Almost thirty years ago I entered County Line, a “freedom colony” in northwest Nacogdoches County, Texas for the first time. Only recently had I learned that such places existed… communities founded by landowning, emancipated slaves… communities providing an autonomy that black people had not previously experienced in the land of the free.

In the ensuing years I learned a lot about just how ignorant I (and most white folks) have been about this important, but largely ignored, part of our American history. Not all African Americans became indentured servants, otherwise known as sharecroppers and domestics, after Emancipation. Some of them, as Thad Sitton puts it “set out to get their forty acres and a mule quite on their own, and many of them succeeded.”

In County Line I met the Upshaw family. Still alive then were several members of the first generation born and raised there by parents who founded the community in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Monel and Leota Upshaw took me at face value when I told them I wanted to learn about their history and make photographs of their family and their community. They said, “yes,” and that one word changed my life.

This blog will be about where that change led me and, hopefully, why it is important to acknowledge the importance of communities such as County Line. More than 500 have been identified in East Texas alone.

My goal, and that of many others, is to put this history in our history books, particularly public school history books. Our ignorance of freedom colonies distorts our understanding of what happened after the Emancipation regarding the successful efforts of many emancipated slaves to take control of their lives after having no control at all.

Nowadays the primary issue in surviving freedom colonies is just that: survival. The last generation to be born there is most likely middle-aged or much older. That generation has a stronger sense of where their community came from historically than their children or grandchildren. And… more often than not, today’s generation must go elsewhere for employment and higher education, complicating the survival of the community from which they come.

This is the challenge that County Line and many other freedom colonies face today. How do they motivate and assist their progeny in staying on the land that is their heritage?

We will explore that and other issues in this blog.

If this interests you… then click the link below to read more, follow and you will get an email whenever I make a new post.

- Richard Orton