The Sutton House and the Black East Side

In eighteen ninety-six, on San Antonio's East Side, a couple named Samuel and Lillian Sutton opened their home to Black travelers at a time when the city's hotels were closed to African Americans. The guests who came are said to have included prominent Black leaders and educators. The Sutton House served as what historians would later call a Green Book property before the Green Book existed.

Samuel Sutton came to San Antonio, where he became an educator and then a civic institution. The East Side neighborhood where the Suttons built their home and their influence was the center of Black San Antonio life for the better part of a century.

The historical roots of that concentration ran back to the Reconstruction era, when formerly enslaved people began moving from rural Texas into the city and establishing Freedmen's Towns on the East Side. The segregation was partly enforced and partly a consequence of the same restricted housing market that operated in most American cities: redlining, deed covenants, and social exclusion pushed Black residents east of the city center. They built churches, schools, businesses, and cultural institutions within the space they were allowed.

The East Side's Black community produced Garlington Jerome, who served in the Texas legislature. It anchored musical and professional life through the decades of formal segregation. The neighborhood has changed substantially since then, and much of its historic fabric has been lost to demolition and disinvestment. The Sutton House is among the properties that researchers and preservation advocates have worked to document before the record disappears entirely.