BLACK CITYBUILDING | Black Towns
BLACK CITYBUILDING | Black Towns
To claim our history, we must claim our built environment.
Written By Bruzenskey Bois
This piece was originally printed in Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
In 1887, the tiny town of Eatonville, Florida, was incorporated as one of the first all-Black municipalities in the United States. Over time, it grew in importance if not size. It gave its residents power, dignity, and community. It was the home of famed Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston. It contained a preparatory school for Black children founded with the help of Booker T. Washington. Today, an interstate runs through the middle of its 1.6-square-mile footprint. That school no longer exists, its plot of land now slated for a development that local citizens feel disconnected from. The history of Eatonville is storied, but its fate is uncertain. And it isn’t alone—countless Black towns have suffered similar or worse fates. Still, there are steps we can take to preserve both our history and the cities that reflect it.
More than ever, it’s essential that we ensure the existence of communities, institutions, and programming that will educate our youth about Black history. Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than a thousand Black towns were established across the country. Few have survived, though. Most have been forgotten or are mere ashes of their former selves. Just look at Manhattan. Don’t get me wrong—I love Central Park—I just wish that Seneca Village, the largely Black town that once existed beneath it, would have been integrated into the site.
To our dear governor, I would say: Our history deserves to be remembered.
And that’s not all. To add insult to injury, places like my great state of Florida are taking steps to delete the history of Black towns from textbooks. To our dear governor, I would say: Our history deserves to be remembered. Think of Fort Mose, which in 1738 became the site of the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what’s now the US. Or John Horse, a Seminole freedom fighter of African descent who in 1849 helped found a Black Seminole community in Oklahoma where small groups built homes and cultivated the land.
These stories abound. But are they heard? Are they known by heart? Another Black History Month has come and gone, and I don’t know.
Recently, I had a conversation with my nephew, a fifth-grader, regarding Black History Month and what he learns in school. He told me about routine, about hearing the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks over and over. “But what do you know about Black history?” His response came with an eye roll, because he could predict his uncle would be asking him that question. “In school, I learned that we were slaves and then fought for civil rights in this country,” he said. When I pressed him, he added that he hears me talk about Black history at home too—“all the time.” I was eager to ask what he retains from what I say, but I was interrupted. “When I’m in class,” he said, “the kids make remarks about me being a monkey and laugh at the fact that my people were slaves.” My nephew said all this with a sense of annoyance. “I just ignore them like you said.”
We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our youth. If we don’t, we continue to lose our greatest asset: our towns.
In the face of stories like my nephew’s, there can be no more waiting around for someone else to give Black history its due. We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our youth. If we don’t, we continue to lose our greatest asset: our towns. In thriving Black neighborhoods, dollars can be circulated back into the community. Many of our cities were taken away from us in the name of urban renewal or plain old white supremacy. Today, they continue to get taken, just by a different name. Even after the advent of Black Lives Matter, our trauma continues thanks to everything from bad policing to vigilantism to colonization—I mean, gentrification.
Some Black towns have been able to defend themselves and conserve their legacy, at least to one extent or another. Back in Eatonville, you find one of the success stories. In 1987, N.Y. Nathiri—Executive Director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community—fought a planned highway widening that would have turned a two-lane road into a five-lane concrete expanse. The change would have bisected the town once again, and coupled with the addition of I-4, it arguably would have spelled the end. Stopping it was a victory, but the challenges keep coming. For community leaders like Nathiri who are skeptical of the planned development, the project threatens “the erasure of Eatonville’s ability to create its own future.”
We can take action. But first, we have to understand what we’re up against. As far as I can tell, three tactics deserve much of the blame for ruining Black towns. They’re the oldest tricks in the book, and their damage must be undone:
1) Building highways directly through neighborhoods and towns. We hardly need to cite examples here. They are everywhere. Take Hayti in Durham, North Carolina, for just one.
2) Failing to provide adequate infrastructure and sustainability. Look at Jackson, Mississippi, which as a city was without clean water in the year 2022.
3) Taking away the right to rebuild. Areas like Eatonville that were destroyed in the name of progress were effectively sterilized when they were stripped of their ability to heal.
But there are also solutions that would help us reclaim our towns:
1) Government agencies can offer an infinite right to rebuild. Reparations or no reparations, these rights must come first.
2) Black towns can also grow through annexation. As Town Manager of Tullahassee, Oklahoma, Cymone Davis was able to increase the land boundaries for the town—the first all-black district in the state.
3) Missing Middle codes and the removal of exclusionary zoning must become standard reforms.
Through all this, the more we can do to understand the placemaking process that will help bolster and revive Black towns, the more we can participate in that process, and the more we can connect with other like minds in this space, the closer we can get to combating systemic racism. The Congressional Black Caucus for New Urbanism (CBCNU) aims to do just that. For example, in Tullahassee, CBCNU has launched the Rebuild Tullahassee campaign. The effort will be used to plan and implement several projects throughout the town, including but not limited to: public art (namely, the Lincoln Street mural); creative use of existing buildings (such as town gym façade improvements and site rehabilitation); and historic preservation (like renaming streets for five Black women who had some influence in Tullahassee). Alongside us, other individuals who are placing an emphasis on Black towns include the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA). Part of their work involves partnering with historically black colleges and universities to engage in various community development projects.
The conversation on Black towns is only beginning. As we collectively keep educating, more people will see that this cause is real, that progress can happen. You too can join the conversation and help ensure Black history lives on not just in memory but also all around.
Bruzenskey Bois is a real estate developer, property manager, speaker, and advocate based in Tampa, Florida. He is the co-founder of People Places Management, LLC, and manages over $12 million in real estate assets. Additionally, he is the co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus for New Urbanism and of Bois & Peters, LLC, a real estate development and consulting firm.