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Explore how the social construct of race and racial oppression operates at multiple levels with a rotating focus on different social systems. Connect with Austin-area justice movement organizers and everyday people with relevant lived experience to lay out historical context, current affairs, and creative possibilities for a liberated future.
Greetings, dear listeners. You are tuned in to another episode of Racism on the Levels. I am your host, Stacie Freasier. Racism on the Levels is part of the Austin Cooperative Radio Hour Collective, and we are we've we offer a variety of eclectic programming within this collective, to shine a light on, groups that are doing things to build a better Austin. And racism on the levels is I created this show to examine the social construct of race as it operates across levels, be that interpersonal, institutional, systemic.
Speaker 1:And my focus is to honor the history, to, give voice and air to the truth so we can start to repair and create a different reality. So I am sitting right now on sacred ancestral lands of indigenous people who have, included the Tonkawa, the Comanche Lipan Apache, the sauna, the humanos, and many other groups. And their inconceivable losses due to settler colonialism, is something that I acknowledge, honor, and, invite others to learn about. And if you are joining us on our worldwide web stream, k00p.0rg, you can find out the stewards of the land that you are on by, visiting native-land.ca. So I am really excited to have crossed paths with Rosalyn, and, Rosalyn Alexander Kasparik.
Speaker 1:Kasparik. Kasparik. Thanks. And we met the circumstances in which we met is is is so perfect. We met, at, Lisa Rogers' house.
Speaker 1:Lisa, if you're listening, hello and I love you. And, you know, deep community, being, dwelling, organizing, and, love and justice seeking. So, Roz, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It really is.
Speaker 1:I immediately thought you should come on the show because your, family's history of land and place and people is so powerful that I want everyone, here to know about it. So, do you want to start with
Speaker 2:your roots? Sure. They're pretty deep in Texas. They're deep, and they're very, very far into, into this this land, this place, Texas. Daniel Alexander was my great great grandfather.
Speaker 2:He was the horse breeder trainer for Thomas Freeman McKinney and James Prather McKinney of, you guessed it, McKinney Falls State Park now. At the time, it was McKinney Falls Ranch Or Plantation, whichever you preferred. The McKinneys came here. Daniel was actually from Virginia. He was born in 1810, and he lived until 1883.
Speaker 2:He's buried in the Choctaw Way, speaking of indigenous, ancestry and so forth, in our family cemetery, just south of the Southeast Austin city limits. He and his mother, Sini, came first from Virginia, a farm, historians believed, called the Woodburn Farm, which is well known from the sixteen hundreds as a place for thoroughbred racing and breeding. Thoroughbreds were bred there. It was a English farm. So during the civil war, both sides, took horses.
Speaker 2:Great great grandfather was known as a stellar horseman. He was enslaved, and he handled, America's First great racehorse, sir Archie. There's a picture of sir Archie in the Texas State Archives painted by one of The United States premier genre artist and then landscape artist, Alvin Fisher. There are many Alvin Fisher paintings in the White House, where they were there in in case, in the last administration. And, he painted a picture of this horse, which is called, you know, John Repainting, but he painted it, the horse, with a African American black man, holding the reins and, ostensibly, the trainer.
Speaker 2:Ada deBlanc Simon, who's my mentor, those of you in, Austin history, founding families history, those of you who know the Carver Genealogy Center will recognize Ada deBlanc Simon's name. There's also a street named after her near Mueller. Ada was one of the first people in Texas to, gather histories of the founding black families. She wrote a book, which was published by her sororities, published in concern, the Deltas. And in it, she outlined the histories of not just my family, but several other founding families, which ultimately became, under her tutelage and auspices, the, founding family's room at the Carver.
Speaker 2:There's a four mile track of volcanic rock, that was laid at McKinney Falls State Park, not when it was a park, but when it was, a plantation and a ranch. And the reason for it, according to family lore, the reason great great grandfather put this tract that was from three feet high to six feet high, through four miles of land of the 40,000 acres that the McKinneys got from Mexico to, bring, colonists to. The reason he made this track was supposedly so that he didn't have to blind the racehorses. If they were running down a four mile track, which is a typical length of track for a racehorse, then, you know, they wouldn't be distracted. If if you're trying to go as fast as you possibly can, then, you know, the horse has a job to do.
