Freedman's Town: Dallas's African American Heritage

After emancipation, Dallas's freed people built communities from the ground up — burying their dead, raising churches, opening businesses, and producing leaders whose names still resonate across Texas. This driving tour gathers those threads across the city, from a cemetery nearly erased by a freeway to neighborhoods that nurtured civil-rights organizers, blues musicians, and pioneering Black professionals. You'll visit Freedman's Cemetery and its memorial park, the Tenth Street freedmen's town in Oak Cliff, the home of NAACP organizer Juanita Craft, a historic district that became a who's-who of Black Dallas leadership, the marker to a trailblazing African American architect, and a founding church of the city's Black Baptist community. Together they tell a story of resilience and achievement that downtown's skyline can obscure. Drive with respect; several sites are working cemeteries, active churches, and lived-in neighborhoods.