Separate and Unequal: East Austin's Civil-Rights & Education Trail

Segregation in Austin was written into the map — a 1928 city plan pushed Black residents east of what is now Interstate 35 and concentrated their schools, churches, and services there. But the people who lived under Jim Crow did not just endure it; they taught, organized, and litigated their way out of it. This drive follows that fight across East Austin, from the college on the hill that opened in 1875 to educate the freed, to the neighborhood's first Black high school, to the markers that tell how Texas schools moved from Plessy's separate-but-equal fiction to the Brown decision that struck it down. Along the way it passes the childhood ground of James Farmer, who founded the organization behind the Freedom Rides, and the homes and buildings of the teachers, doctors, and organizers who built a professional Black Austin in the teeth of segregation. It is a trail of classrooms and courtrooms — where the long march toward equality was actually walked.