The African American History of East Austin

You cannot understand East Austin without understanding one road, one planning document, and one highway. Together they drew a color line through this city that policy invented, paper enforced, and concrete made permanent.

This is the deeper history behind my personal story of choosing East Austin. If you only take one thing from it, take this: the segregation of East Austin was not an accident of the market or the natural drift of people toward people like themselves. It was designed, on purpose, by a city government that wrote down what it intended to do.

Before the Line: A City of Freedmen Communities

After emancipation, formerly enslaved people across Texas traveled to Austin, where the regional Freedmen's Bureau was located. They built their own neighborhoods — known as freedmen communities or freedom colonies — anchored by churches, schools, and self-help organizations. By 1870, more than a third of Austin's population was Black, and these communities were scattered all across the city, not concentrated in any single quarter.

Clarksville sat on the west side. Wheatville rose near present-day UT. Masontown, Pleasant Hill, and Robertson Hill clustered east of downtown. They were modest — often unpaved, often denied services even then — but they were Black-owned and self-governed, and they were everywhere. I cover them individually in the freedmen communities piece, including what physically survives today.

1917: The Supreme Court Closes One Door

In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that cities could not enforce residential segregation through explicit racial zoning ordinances. On paper, that should have protected mixed neighborhoods. In practice, cities like Austin simply went looking for a way to achieve the same result without saying so out loud.

1928: The Plan That Drew the Line

In 1927, the Austin City Council hired a Dallas–Fort Worth firm, Koch & Fowler, to produce the city's first comprehensive plan and zoning map. The result, "A City Plan for Austin, Texas," was adopted by the all-white City Council in March 1928. Most of it dealt with ordinary planning — streets, utilities, parks. But two paragraphs changed the city for a century.

The planners acknowledged, in writing, that racial zoning was unconstitutional. So they proposed a workaround: locate every public facility intended for Black residents — schools, parks, services — exclusively in the area east of East Avenue, as an "incentive" to draw the Black population there. Pair that pull with a push — withholding paved roads, sewer lines, and utilities from Black neighborhoods elsewhere — and you could empty the freedmen communities without ever writing the word "segregation" into law.

It worked. Within roughly four years, almost all of Austin's Black residents had been funneled into a district of about six square miles east of East Avenue. The other freedmen communities across the city largely disappeared.

The 1930s: Redlining Hardens the Damage

What the city started, the federal government reinforced. Beginning in the 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation produced "residential security maps" grading neighborhoods by lending risk, color-coded from green ("best") to red ("hazardous"). A 1937 map of Austin marked much of East Austin as hazardous.

Historians debate exactly how the HOLC maps themselves were used, but the broader pattern of lending discrimination they reflected and helped institutionalize is not in dispute: predominantly Black neighborhoods were routinely denied the mortgages, insurance, and investment that built middle-class wealth elsewhere. For East Austin, that meant decades of suppressed property values and disinvestment layered directly on top of the 1928 plan's segregation.

The 1960s: A Highway Makes It Concrete

When Interstate 35 was completed through central Austin in the early 1960s, it was built directly along the old East Avenue — the exact line the 1928 plan had designated three decades earlier. A boundary that had existed as policy and pattern became a physical wall of concrete and traffic, separating the white central city from the Black east side. To this day, "east of I-35" carries meaning in Austin that has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with history.

Why This History Still Matters to Buyers

If you're considering buying in East Austin, this isn't trivia — it's context you should own. The neighborhood's relative affordability for much of the 20th century was manufactured by discrimination, and the wave of value increases that followed has driven the displacement I write about in the gentrification piece. Buying here thoughtfully means understanding both halves of that story.