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Opinion

Fourth ward fires raise race concerns 

Timothy O'Brien
Opinion Columnist

In 1985, long-time community activist and Freedmen's Town native Gladys Marie House's years of hard work paid off when a 40-block section of Houston was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The area is Freedmen's Town, which is just south of Buffalo Bayou and along the western edge of downtown Houston. Freedmen's Town is a section of the Fourth Ward. The area was unique because it was the largest intact freed slave neighborhood in the United States.

At the end of the Civil War, freed slaves were given some of the worthless, mosquito-infested swampland that became Freedmen's Town. By the turn of the century, the Fourth Ward had become the economic and cultural center of black Houston. Because Fourth Ward was hemmed in by downtown, the bayou and developed neighborhoods to the south and west, it could not expand.

By the 1970s, Freedmen's Town had become a poverty-ridden slum. The city all but gave up repairing the infrastructure. The developer-controlled city government's agenda was to build new suburbs, not to address inner-city blight. A locally produced documentary titled Who Killed the Fourth Ward? examined these race-related issues and was broadcast on KUHT-TV, Houston's PBS affiliate.

By then, most of the black residents of Freedmen's Town were tenants living in shotgun shacks owned by slum lords. Many black families had lost homes because of financial difficulties and unscrupulous acts by businessmen. The Houston economy exploded in the 1980s when the Arab oil embargo drove the price of oil up. The construction business expanded as oil money rained down on the city's bourgeois class. Freedmen's Town suddenly looked appealing to commercial developers.

In 1983, the Houston City Council voted to raze the 1,000-unit housing project known as Allen Parkway Village, which sat on 37 prime acres in the Fourth Ward. A major hitch in the developer-driven city politics arose when APV residents, led by Resident Council President Lenwood Johnson, fought back.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the battle for APV raged on. Fires destroyed the historic shotgun shacks that lined the narrow streets of Freedmen's Town. In 1991, the Texas Observer published a cover story asking, "Why are buildings burning in Houston's Fourth Ward?" The article reported the city had shut down the neighborhood fire station and that 17 of 32 fires over a five-year period were unsolved arsons. The city arson investigator said that no investigations had taken place.

Houstonians should have shown concern as black history was being burned in this historic neighborhood.

In Jan. 2005, Freedmen's Town's 100-year-old Bethel Baptist Church burned. House stopped the city's bulldozers from razing the facade, but nobody was convicted of starting the blaze. Less than 30 historic houses out of 580 remained in the Freedmen's Town historic district. 

Freedmen's Town's Friendship Baptist Church burned Nov. 6, and while reports say the fire was caused by a lightning strike, it's suspicious that city officials would raze the church six hours after the blaze started.

Ethnic cleansing is defined as the forced removal of certain culturally identified groups from their lands. Ethnic cleansing has been occurring for more than 30 years less than seven miles from our campus.

O'Brien, a history Ph.D. candidate, 
can be reached via  dccampus@mail.uh.edu