Speaker 2:So that was what we were told the track was for. Most recently, we found two things through some historians. One at Stephen f Austin University, in Nacogdoches, researcher by the name of Kyle Ainsworth in 2020, did a, NIH, NEA, study of some 60,000, documents and court, information, newspaper articles, and the like. And he discovered some trends that had not heretofore been discovered. And one was that in Travis and Bastrop County, where great great grandfather trained everybody to ride according to The US history of horse racing at the Smithsonian and oh, sorry.
Speaker 2:At The US, The US history of horse racing, which is at not the Smithsonian, but the Library of Congress, from 1900. He trained everybody to ride, but in Bastrop and Travis County, Enslaved people who fled slavery didn't flee the standard way on foot with, you know, your quintessential enslaver on horseback with dogs barking, crossing the river and all that. Instead, the enslaved people in our two counties of Bastrop and Travis fled on horseback, and they sometimes fled on the fastest horses. We also found from some National Geographic mappers that the El Camino De Real De Los Tejas, forgive my poor pronunciation, but that hundreds of year old trail, that's a national historic trail, whose gateway, in Travis County is McKinney Falls State Park, is a known, underground southern underground railroad route, and our farm sits in the middle of it. So here we have this four mile track, and here we have this odd set of circumstances with all these enslaved people, fleeing slavery on that trail, going to San Antonio or Mexico or perhaps other points, to the east and west of us.
Speaker 2:And we have an odd instance of everybody going on horseback. So these things are difficult sometimes to prove unequivocally, but there is so so much circumstantial evidence that suggest that our great great grandfather wasn't just a breeder trainer. He wasn't just some guy creating a four mile track. He was in all likelihood a person of African descent, at least in part, who made a way Mhmm. For people to flee bondage that was surer than by foot.
Speaker 2:Coincidentally, perhaps, maybe not so coincidentally, our property is by two creeks, Cottonmouth Creek and Onion Creek. 1 of the major things that stopped enslaved people who were fleeing slavery from actually reaching their destinations was a lack of water. So we are in horse country, nineteenth century horse country. We were there from before 1846. We're in 1846 in the Travis County courthouse records, but we were actually there before then because that's what the deed says.
Speaker 2:And here are all these people who are fleeing slavery. And so, what's, I guess, most interesting about great great grandfather and our whole very, very rich history and remember, this is just him and his mother, Sini. And there's a whole set of histories around his racehorse acumen, and there's this whole set of history around the fact that he also trained Sam Houston's horse, half thoroughbred, half quarter horse named Copper Bottom that Sam Houston bought brought, excuse me, to, Galveston prior to the McKinney's moving to Travis County for their retirement and the stud farm that was McKinney Falls State Park when it was created. You you know, you have all of that sort of transpiring and transmogrifying together, and there is a whole whole lot more to be uncovered, documented, sourced, etcetera. But we already have something that is so incredibly rich in the way of our history.
Speaker 2:And something that I didn't know at the age of 17 when missus Simon came to my parents and said, we need your precocious daughter to, do some research and write a paper on your family. We want it to be one of Daniel and Emmaline's direct descendants. I was out of high school in terms of having done all the classes I could do at Del Valle. I was, you know, helping out, you know, teaching classes, you know, helping with special education, helping with, you know, everything and anything that needed help because I'd already taken all the advanced stuff. And I already had my free ride to UT.
Speaker 2:I was a national merit scholar. So, you know, I spent my days in the Barker History Center, now the Briscoe Center, the Austin's History Center still so named, and with missus Simon looking up all these facets of my family's history back fifty years ago. Flash forward to now, and there's just a ton more. There was stuff along the way, but there's just so much of late with all of the databases and the interest and and so forth that's going forward. So, you know, again, that's my, family's, initial history.
