Photo by Amani Sodiq
Two miles south of downtown Dallas and east of I-35, the Oak Cliff Freedman’s Town, believed to be established in 1888, provided a safe haven for African Americans when Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black violence made it unsafe to live in other parts of the city. The Tenth Street Historic District was the epicenter and what remains of the freedman’s town.
The Tenth Street Historic District is still the largest, most intact freedmen’s town in the nation, with both local and national historic designations. Despite these recognitions, The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the 69-acre district as one of America’s most endangered places three times, most recently in 2019.
In 2021, after looking into her history, Tameshia Rudd-Ridge went to look for one of her family member’s childhood homes on Tenth Street. After circling around, she realized the highway is where her home would have been.
“Luckily, I have a very deep sense of who I am because of family history, what I studied, and how I was raised,” she says. “But I just thought about how other people might have returned to that and felt that their history is lost.”
Rudd-Ridge later went on a Freedmen’s Town bus tour.
“They were sharing some of the struggles with Tenth Street, and I was the youngest person on that bus,” Rudd-Ridge says. “And they were like, ‘What are you gonna do about this?’”
Rudd-Ridge and Jourdan Brunson work together at Kinkofa, a tech company that provides resources for Black families to document, share and preserve their stories. Southern Methodist University researcher Katie Cross is a doctoral archeaolgy student specializing in geographic information systems.
They’ve teamed up to map out and document the Freedmen’s Town’s hidden history.
“We thought about ways that the story could be told more compellingly,” Rudd-Ridge says. “We knew in the beginning that a lot of the narrative that’s told about the community is really through a lens of loss, and also partially told through the story of a former enslaver giving people land and I kind of was like, I don’t think that’s true … So I was like, let’s investigate the foundational story and see if it’s true, and if it’s wrong, we tell the new story that we know.”
The team thought about how much of Black history is passed on through oral tradition and not through records.
“We knew that one thing that would be beneficial would be the ability to do a story map,” Rudd-Ridge says. “So Katie has the GIS systems part of it. We have the oral history. Katie is helping us put those stories on the map, literally.”
The team interviews community members to map out their memories. Schools, churches, parks, community centers, plenty of family homes and businesses dot the area on their maps.
“The city directories will call one thing one name, but the residents knew it by another name, and the mapping brings in all these different things,” Cross says. “We’re taking the historical maps and aerial images and putting them in the GIS and wiring them on top of each other to look at the landscape through time and how it changed. We’re partly looking at how vibrant the community was, partly looking at how much landscape changed and how people have persisted through time.”
The project has a sense of urgency to it, particularly in recording all the stories of the elders. Their long-term goal is to have somewhere permanent for the project to live such as a museum.
“There’s definitely mixed emotions around doing the work, because I think that in many ways, it’s rewarding, it’s definitely needed, and it’s impactful,” Brunson says. “But obviously, these communities like Tenth Street shouldn’t have had to face the history and disinvestment, and all these awful things that have happened.”
As a student, Cross says this is the type of work that truly matters to her.
“Using skills to support efforts like this, that will make everyone hopefully feel a sense of belonging in our city, it feels really good,” Cross says. “This is a step in the right direction in making Tenth Street our story as a city. This is a very important place in our city.”
