They Tried to Erase This Street Three Times. She Stopped Them. | ERASED: Freedmen's Town

A construction crew tore up a Houston street, and underneath the asphalt were bricks laid by hand more than 150 years ago by people who had only just been freed from slavery. Three separate times between 2014 and 2016, the city tried to dig them up for good.

Three separate times, someone stood in the way including a woman who climbed into the excavation hole herself and refused to move. In this episode, we trace the story of Freedmen's Town: a community that built its own doctors, schools, and streets by hand when the city refused to, and the century-long fight to keep it from being erased.

You'll hear how formerly enslaved Houstonians built this neighborhood after being denied basic infrastructure for six years straight, the three separate attempts to tear up its historic brick streets, why this ground is now part of an active bid to become a United Nations World Heritage Site, and a proposed federal law that would trace a 51-mile trail all the way from the origin of Juneteenth to this exact spot. Key figures: Rev.

Jack Yates, Rutherford B.H. Yates, Catherine Roberts, Doris Ellis Robinson, Ben Hall, Mayor Sylvester Turner.

Sourced from the Houston Press, ABC13 News, the National Register of Historic Places, and congressional testimony from the Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy. In partnership with Amplified Voices TV .

For educators: our companion discussion guide and full classroom lesson bundle are available now link in the show notes. Free resources on Substack, paid bundles on Etsy and TPT.

Subscribe for more of the history that was suppressed, hidden, or simply never told. Music licensed via #ERASED #FreedmensTown #HoustonHistory #BlackHistory #UntoldAmericanStory #UNESCO #Juneteenth #BlackHistoryEducation #AmericanHistory #Houston #Emancipation Powered by Amplified Voices .

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