of venues that offered Black performers safe, welcoming stages when white clubs were closed to them. Owned by former Negro Leagues pitcher I.T. Harper and his wife Sis, the park hosted jazz and blues greats like Etta James, T-Bone Walker, and Lightnin' Hopkins, while its baseball field drew exhibition games featuring Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Between shows it served the community for church picnics, holidays, and family reunions.

Galveston, TX

The earliest known inhabitants of West Galveston Island were the Karankawa people, and it was near here that the shipwrecked Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca came ashore in 1528, the first European known to reach the island. Over the centuries that followed the island saw explorers, the pirate Jean Lafitte, stagecoach and ferry travel down its beaches, and a grim role in the illegal slave trade as a landing point for traffickers barred from Galveston's harbor. By the twentieth century it had become a haven for migratory shorebirds and, since 1957, a booming resort coast.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston congregation traces its roots to 1870, when it was first known as the West Point Free Mission Baptist Church under its founding pastor. After worshiping in a variety of places, the members acquired this site in 1900, built a small sanctuary, and in 1921 laid the cornerstone of a larger two-story building on Independence Day. Across its history the church has emphasized community service, sending members into the ministry and leading groups from the Boy Scouts to a county community action council.

Salado, TX

West Salado Cemetery grew up in a community of former slaves who settled here after the Civil War, its earliest documented grave dating to 1877. In 1879, Elijah Sterling Clack Robertson deeded the land for a church, school, and graveyard—the trio of institutions freedpeople so often built to anchor their new lives. Though the church and school are long gone, the cemetery endures as a link to the area's early Black history.

New Waverly, TX

Founded in 1885, Western Grove Baptist Church is the oldest African-American congregation in New Waverly, begun as Eastern Grove Baptist Church before moving to the west side of town. Organized by ministers and deacons in the years after emancipation, it survived being blown down by high winds in 1936 and relocated again in 1958 when Interstate 45 cut through the county. Through each move it rebuilt, remaining a spiritual anchor for its community.

Charleston, SC

In a cramped three-room house on a Charleston back lot, two brothers born into slavery began lives that would carry them to the front ranks of the fight for Black equality. Archibald and Francis Grimké were the sons of an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and grew up amid the hard aftermath of the Civil War before finding their way to Northern educations and national influence. Archibald became a lawyer, writer, and civil-rights leader, while Francis grew into one of the era's most respected ministers and moral voices. From this modest Charleston lot rose careers that shaped African American advocacy well into the 20th century.

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio's Black history reaches back to its earliest days, from presidial soldiers of African ancestry to the North African Berber heritage of the Canary Islanders. By 1885 the city's Second Ward, west of the San Antonio River, was home to a substantial Black community anchored by institutions like St. James AME Church—begun in 1868 in a former soap factory—and the West End Baptist Church. Community leaders such as Ella Austin, who opened an orphans' home nearby in 1890, and gathering places for literary societies and glee clubs gave the neighborhood civic and cultural life before it later transformed into a Latino cultural center.

Center, TX

In the hills of Shelby County, Westview Cemetery became the resting place for African Americans freed after the Civil War, many of whom stayed on as tenant farmers and sharecroppers while building their own businesses, churches, and a school. Long known as the Union Grave Yard and later Center Colored Cemetery, its earliest recorded burial is thought to be Jane Chumley Miller, a former slave, and its oldest surviving marker dates to 1909. Educators, preachers, and business people lie here, including a man said to have cooked for Gen. John J. Pershing during World War I.

Wharton, TX

Founded in 1896 as the Wharton Colored School, this institution served as the heart of African American education in Wharton County for nearly eighty years. In 1927 the county won a Rosenwald Fund grant to build a larger school, part of the philanthropic program that helped construct thousands of Black schools across the segregated South. Renamed the Wharton County Training School and steadily expanded with new buildings, science labs, and a full curriculum, it educated generations—many of whom returned as teachers—until it closed with integration in 1968.

Honey Grove, TX

Built between 1852 and 1854 with slave labor, the Wheeler House was the area's first Classic Revival dwelling, its lumber and chimney stones hand-hewn and its joists pegged rather than nailed — the fifth house along the Bonham-to-Paris stagecoach road. Builder Wiley Hulsey sold it in 1884 to Confederate veteran Peyton Wheeler and his wife Martha Jane Hamil, whose descendants later placed this marker.

Crockett, TX

Settlement here began in 1835 when Joshua J. Hall founded a community along the Trinity River. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people from the Hall family and other freed African Americans put down roots in this area, building a community around springs on land donated by French Taylor. A Baptist church and schoolhouse rose near the springs in 1905, followed by a new school and a cannery in the 1920s; though the school closed in 1959, the church and civic life endured.

Addison, TX

After emancipation, freed people from the Coit, Caruth, and Obier plantations built the community of Upper White Rock, and in 1884 they organized a Methodist congregation and raised a log church beside a small African American burial ground. Repeated flooding tormented the worshippers — oral history recalls the congregation trapped inside for days waiting for waters to fall, and a 1918 flood that drowned a family after services drove them to higher ground. Renamed over the decades and tested by fire, the church later fought a years-long court battle, finally won in 1979, to keep the very graveyard where it began.

Colfax, LA

This monument commemorates the white participants in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white militia attacked and killed a large number of Black freedmen defending the Grant Parish courthouse during a disputed Reconstruction election. It was among the deadliest acts of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, and the Supreme Court case that grew from it, United States v. Cruikshank, gutted federal power to protect Black citizens' rights. The marker's own language — honoring men who fell 'fighting for white supremacy' — makes plain the Lost Cause worldview that later erected it.

Nazareth, PA · est. 1966

The Whitefield House was begun in 1740 at the urging of the famed revivalist preacher George Whitefield, who envisioned it as a school for Black children. When his plans faltered, the Moravians completed the building in 1743 and put it to communal use—most memorably as a shared home for 32 newly married German couples brought to Pennsylvania in 1744. Its stout walls have watched over Nazareth ever since.

Nazareth, PA · est. 1931

The Whitefield House traces its origins to 1740, when the famed revivalist George Whitefield acquired land in the Pennsylvania backcountry with the intention of founding a school for Black children. Moravian Brethren began the sturdy stone building, and after the Moravians purchased the tract in 1741 it served in turn as a family dwelling, a girls' boarding school, and a nursery for missionaries' children. Since the 19th century it has housed the Moravian Historical Society and Museum, preserving the memory of these early ventures.