blackaustintours

When many people think of Black Austin, they think of East Austin. But Black history in Austin has never been confined to one side of town.

Clarksville, founded by formerly enslaved people in 1871, remains one of Austin’s most significant Freedom Colonies. Its history is also connected to nearby and the Pease family, whose wealth and landholdings were built in part through the labor of enslaved people. Some of those enslaved families and their descendants became part of the broader Clarksville community after emancipation.

While the 1928 City Plan concentrated many Black Austinites into East Austin, it’s important to remember that historic Black communities existed across the city. Clarksville residents fought to preserve their neighborhood through decades of displacement pressures, including urban renewal projects and the construction of MoPac.

Understanding Black Austin means understanding all of these stories.

🎥 Learn more on a tour with Black Austin Tours.

👕 And don’t forget to grab your limited-edition Juneteenth shirt before they’re gone. Link in bio!!

As a student at the I first encountered the phrase “Gone to Texas” as a celebration—a welcome event marking new beginnings, opportunities, and the start of a new journey.

But the more I studied Texas history, the more complicated that phrase became.

In the 1820s and 1830s, “Gone to Texas” was commonly associated with Anglo-American settlers moving into Mexican Texas. Many were attracted by the promise of land, wealth, and opportunity. For some, that opportunity depended on trafficking enslaved Africans and their descendants into Texas

As a Black Texan, this history forced me to think differently about a phrase I had once experienced as welcoming. Welcoming for whom? Opportunity for whom? And at what cost?

These questions are part of what makes Juneteenth so important. To understand the significance of emancipation in Texas, we must also understand how race-based slavery expanded into Texas in the first place. Freedom cannot be fully understood without confronting the systems of unfreedom that preceded it.

In this project, and through the work of artist , we engage the story of Hemsley Coursey, my 5th great grandfather, and others whose lives were shaped by this history. Their stories remind us that Texas was not simply settled—it was built through contested struggles over land, labor, race, and freedom. Jaiden, his 6th great grandson honored him in the sculpture.

Juneteenth is not just about the end of slavery. It is also about understanding how slavery came to Texas, how people survived it, and how their descendants continue to shape the story of this place today.

John Fisher, the artist behind Voices of East Austin on the exterior wall of the George Washington Carver Museum & Library, is truly an artistic genius. Many people see the mural, but don’t fully realize the depth of what they’re looking at.

Here, John explains the meaning behind the figure looking upward in the mural, a Blacksmith figure inspired by Dogon cosmology and beliefs about the world. He shares how the blacksmith represents the use of natural elements to create life force, transformation, and meaning.

What also makes this mural so important is the lineage behind it. Many people don’t know that while studying at Texas Southern University under legendary African American artists John T. Biggers and Alvia Wardlaw, John Fisher also received a fellowship from the Ford Foundation that allowed him to travel to West Africa to study different Indigenous artistic traditions and practices. Those experiences deeply influenced his artistic vision and can still be seen throughout his work here in Austin.

John Fisher is an Austinite, and this is one of the most important murals in the city of Austin. Sometimes on tour we get lucky enough to run into him while he’s restoring the mural and hear directly from the artist himself about the layers of history, culture, spirituality, and Black artistic tradition embedded into the work.

This is why public art matters. 🎨

One of the central questions behind Gone to Texas is how we tell truthful stories about slavery while centering the humanity of the people who lived through it and the descendants who carry those stories forward.

Too often, narratives about slavery focus on enslavers, traders, and systems of power. Their names fill the archives. Yet people like Hemsley Coursey, who was trafficked through the domestic slave trade and ultimately forced to Texas, are too often reduced to a line in a ledger, a census record, or a bill of sale.

Gone to Texas asks a different question: What happens when we place the lives, humanity, and legacies of the enslaved at the center of the story?

That question guides every aspect of this project. We want to tell a truthful story about violence, displacement, and loss without allowing those realities to eclipse the humanity, resilience, and enduring presence of the people who survived. More than 190 years after Hemsley Coursey was sold south, his descendants are still here.

That is one reason working with and his team felt so important. Stephen’s commitment to incorporating live models transforms public art into something more than a static monument. It creates a living connection between past and present, ancestor and descendant, history and memory.

Gone to Texas is not simply about what happened. It is about who it happened to, who survived, and how their stories continue to live through us.