Never Sell the Land

Chronicling the stories and resilience of Texas freedom colonies facing erasure, and of the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard them.

Since Emancipation, Deep East Texas has been a place where Black Texans have experienced oppression yet also have created free Black communities. Well into the Jim Crow era, the area was home to communities where formerly enslaved people farmed their own land and ran their own affairs, now called freedom colonies. At one point, more than five hundred such communities existed in the state. Yet only a handful of these freedom colonies remain today, and they are in danger of disappearing from the record and from historical memory.

Never Sell the Land is a work about Black agency—specifically, how agency is secured through bottom-up planning and preservation in the face of unequal access. Andrea Roberts traces the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard the land and heritage of settlements in Jasper and Newton Counties, which abut the Louisiana border. She follows the descendants of these Black-built places as they deploy creative approaches to education and revitalization built on traditional community practices. Never Sell the Land tells the origin story of The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas and Study and shows how preservation becomes self-determination—and how grassroots projects are exhuming the freedom colonies from history books, personal archives, and oral histories, and fighting to physically cement them within the landscape of Texas today.