America's Lost Black Towns Vol. 1 — Texas: Built From Freedom (Standard Companion Edition — EPUB Edition)

In the summer of 1865, nearly a thousand freedpeople walked down San Felipe Road and built a city of their own on the bank of Buffalo Bayou — Freedmen's Town, Houston, where residents bought and laid their own brick streets because the city would not, and pooled $800 to buy Emancipation Park seven years after emancipation. A generation later, Black families north of downtown voted Independence Heights into existence — the first Black municipality in Texas, with its own mayors — then voted to join Houston on promises of services that never came. And in Austin, Charles Clark bought two acres for $100 in 1871 and founded Clarksville, a freedom colony the city's own 1928 master plan then set out, in its own written words, to empty. Three Texas towns, three different instruments of erasure — demolition, annexation, and a written plan — told from the documents: the 1984 National Register nomination (568 structures; about 50 remain), the 1914 incorporation petition, and the master plan itself. Contested numbers are printed with their sources; oral tradition is printed as what it is — a primary source — with the museum, church, or community that carries it named every time.

All 3 chapters, full text (8,102 words). Every chapter closes with its receipts — where the record disagrees, the disagreement is printed, not papered over. The clean EPUB edition, readable on any e-reader, tablet, or phone.