African American History

Mesquite, TX

Zachariah Motley came from Kentucky to this part of Dallas County in 1856, bringing his large family and the people he held in slavery to settle a homestead carved from the Crittenden Survey. The family cemetery began with the 1863 burial of a daughter and remained in use for generations. Among its roughly twenty-five graves lie both Motley relatives and the enslaved people whose forced labor built the family's fortunes.

Austin, TX

A jurist, educator, and author born in North Carolina, Zachary Taylor Fulmore came to Texas in 1870 and built a public-spirited career in Austin. He chaired the state's codifying commission and city school trustees, helped organize a state school for Black deaf and blind students, and served as a charter member and president of the Texas State Historical Association. He also wrote a well-regarded study of Texas county names.

Wichita Falls, TX

Raised in an Alabama foster home, Zenobia Estelle Trimble married C. C. Trimble and settled in Wichita Falls, where she became a pillar of the city's Black community. While her husband served as principal of Booker T. Washington School, she taught alongside him and helped launch its science classes, and for 38 years she cared for children at the "Colored Day Nursery" serving working mothers. Her decades of service to schoolchildren, young women, and the underprivileged earned lasting community respect.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Rev. Lawson Reed reached Nacogdoches in 1878, he found no organized Baptist church for the Black community, so in 1879 charter members began worshiping under a brush arbor before the Walton family donated land. The cemetery's earliest marked grave dates to 1897, and among those laid to rest are Reed himself, members of fraternal orders, and Jim Smith, a World War I veteran. After falling into disrepair, the ground was taken up for care by the city in the 1970s.

Nacogdoches, TX

The Rev. Lawson Reed gathered this Black Baptist congregation in 1879, holding the first services in the open air beneath a brush arbor in the years after emancipation. By 1914 the growing membership raised its third home, a handsome brick church that blended Victorian styling with Gothic Revival detail. It was designed by Diedrich Rulfs, the German-born architect who shaped much of Nacogdoches's built landscape — a notable commission for a church founded by freedpeople.

Colmesneil, TX

Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church is one of the oldest African American congregations in this part of Tyler County. It grew out of a Freedmen's colony that formed in the early 1880s around jobs at a new sawmill, and was formally organized in 1881 by the Rev. George Durden as the first Black congregation in Colmesneil. For decades it served not only as a place of worship but as a school for Black children and a center of civic life, worshipping first in a log cabin the members built themselves.

Henderson, TX

Founded in 1868 on land deeded the year before by Augustus Ferguson, Zion Hill grew from a congregation worshipping in a log cabin into a lasting community institution in Rusk County. Its first frame church stood from the early 1880s until fire took it in 1943, and the present building rose in its place. The adjoining cemetery holds graves older than the church itself, including church members, war veterans, and formerly enslaved people.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1919, Zion Missionary Baptist Church became a cornerstone of the African American neighborhood of Lake Como in Fort Worth, raising its building in 1923. That same year the Rev. G.W. Burton began a pastorate lasting until 1966, followed by the Rev. J.W. Briscoe, Sr., through 1992—decades in which the church anchored the community's spiritual, civic, and economic life. It stood as a spiritual leader through the civil rights era and remains active today.

Houston, TX

In the 1920s, Louisiana Creole families — "Creoles of Color" — migrated to Houston and built the Frenchtown neighborhood, carrying their language, culture, and music with them. Their traditional accordion-and-washboard La-la music, played at community fundraising gatherings, blended with jazz and blues by the 1940s into the distinctive sound of Zydeco, showcased in clubs like Johnson's (later the Continental Lounge and Zydeco Ballroom). Clifton Chenier, the "King of Zydeco," modernized the style here by adding electric guitar, bass, drums, and horns.