As the leader of the project, Roberts draws upon her more than 12 years as a municipal administrator, where she learned firsthand about issues associated with Black community heritage conservation.<\/p>\n At the end of the American Civil War, approximately 250,000 formerly enslaved people in Texas, facing new and extraordinarily difficult circumstances, worked together after the Civil War and ensuing decades to establish self-sufficient, all-Black communities known by some as freedmen\u2019s settlements or freedom colonies.<\/p>\n Many of these communities are unmapped, absent from public record, or destroyed due to natural disasters, gentrification, and land dispossession. The communities that remain represent a crucial link between contemporary Black Texans and their family roots, said Roberts. In many cases, they are the last connections some African Americans have to their enslaved ancestors, cultural assets, and property.<\/p>\n Over the past two years, Roberts has brought her Texas Freedom Colonies Project team, which includes faculty and graduate students, with her on her travels through Texas interviewing residents and their descendants to locate these freedom colonies and preserve the heritage of these communities.<\/p>\n Team members document the communities\u2019 historical and contemporary materials, recordings, photos and oral histories about settlements\u2019 origins, locations, challenges and promising preservation practices and upload these records to the project\u2019s Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas<\/a>, a website that analyzes collected data \u2014 surveys, archival material, images, stories, and public histories.<\/p>\n In addition to data uploaded by project team members, the site also collects crowdsourced data that will support freedom colony advocates, planners and cultural resource managers as they support community preservation and protection from development.<\/p>\n Since 2017, Roberts has mapped 357 of 557 known freedom colonies across Texas and has crowdsourced an additional 55 previously undocumented locations from the public.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to engage all the dispersed descendants of all freedom colonies,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cI want to make it known that freedom colonies are not just in the past, but that there are people still living there and engaged in these places and that we are committed to protecting them.\u201d<\/p>\n Roberts said project findings can help African Americans reclaim parts of their unrecorded past, learn new ways to protect their historical properties, and inform political decisions that affect the communities.<\/p>\n The project website allows communities to store historical and contemporary materials, recordings, photos and oral histories about settlements\u2019 origins, locations, challenges and promising preservation practices. The platform also supports freedom colony advocates, planners and cultural resource managers as they support preservation and protection from development.<\/p>\n Helping fund her work is the 2020 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship<\/a>, the 2019 National Trust for Historic Preservation\u2019s National Trust African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Grant<\/a>, and Texas A&M\u2019s T3 Grant<\/a> and Center for Digital Humanities Research<\/a> grants, among others.<\/p>\n In addition to funding COA student researchers, \u201cour grants give us the visibility to tie us into national efforts to preserve historic places,\u201d Roberts said.<\/p>\n Her team is partnering with historic preservation groups and other state and federal agencies, who use the atlas as a practical resource for development and infrastructure projects.<\/p>\n Recently, the team joined the Landowners Association of Texas<\/a> and the Texas A&M University School of Law<\/a>, to develop webinars and workshops for landowners\u2019 estate planning. The sessions, which provide freedom colony residents with strategies to mitigate land loss, are funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n Other endeavors include working with complementary projects such as a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill effort that seeks to map every African-American town in the U.S.<\/p>\n Roberts is also a 2020 visiting scholar at Yale\u2019s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition<\/a>. Utilizing their archives, she is writing a book about Black historic preservation practice to be published by the University of Texas Press.<\/p>\n Roberts said she wants her legacy to be about an approach to empowering people to make themselves visible and to have a say over what happens in their communities.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, it\u2019s African-American settlements, but I\u2019m hoping this platform and approach are extrapolated around the planet,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next set of communities I want to work with is the African diaspora in the Caribbean. I want to look at how we\u2019re documenting and making visible Native American communities. I hope eventually there is a whole cadre of scholars who are doing the research I\u2019m doing and an atlas and study in Australia using my methodology and approach.\u201d<\/p>\n For more information, contact rnira@arch.tamu.edu<\/a> or doswald@tamu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Associate professor Andrea Roberts heads the Texas Freedom Colonies Project in an effort to preserve the heritage of Texas’s all-Black communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[61,88,63],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/coanews.arch.tamu.edu\/content\/images\/2020\/09\/1.JPG\")
Cataloging Historic Black Settlements and the Freedom Colonies<\/h2>\n
![\"Roberts](\"https:\/\/coanews.arch.tamu.edu\/content\/images\/2020\/09\/_DSC9881_1_-jpeters-1.JPG\")
Partnering with State and Federal Agencies<\/h2>\n
Onwards to the African Diaspora, Native Americans, Australia and More<\/h2>\n