Some of the most wide spread rhetoric around gentrification does its best to remain in the arena of the market phenomenon, this rhetoric places the most regular blame on the individual largely white upper middle class for buying the houses, the arty and punky largely white formerly middle or upper middle class who rent houses and industrial space, and developers for building out of place “ultra modern” luxury multifamily housing in the middle of residential neighborhoods. While these factors do deserve recognition, the processes through which these changes occur is mystified.

This mystification produces an ahistorical understanding of the issue, one that makes us blind to the specific actors and junctures in which social movements could intercede. This mystification produces a byproduct of guilt and consumer based and reactionary activism that shields those with the prime interests, profit, from having to defend themselves, rhetorically, legally, or extralegally. In fact this mystification is their first wall of defense.

A couple of caveats: firstly, this mystification is largely expressed in the attitudes and tropes of relocated radicals and liberals (largely white, but not exclusively), since this is the community Im most a part of and most familiar with this is at whom Ill level the concern. Im also sure that we would have much to learn from long time residents, as this is not the first time there have been attempted land grabs in these apparently highly desired areas. I personally have had the time, luxury and inclination to spend hours in the Austin City Archives and reading archived news stories online, following threads and trying to see which puppet master they attach to, as well as the opportunities to talk to some old hands (more upcoming).

I do not wish to excuse radicals and liberals from self reflection, but wish to take it deeper, as a challenge to actually learn the history about the area in which you are trying to organize or complain about, so we can at the very least be more interesting, if not more creative and effective and achieve our goals. This means the end of one-size-fits-all analysis that stays remarkably the same in city after city after city, with the same generic yuppie-hipster-punk-developer foe with no history to them. Christ, the world (let alone Austin) was not created in the year 2000.

Since I started this history project, I have been continually interested in the rise and fall of freedmen’s colonies in Austin, TX. The reasons are several:

First and closest to home, I work in one and live in another. Clarksville, where the preschool is located was founded after emancipation on land near the Woodlawn Plantation apparently where the Enfield neighborhood is west of Mo-Pac. Woodlawn was owned by E.M. Pease who served as the governor of Texas twice, and who has a city park named after him. This knowledge of Clarksville as a historic black community has maybe been the piece of historic information that has been kicking around my head the longest.

I live on the north side of west campus in the area that was once Wheatville. Unlike Clarksville which survived as a coherent neighborhood, if not an African American one, Wheatville’s last vestiges are one historic building, which used to house a newspaper and now sits vacant, and the food co-op which bears a slightly different name, “Wheatsville”.

Second is the process of their integration into the city (for lack of a better word) and subsequent dissipation and displacement of these communities by the white establishment, represented by the Austin City Council. Paying close attention to the geographic strategies of both freed slaves and the Power of the city of Austin when it came to its least desirable citizens.

In 1928 a city plan was drafted advising the relocation of the “negro” population to the tract now commonly referred to as east Austin. The city was appraised that a forceful relocation was unconstitutional, but established an assortment of push/pull factors in order to achieve this goal. Among these were: the denial of services and infrastructure (roads, sewage, lights, education) to some established freedmen’s colonies/black areas of the city, and their provision in the East Austin negro district, the imposition of large infrastructure projects either through these communities or immediately bordering them, restricting their growth, passing of city codes restricting the raising of animals within city limits, and straight up illegally dumping trash in them (in the case of both Clarksville and Wheatville.

It is important for me to study these particular cases, which happened literally under my feet, to understand that the displacement of poor and working class communities of color by moneyed, powerful racist interests isn’t a particularly new phenomenon, and that many of the tools used back then are still availible to the city today.