Speaker 1:So I, if you're just tuning in, thank you for joining, Racism on the Levels. I am sitting here with Rosalind. May I call you Ross? Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:Please. Kasparik Alexander.
Speaker 2:Alexander Kasparik. Alexander Kasparik. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And we are just going to scratch the surface of the deep well of of information and history and and stories that you are transmitting and carrying through the generations. So so we have covered, your second great grandfather, Daniel, who came from Virginia. Do you know the circumstances in which he came from Virginia?
Speaker 2:He was enslaved as a child.
Speaker 1:And so does the family move? Well,
Speaker 2:in slavery, you you didn't move. You had the he was in slaver.
Speaker 1:The the the the family that enslaved him.
Speaker 2:Yes. Let me explain a little bit about how the McKinneys got here. Yeah. They went through the Cumberland Gap. They were led through the Cumberland Gap by their majordomo, a man by the name of Peter, and he was black.
Speaker 2:In fact, the McKinney's relied upon their servants, for, just about everything. And in fact, in all of my research that I've done in Kentucky, Galveston, here in Texas, obviously, a bit in Washington, DC, and certainly, you know, in the archives here at the state, it becomes crystal clear that one of the things the enslavers, the McKinneys and every other enslaver in Texas did, was to bring colonists to this new state, this new country, this republic. They had to make it palatable to them. They had to give them a reason to wanna leave wherever they were and come here. The McKinneys had a shipping operation from Europe.
Speaker 2:They not only, took cotton back and forth, to Europe, they also brought Czechoslovakian, Irish, and German indentured servants on their ships that had been the Texas Navy. Great great grandfather also went to races up and down the Southern Seaboard and the Eastern Seaboard in those same ships up until the time of the civil war. And the the reason he did it was because horse racing was America's First sport. It was the sport of the landed gentry. It was declasse to, get a make a bet.
Speaker 2:It was a little declasse to have a purse, but sometimes and most often, especially in Texas with the McKinney's and the landed gentry here, the most prevalent thing they had was land. And the land could be sold or, you know, sold to colonists for as little as a penny an acre. That's why it always interests me when people say, your great great grandfather in exchange for all of his labors as a horse breeder trainer, he got this 75 acres of land. Well, in actuality, at the time, Mexico gave every person who brought an able-bodied servant. We say servant.
Speaker 2:They said servants because Mexico had just fought a civil war to end slavery in Mexico. So they didn't abide. Santa Ana and the rest of them wouldn't abide slaves in Tejas. So they turned a blind eye to the colonist, the Mckennys and everyone else, calling enslaved people their servants. So in Mexico, if you brought an enslaved person servant to the new colony of Tejas, you got Langyap in the way of land.
Speaker 2:Langyap is a a little something extra in Creole Patois, and basically, the little something extra was 40 acres per able-bodied person. In my family's case, in our antecedent's case, there was Daniel and there was his mother, Seny, my great great great grandmother. Both were acquired at that Virginia location next to the Woodburn Farm, ostensibly or arguably one of America's greatest stud farms that still exist. They've removed all, African American descendants or, enslaved persons from their records. But there is still ample evidence that somebody ran the place and somebody took care of the animals, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 2:And so it's kind of undeniable, and there are still some records that support that. So Sini and Daniel came from there to through the Cumberland Gap with the, McKinney clan. And then they came to, Missouri. They came to a part of Virginia that's now become Kentucky. And then Thomas Freeman McKinney came to Nacogdoches to his uncle, uncle's native indigenous trading post in Nacogdoches.
Speaker 2:And pretty much in 1836, that's where the Texas War of Independence started with Stephen Prather and a group of indentured, people and a few enslaved folks holding back some colonists who wanted to do some different stuff that Prather and McKinney and the rest of the Texas Republic didn't want to happen. But anyway, so, there's this long history. There's this long sense of, okay, how did you get this land? Was it a gift? No.
Speaker 2:Enslaved people worked their lives away for no wages. There was no remuneration. There was no compensation. So some land that was given to the enslaver for the presence of my ancestors being there as servants, able-bodied servants, is not a gift. It's basically just passing on the Langley app.
