Login

Texas wrote Black exclusion into law the very first year after freedom, and how our people built anyway. Forty acres and a mule never materialized. Instead, the Texas Black Codes criminalized Black movement and labor bargaining, keeping freedpeople tied to plantations by another name. The 1866 Homestead Act specifically excluded African Americans from accessing public land. The state said in statute: the people who worked this soil for generations can own none of it. So freedpeople bought land with cash wages and claimed it through adverse possession, taking the flood prone bottomlands, swamps, and county line margins white settlers didn't want.On land engineered for failure, they built over 500 communities with schools, churches, and cemeteries. The exclusion was law. The building was resistance. Both facts belong in the curriculum.