History of Home

Home creates a sense of belonging, of being in community. It’s a vital space to love, to dream, to create, to cry, and to rest. Like a nest, it nurtures us and provides a launchpad for us to create the life we desire, surrounded by the beings we love.

However, this warm vision of home has been fractured by violence at the hands of the oppressor, like a mirror shattered into a hundred tiny pieces. Driven by profit-hungry capitalism and an endless quest for urban development, the malicious workings of displacement have deprived people of their homes for generations. This system relies on uprooting entire communities, forcibly removing groups of people from their homes and entrenching racist ideology into the foundation of our homes in this city.

Though the scars of displacement remain across our neighborhood, our city, our country, and our world, past acts of collective care can empower us to resist. We must pick up the hard work to unearth the ruins buried by the empire, recover the existing fragments of community, and move boldly into the future, armed with the knowledge that we have always resisted.

Locally, we see echoes of resistance in the former Wheatville community. Established after the Civil War and named after the free Black man James Wheat, the neighborhood was a refuge for Black people from all over the south. The Gold Dollar Building at 2402 San Gabriel Street is the last vestige of this community, which served as a meeting space and the publishing center of the Gold Dollar newspaper. How powerfully radical- to create a communal meeting space and challenge systems of power, creating a space of freedom and safety. Among the steel high-rises and shiny glass apartments which stand today, the brick, wood, and limestone Gold Dollar building stands as a symbol of resistance, a pillar of home for generations gone by.

This thriving neighborhood only lasted until the early 1900s, when the increase of sorority and fraternity houses around UT displaced the community. The 1928 Austin City Plan coupled with the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 drew literal red lines around communities of color, including Wheatville. As a result, the people in these communities were prohibited from loaning money to build homes or businesses in a process known as redlining. The federal and local governments kept the residents impoverished, living in crumbling infrastructure in a city that whispered false promises of hope. Home had to be reinvented yet again, surviving at the whims of the empire.

Home is something we must fight to preserve and dare to create. In the wake of unfathomable harm, we are left to take broken shards of what was once home and recreate it amongst our peers. In the silence of unearthing the past, the joy of laughter at the dinner table, or the beautiful stillness of a flower blooming, we can rebuild and reimagine home.