Speaker 2:The other thing that the McKinney's did that was interesting from our research is there are letters upon letters upon letters in the Rosenberg Library at Galveston, where the McKinney's were trying to entice all these people from Virginia. Mercer County, Virginia was a real stronghold. A lot of Texas founding fathers came from Mercer County, Virginia, and there was a Mercer County, Kentucky. And they were, like, next to each other, and then they became each other when the two states formed. But in any case, there was a real effort to say to these men, and letter upon letter upon letter verifies this.
Speaker 2:If you move here to Texas, you will never have to labor. In your fields, you will have an estate. You will be a landed aristocrat because we have the labor here already. You can bring the labor with you or you can buy it when you get here. Just come, establish your homestead, buy this land at this greatly reduced rate, Populate this unpopulated, except for, of course, indigenous people.
Speaker 2:Populated. Yes. Right. Indigenous people's country. Do these things, and you will never have to work in your life.
Speaker 2:It's paradise. That was the sale. That was the pitch, and it was based as every major African American scholar that I know of and have ever read has said, slavery built this country in large part. It was the economic core of the South, And to say that the labor was inconsequential or nonexistent is to belie the very nature of building a country in the first place. So,
Speaker 1:you know and it it was the core of the economic South, and it was the core of the economic Northeast too because investments were made. And so that looked different. It wasn't as visceral. There weren't acreage acres of land and people tilling the soil, but absolutely, New England also was built on enslaving other people. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Slaving African Mhmm. Yeah. Americans. Yeah. So we are, we've we've we've scratched the surface of talking about Daniel's story.
Speaker 1:So then, what happened in the next generation? And then to you.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. Alright. So Daniel, had several children, and, the land has been passed down since 1846. Eighteen '40 '7, we use as sort of extreme caution.
Speaker 2:The documents in the Travis County Courthouse, which are always public and always have been, indicate 1846 was when the documents were written. They weren't filed until 1847. What they are is my grandfather was mortgaged along with his mother and all of these million dollar horses and cattle and everything else. The reason they were mortgaged in 1846 and it was not, put into the record until 1847, was because they were trying to finance, the McKinney's were, Texas' one of Texas' first Texas republic's first banks. And one of the things they did in those banks, in that bank, was to, print money from the US Treasury.
Speaker 2:In order to, get the approval of the US Treasury to print Texas independence money, they had to not liquidate all their assets, but aggregate them all. And so the deed that establishes us on our land in 1846 was an attempt by the McKinney's to aggregate their incredible wealth, for the purpose of, having sufficient assets to, print their own money, which they did for a short time before leaving Galveston and coming back here to Travis County, which was supposed to be the horse farm, the stud farm, etcetera, etcetera. McKinney's had been involved with horse racing since the seventeen hundreds, and they had brought, with them a descendant of sir Archie, America's first great race horse. I have to tell you who sir Archie's descendants were. Seabiscuit, Lexington, even Secretariat.
Speaker 2:In fact, when I was recently doing some research on another fairly famous horse owned by a musician who is descended from sir Archie, I found that some 85 to 90% of racing thoroughbreds are descended from sir Archie. Great great grandfather handled him, and he trained the descendants of sir Archie for racing and won very frequently both for the McKinney's and for himself after emancipation. There's a very famous book. It should be more famous, but it's extremely famous to those of us who have, antecedents in the, horse racing industry, in this country. Katharine Mooney wrote a book called Racehorsemen.
Speaker 2:Racehorsemen is what black horse racing people called themselves. Until the turn of the twentieth century, until 1900, '18 '90 '5 or thereabouts, when the derbies came into their own. Black men raised the horses, raised the horses, trained the horses, etcetera. Frequently, they also owned the horses. The Woodburn farm sent some of their enslaved black men back to Europe to learn the, science of animal husbandry and breeding and so forth.
Speaker 2:And so they bought their freedom. They had their horses. Initially, they entered the derbies and their horses won. There is ironically enough, a person in Austin who works for city government, who's descended from Isaac Murray, who's known as, America's First and greatest jockey. He was black.
