Blackshear Residents Organization battles Urban Renewal

Mining the Archives

PHIT has digitized all the interviews and oral histories from the Legal Aid Documentary that was produced in 2008 to celebrate 50 years of Legal Aid (The Law Firm of the Poor.)  We have been diligently mining those archives to retrieve forgotten stories.

In this post, we are highlighting the Blackshear Battle, in which  Blackshear, a neighborhood in East Austin, battled HUD and the City of Austin for three years around the issue of Urban Renewal.  In the 1960s, Blackshear, which was mostly African American, encompassed the area roughly around Huston-Tillotson and the Blackshear Elementary School.  I emphasize roughly.  Neighborhoods get measured differently now. But however measured,  Blackshear was the area around Houston Tillotson College and was one of the historic Black Austin neighborhoods going back to the 19th century.

Urban Renewal, for those that don’t remember, was a plan by the federal government to upgrade American housing by demolishing inner city slums and replacing them with better housing.  What a great and wonderful idea!  Originally, Urban Renewal was supposed to provide decent housing for the bottom part of the income class.  Cities, however, used the program to cleanse the city of poor folks, i.e, minorities.  On paper, Urban Renewal was supposed to provide replacement housing.  Cities, however, neglected that inconvenient requirement and no one insisted that they do so.  On paper, cities were supposed to allow maximum feasible citizen participation.  That requirement also was mostly ignored.

In Austin, by 1969, Urban Renewal had efficiently razed the Kealing neighborhood to the ground, and it had also scraped the Glen Oaks neighborhood.  The next target was Blackshear.  The Blackshear residents saw the consequences of those earlier Urban Renewal projects and decided they didn’t like it—not one little bit.  

The Blackshear Residents Organization (BRO) was created to contest the plans of the local Urban Renewal office.  Legal Aid of Austin assisted them by filing lawsuits and representing them in hearings and basically demanding that the law be followed.

In one of the many public declarations of opposition, Blackshear citizens attended the City Council in Nov. 1969 to complain about the plans.  This was the new hard-right conservative city council that had driven out the 

Democratic liberals over the issue of Fair Housing Ordinance referendum election in 1968.  There was little chance of getting justice from this council, but the Blackshear Neighborhood Organization insisted on being heard.

A woman, 78,  explained her situation.  “I’ve been in Austin for 60 years,” she told the council. “When I came here you couldn’t see the rest of the neighborhood, because of the trees. We bought our lot for 150 dollars. My husband used the money he got from his $500 war bonus,” [that was the first world war, folks] “We had a man build us three rooms.  It cost us $40 dollars and we moved in.  My husband worked for the railroad.  I walked to work across the river every day.  

I made $5 and my husband made $10 per week, but we kept the house up and the taxes paid. During the depression, we didn’t have enough to eat.  Most of the time it was oatmeal and black coffee for breakfast, bread and syrup for lunch and supper, but we kept the house up and paid the taxes. We have worked all our lives for this home.  With another bonus, we put in a bath and a porch room.  We wanted a place to live for when we were older and we have worked for that. 

Now these people tell me that we have to sell and sell for $3000 dollars.  We can’t buy another place for that.  My husband is sick now, he can’t earn anymore, and we need that house.”

Voices and testimony like the one above don’t get heard very often and certainly not in history books.  The RAG underground newspaper reported this story.  In that same issue of the RAG, the tale of the Chuckwagon Riot was reported.  These were tumultuous times in Austin. People were protesting on both sides of the I-35 racial division line. The Austin Law Commune  assisted the rioters.  Watch that documentary.  Legal Aid assisted the Blackshear Residents Organization.  Movement lawyers were busy in those days.

The Blackshears Residents Organization, assisted by the Legal Aid lawyers filed a petition against AURA, the urban renewal authority of the City of Austin, in 1969.

Larry Jackson, a rather prominent local activist in the Austin Eastside community, recalled in a PHIT interview that Legal Aid was instrumental in the organizing efforts.

“Well, Urban Renewal was a governmental entity who used a lot of legalese to frustrate people.  And Legal Aid then was the only mechanism to offer, especially African -Americans in the area, an opportunity to have a legal regress to what was happening. And I think that if Legal Aid was not around then, far worse things would have happened.”

Bill Allison was one of the Legal Aid lawyers. “They were using imminent domain to take the property. We were filing civil rights lawsuits based upon racial discrimination targeting. You couldn't use federal money to destroy a neighborhood in which there was no one who lived in the neighborhood except Black people.”

“We didn't win that lawsuit.  We slowed them down, but we sure didn't stop them.”

But, when the battle is lengthy and the odds are overwhelming, slowing the opposition down is something of a victory. And anything positive needs to be celebrated and remembered.

It took three years but the resolution of this conflict was that the Blackshear Residents Organization negotiated with Austin Urban Renewal Agency to save most of the homes and rehabilitate them. This laid the foundation for similar community organizations, such as the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, to gain some small bit of control and influence over the development of the neighborhood.

Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation is a nationally recognized CDC and GNDC includes some of the Blackshear area to this day.

And it all goes back to the grass roots organizing by the neighborhood and some professional legal support from Legal Aid.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next installment of this Mining the Archives vein  as we talk about Elliott Naishtat, long time Austin representative in the Texas  House, and his involvement in the community organizing.

Richard Croxdale