Those Who
Remain
Faith, family and belonging in the dwindling African American community of East Austin
by Becka Baptista, Kirsten Kumar, Mike Thompson & Rachel Goodman
East Austin is a concrete location — the history of its African American community encapsulated in the defined borders of District 1. In recent years, gentrification has forced out most of its longtime residents. But East Austin is more than its physical location; in truth, it’s a romantic idea.
These are the stories of those who remain.
When President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Stonewall, Texas native, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Yet, even in liberal Austin, that goal hasn’t yet come to fruition.
In 1928, a strategy to isolate minorities in Austin manifested in the Koch and Fowler city plan. The “Master Plan,” as it came to be known, pushed the city’s African American population east of Interstate 35 by denying city services to those who refused to relocate. Just two years later, 80 percent of Austin’s African American community, whose members had resided in their own enclaves throughout the city, lived on the East side.
Since the mid-1990s, East Austin has become the principal site of gentrification to accommodate the city’s growing population. A 2016 report by Dr. Eric Tang, a University of Texas professor in African and African diaspora studies, suggests “residents who live east are experiencing the ‘suburbanization of poverty’ phenomenon” as they are forced to places like Pflugerville, Round Rock and Cedar Park.
According to the results of Tang’s survey, about three-quarters of the African American homeowners said they felt pushed out primarily over concerns of declining school quality and rising housing costs. Almost half said they would move back into Austin if they could afford the housing.
Source: City of Austin Census Data
Freshman Joseph C. Parker Jr. sat at his biology class lab station at Woodlawn High School. The day’s lesson was to draw blood, place it on a glass slide, and examine the sample under the microscope. Parker concentrated as he brought the needle to his finger, but he couldn’t help but feel a hovering presence behind him, a collection of eyes trained on his every move. It was his class, full of white students wondering the color of the blood of the only black boy in school. This was, after all, the year 1966 in Birmingham, Alabama.
Schools were supposed to be desegregated in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 11118, which demanded federal assistance in removing “unlawful obstructions of justice in the State of Alabama.” However, integration came slowly. A policy known as “Freedom of Choice” gave students the power to decide which school to attend. That too received backlash, which was most clearly evidenced in the infamous picture of Gov. George Wallace defiantly blocking the door to the University of Alabama.
Because of this backlash, the only son of Rev. J.C. Parker was the first to ever choose Woodlawn.
“It didn’t make sense to me to take a bus across town to the black high school, Parker High School,” the younger Parker said. “Woodlawn was just a five minute walk from my house.”
Biology wasn’t the only incident. There were times when Parker’s peers left him surrounded by empty desks, as if a leper in their midst. Instances when he’d feel the wet, slimy prick of a spitball hitting the back of his neck. Moments when fellow students would come up to him in the hallway and ask to touch his hair, just to see how it felt.
Parker’s upbringing wasn’t like most. His father was a college friend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. At the behest of the local Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the elder Parker wrote a letter to his old friend on March 10, 1954:
“My dear King:
I am sure that you have been informed of your call to the pastorate at the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church…I shall be very pleased to have you pastor in the city with me….
Yours in Christ,
Rev. J.C. Parker”
In April, King accepted the position.
A little more than a year later, when Parker was just three years old, his father worked with King on the nonviolent Montgomery Bus Boycotts. On the half-page advertisement printed in the Alabama Journal detailing eight areas of complaint and an explanation of the boycott, Martin Luther King’s name is printed as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Just above King, it is inked Rev. J. C. Parker, secretary of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance.
Over 60 years later, the younger Parker recounts how his “parents created a culture where I didn’t have hate.”
And he had plenty of reason to hate. As a boy, his father took him to the scene of each bombing white supremacists directed at the African American community. Parker bore witness each time a home, church, or business turned to rubble, destroyed by a bundle of dynamite.
On Sunday morning, Sept. 15, 1963, four young girls changing into their choir robes were killed when a bomb went off underneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Upon hearing the news, Parker’s father took his son from their own service at Jackson Street Baptist Church to the scene. The image of the smoke billowing from the the church, he said, is still deeply ingrained in his mind. On the night before Mother’s Day 1963, 11-year-old Parker peered into what was left of the home of Rev. A.D. King, the younger brother of the face of the Civil Rights Movement. Standing around him on the sidewalk: the King brothers, his father, and Rev. R. D. Abernathy, a close advisor of King.
