DFW Civil Rights Trail

After emancipation, freed African Americans across North Texas built towns, schools, churches, and institutions of their own — and in the century that followed, fought to dismantle the segregation that hemmed them in. This driving trail traces that history across the Metroplex, from freedmen's communities founded in the 1870s, to a cemetery rescued from beneath a freeway, to the schools that anchored Black life, to the desegregation fights that drew national attention. These are places of resilience and, in some cases, of real pain; several of the original buildings are gone, marked now only by a monument or a museum. We tell each story plainly and with respect, naming the people who built these communities and the forces that displaced them. Read the markers, visit the museums where they exist, and let the trail connect a history that highway-building and time scattered across the map.