Speaker 2:He won the Kentucky Derby twice. So there's this, like, whole history. You ask what after that. Great great grandfather, we know from The US history of horse racing, had his own stables, ran his own races after emancipation, trained, mentored people. In fact, one of those mentees is the reason he's in The US history of horse racing.
Speaker 2:That mentee was a trainer, a winning trainer and breeder for the Kentucky Derby. And in his biography in The US history of horse racing, he said, I studied for three years as a young child with Daniel Alexander in Travis County. And, I learned everything I know of horses from him. He had his own stables, his own races, his own thoroughbreds. And then we go to the the files of, in this country, the history of horses is better known than the history of the first men who trained and raised them.
Speaker 2:So there are extensive histories in Lexington, Kentucky and at Keeneland, which is a library, as well of every single thoroughbred horse and what they raced and what they want and so on and so forth. And so great great grandfather's, horses that were descended from sir Archie are there as well. So we know what he raced. We know when he raced it. We know he got accolades.
Speaker 2:We also know that because he was a fair skinned black man, likely biracial, that the reporters from New York and other places didn't know he was black. So they sang his praises. People in Texas knew who he was. They didn't bother to, you know, change the narrative. So, you know, it's it's interesting what happened after the Kentucky derbies began.
Speaker 2:Blacks were summarily removed, systemically, systematically removed from horse racing. How? First, they were disallowed in the Derby rules from owning a horse that ran. Then they were disallowed in the Derby rules from racing on a horse, being a jockey on a horse that ran. They were removed from the sport.
Speaker 1:When did when was that
Speaker 2:Eighteen ninety five, nineteen hundred. Right in there. And and the reason and again, it's in Catherine Mooney's book, Racehorsemen, Harvard University Press. I think it's 2019 or '18 or something. In any case, the reason for that was the prizes were a million dollars then.
Speaker 2:The the prize for the derbies was a million dollars and, you know, real money. And that was just too much money for three fifths of a person and, nonhuman to be getting. And, also, it kind of flew into the whole face of Jim Crow to have black people at the head of this sport. So the way that p, you know, people like Catherine, describe it is like, you know, you have Steph Curry or, LeBron James, and they were recruited by different plantation owners. And they got, quote, unquote, perks like the land.
Speaker 2:Or in Daniel's case, he was encouraged to marry an Irish indentured servant named Emmeline, who is my great great grandmother. In any case, bottom line is they were removed because it just didn't sit well to have black people who were not equal in the same major race when it was pretty much the only sport in this country that, you know, 30,000 people came to these races. There weren't 30,000 people in a lot of states at that point. So, you know, it's it's, interesting thing. So what do you do, when your livelihood and, your way of existing and what you've built your life on is removed?
Speaker 2:Well, in Daniel's case, as in various and sundry other folks, who in the same profession, he built his farm. Animal husbandry became the, rule of the day. There's a difference between livestock breeding and animal husbandry. I like to think, and I can also prove, that our family has been involved and engaged in animal husbandry as opposed to livestock breeding for our entire hundred and fifty year history of that. And it it's basically, it's as good as you give.
Speaker 2:The animal gives you back as good as you give it. Reciprocity. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And And, Roz, I never wanna pause any of your stories, but we need to pause for station break, and we'll be right back.
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Speaker 1:You are listening to racism on the levels on k o o p ninety one point seven FM here in Austin. And thank you for those of you who are listening from afar, online, k o o p dot o r g. I am Stacy Frazier, and I am sitting here, with Rosalind Alexander Kasparik. And we have she is the direct descendant of Daniel Alexander. Is was he also Kasparik?
Speaker 2:No. Alexander. Alexander. Alexander farm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The of the Alexander farm. And Razi really put, painted a beautiful canvas of history and and place and let us up to great great grandfather Daniel coming as an enslaved person from Virginia to Texas. His rich legacy of, horse horses and, and also the context of horse racing in this country and the systemic racism that has transpired within that. I really appreciate this because you you're this is a lot of, this is a world that I didn't really have much awareness of, to be honest with you. And I'd love I'd love that this is my my first entry point is to view it through, a racialized lens.