Though he cared deeply about the issues plaguing his community, Parker resisted the pressure to follow his father into the pastorate.
In 1979, Parker moved to Austin with his wife LaVerne to attend the University of Texas School of Law. According to him, when the couple consulted a rental locator, they were directed to East Austin not because of the neighborhood’s proximity to where Parker would begin classes, but solely based on the color of he and his wife’s skin.
“Even given my upbringing in Birmingham, I thought Austin was more racially segregated than where I had been raised," he said. “At least in segregated Birmingham, there was black neighborhoods spread throughout the city. In Austin, it was just the one east of I-35.”
While Parker worked hard to find his place in the greater Austin community, he found a spiritual home in David Chapel Missionary Baptist Church on the corner of Chestnut Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard in East Austin.
It used to be that residents could walk down Chicon, 12th or San Bernard streets, sit around a neighbor’s table and talk. They spoke about the mundane, but they also spoke about oppression. They organized bake sales for their children around those tables, but they also devised plans to fight racism.
They may have been placed in East Austin by force, but they made it their own — they made it home. Now, with those people dispersed to the outlying suburbs, Parker’s job to maintain that sense of community is harder, but all the more necessary.
Parker said the swell of unrest throughout the nation, particularly the presidential campaign and police brutality, has left him pondering how much American society has really progressed since his upbringing in Alabama.
“I was raised to see that the Church and Christians ought to be engaged in public life, in politics, in improvement of the community,” Parker said. “But, I was hopeful that my three daughters wouldn’t have to deal with the things that I had to deal with. I think my father and Dr. King were hopeful that I wouldn’t have to deal with it.”
The 62-year-old contends that while the black church might be few in numbers, its voice will continue to guide the African American community.
Rev. Joseph C. Parker Jr., senior pastor of David Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in East Austin, sits in his office and recounts stories from his childhood on Oct. 13, 2016.
Despite previous reluctance, Parker found himself returning to the family business, and began to preach at David Chapel in his last semester of law school. At that time, over half of the church’s congregants resided in East Austin, according to Parker.
In 1992, he became the seventh senior pastor in David Chapel’s 92-year history.
According to Parker, 90 percent of his congregants now commute from the surrounding suburbs, pushed out by the rising cost of living in East Austin.
“I have people coming from Buda, Pflugerville, Round Rock, Georgetown, even a couple that drives in from Rockdale,” he said.
Parker, who worked with the city on revitalizing part of East Austin in the late 1990s, said he’s spoken with many of the other pastors in the area and they are all concerned about gentrification, the process of remodeling various areas of East Austin to better suit the wealthy, mostly caucasian middle and upper-middle class.
“Not one person has joined David Chapel who is a gentrifier," he said.
When the majority of the neighborhood’s original residents were forced out beyond the city limits, black businesses in East Austin mostly shuttered, replaced by high-end home goods stores and trendy dinner spots.
But the black churches remain.
“Every culture wants a place that can speak to their background, their history in the midst of the whole,” Parker said. “So it becomes more important that we, the Church, provide that and that we help to retain the history.”
Otis Bell liked playing baseball at Downs Field on 12th Street in East Austin. It was the proud home of local Negro League teams like the Austin Black Senators and Black Pioneers. He had the opportunity to pitch on the same mound where the great Satchel Paige had once pitched and field hits where local legend Willie Wells played shortstop.
But, it wasn’t football.
As hard as Bell tried, he just couldn’t make the L.C. Anderson High School Yellow Jacket roster. And that was his only shot. Segregation kept the school from playing white schools, so the East Austin community could only support one team traveling outside the city limits to compete against other black schools.
In the neighborhood, sports were important, but church on Sundays was paramount.
Often, Bell stood in the pews of St. James Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday mornings. “It wasn’t about the church, it was about the people inside the church,” he said.
Bell’s bags were packed, though, ready to be shipped off to fight for another people’s justice when he didn’t even have justice in his own neighborhood.
