Clarksville: Austin's Oldest Black Neighborhood and Its Disappearance

In eighteen seventy-one, a man named Charles Clark, who had been enslaved before the Civil War, led a group of freed Black Texans in establishing a community on land west of downtown Austin. The land was cheap because it was undesirable: rocky, far from the center of the city, without the infrastructure that would have made it attractive to white buyers. That is how freed people could acquire it. They called the community Clarksville.

For a hundred years, Clarksville was a self-sustaining Black neighborhood. It had its own churches, including Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church, which was founded in the eighteen seventies and still stands. It had its own schools before integration. It had small businesses and a social life that had developed over generations, separate from but adjacent to the rest of Austin.

The nineteen twenty-eight city plan that designated East Austin as the city's Black district affected Clarksville differently from those eastern neighborhoods. Clarksville predated the plan. It sat west of the line the planners drew. Over the following decades it was not razed or formally displaced, but as the west side of Austin became more desirable, the economic pressure on its residents increased.

By the nineteen eighties and nineties the neighborhood had become some of the most expensive real estate in Austin. The Black families who had built Clarksville over four generations were largely priced out. Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church remains. A historical marker stands near the church. The community that the marker commemorates has almost entirely dispersed.

This is what displacement by market pressure looks like when it completes. Not a demolition. Not a government order. Just prices rising until the people who built the place can no longer afford to live in it.