Never Sell the Land: Freedom Colonies, Black Storytelling, and Keeping Home

Chronicling the stories and resilience of Texas freedom colonies facing erasure, and of the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard them. Since Emancipation, Deep East Texas has been a place where Black Texans have experienced oppression yet also have created free Black communities.Well into the Jim Crow era, the area was home to communities where formerly enslaved people farmed their own land and ran their own affairs, now called freedom colonies.At one point, more than five hundred such communities existed in the state.Yet only a handful of these freedom colonies remain today, and they are in danger of disappearing from the record and from historical memory. Never Sell the Land is a work about Black agency-specifically, how agency is secured through bottom-up planning and preservation in the face of unequal access. Andrea Roberts traces the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard the land and heritage of settlements in Jasper and Newton Counties, which abut