When he returned, East Austin hadn’t changed. He could still grab a plate of beef at Sam’s BBQ or stop in to Marshall’s Barbershop for a clean cut. While those two East 12th Street fixtures remain, most of the other places Bell remembers are gone, including his father’s Gulf Gas Station.
Bell now lives in what was once the Aristocrat Inn, a club he used to frequent just a few dozen steps away from the corner of East 12th and Chicon streets. It became Bell’s when his father Willie, who owned the land, passed away. The exit sign from the house’s past life still emits a red glow above the front door.
While many of his friends and neighbors also inherited homes and businesses, increasing property taxes due to gentrification forced most of them to sell.
“I don’t know nobody over here now," said, Bell, who helps wait tables at his wife Lozina’s restaurant, Nubian Queen Lola's Cajun Soul Food Café. Little white cards sitting on customers’ tables read “Give a Gift: Help Feed the Homeless” — on the weekends the couple serves hot meals to the sick and homeless.
“I don’t see people from the churches out in the community anymore,” he said.
Bell doesn’t go to worship on Sundays anymore; he contends the churches are more concerned about making money than helping the neighborhood.
White children now often peddle past their purple-roofed home flush against the Big Easy Bar and Grill next door serving what its painted outer wall claims is the best cajun food.
“I see a whole bunch of snobby white folk running past here with their dog and they just turn their nose up,” Lonzina Bell said. Teams with few black children on their rosters now play on Downs Field where Bell’s husband first picked up a baseball bat.
The couple says they’ve had plenty of offers to buy their home, but they’ve seen that the meager money offered isn’t enough to start a new, comfortable life in the suburbs. They’ve seen one too many former East Austinite suffer that fate.
It isn’t just monetary reality keeping the Bells firmly rooted in East Austin, though. They said a sense of responsibility to hold on to their community’s former self keeps them there.
“I’ll probably never leave,” Bell said.
The hymns about Jesus cultivated a love for God in Bell, but that wasn’t what meant most to him, he said. His East Austin community had its problems: they were treated as second class citizens by city dwellers west of Interstate 35, but they also dealt with high levels of drug and crime amongst their own. The church was there for them. The pastors worked with congregants to try to better the community. If nothing else, the church walls acted as a safe haven from a troubled world — a place where neighbors could feel at peace, if only for a few hours.
On July 20, 1966, Bell’s draft number came up. Around the same time, Bell witnessed the first inklings of gentrification.
According to Bell, his home, which was on a hill in the Glen Oaks neighborhood, and those of his neighbors were declared within a flood zone, forcing them to settle elsewhere in East Austin.
“The flood from Noah’s Ark couldn’t have washed us off from there,” the 69-year-old said. “They took most of the houses and built new ones over there, same way they’re doing over here now.”
Otis Bell's home is just five lots down from the 12th and Chicon Street intersection. The house is one of the few remnants of what was the center of the African American community in East Austin. Oct. 14, 2016
One member of St. James Missionary Baptist Church raises his hands in praise during service on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016.
Members of St. James Missionary Baptist Church clap their hands while the gospel choir echoes the words "this is the way we praise him. Clap your hands." Oct. 2 2016.
"I wish I had my usher pin," says St. James Baptist usher, Bertha Williams. "We usually wear black, and I forgot to take my pin off my black uniform. Oh, I wish I had it." Oct. 2, 2016.
Halle Bell, an attendee of St. James Missionary Baptist for 65 years, awaits the start of the Worship in White Service on Oct. 2. Bell, whose house recently caught fire, says the church has served as a helpful and hospitable community while she recovers from the loss of her home.
Long-time members of St. James align in all white for the "Worship In White" service on Sunday, Oct. 2 in Austin, TX.
The stage lights of St. James Baptist Church shine on church members aligned for the "Worship In White" Service on Oct. 2.
Church deacons face the audience while they wait to aid in the Communion process at St. James Baptist on Oct. 2.
Male church deacons make their way to St. James' pastor to help administer Communion on Sunday, Oct. 2.
One church member faces the audience during St. James Baptist's "Worship In White" Service. Oct. 2.