Speaker 1:So, there are many, many history books out there. It sounds like you have spent a ton of time. I don't know if you label yourself a historian, but you certainly are, reading through documents and what has been documented and what has not
Speaker 2:been
Speaker 1:documented. So I want to devote this next segment of our show to your story. You mentioned earlier, as a 17 year old, by miss Simon to start documenting some of this history of Alexander Farms and, great great grandfather Daniel and all of that. And so what happened from that point? And, where did you study and where you because you like, I did left Texas for a little for a minute.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So where did you go and what did that look like?
Speaker 2:Okay. So, missus Simons, I wrote this paper. It was approved by a judge. We got our first hundred year designation from the Texas Family Land Heritage Program in San Antonio. It was a very proud day for my grandmother.
Speaker 2:I was thrilled that missus Simons had gone that far. I then before I started the University of Texas where I had, you know, a full scholarship because of my national merit status, I, took a job at the city of Austin, with the early Carver library collection. And what I did, in my summer before entering UT was to collect art artifacts from the black founding families in Austin. I was instructed in that not only by missus Simon, Ada deBlanc Simon, but by her relative, Ada Anderson, who many in, old Austin know well. So much of what was collected for the founding family's room in the Carver, I collected along with missus Simon and a small army of others.
Speaker 2:After that, I went to UT. We did lots of stuff at UT. I got a broadcast journalism degree, decided against actually going into broadcasting immediately, went to work for a time at Maubelle. And the reason I went to work at Maubelle was because I wanted to go to graduate school. And Ma Bell at the time, Southwestern Bell at the time, had a program for executives that allowed you if you moved someplace, you could go to school on the company dime.
Speaker 2:I wanted to go to Howard. I'd always wanted to go to Howard University in Washington, DC.
Speaker 1:What planted that seed? Sorry? What planted that seed for you?
Speaker 2:HBCUs in general, were I perceive them to be sort of, catbird seats of, what had come before and what was ahead for us. Racism is a a permanent thing, has been a permanent thing in our on our landscape and in our nation. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And one of the things that we always said to each other at Howard back in the day, and it was a long day ago, was that at Howard, you could start from where you are, not from where everybody else assumed you were? So you didn't start from, oh, let's talk about the history of whatever in The United States.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the history of slavery. Let's talk about black music. Let's talk about black arts. Let's talk about black entrepreneurship. Let's talk about this.
Speaker 2:That was already not just given, but lived experience. So you could start at Howard with the Henry Louis Gates. You you could start with where he was taking, the country in the way of things like, what is it? Your roots? He has a PBS show your roots?
Speaker 2:Finding your roots. Yeah. Skip. And then, you know, all of the other folks that you dealt with at Howard, you know, people, Nkrumah. Nkrumah's people from Ghana.
Speaker 2:Nkrumah was a, colonial, African national, leader. And WB Dubois, who is a fairly famous African American in his own right, went there to the Nkrumah government, and there were people at Howard who'd been part of that. Desmond Tutu's daughter is going to Howard, at the same time. I taught at a a private little school, next to the university because my professors didn't have time that year.
Speaker 1:In Shaw? Were you in the Shaw neighborhood?
Speaker 2:No. Not Shaw. They called it was it what it was Sixteenth Street, Columbia Road. What did they call that? The Golden The Golden no.
Speaker 2:It wasn't a triangle. I there was a a colloquial name for it, a local name for that particular part of DC, but it encompassed, Merrill you know, a bit of Maryland, and it encompassed the hospital that presidents go to, whatever one that Fort, something. But in any case, it was Sixteenth Street Columbia Road. It was a kind of a hip part of town. And, you know, you could Howard was near to there.
Speaker 2:And, you know, so so was National Public Radio. So I went first to the FCC.
Speaker 1:So is Twins Jazz.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, lots of jazz places. Lots and lots and lots of Creole places for eating and just Ethiopian. The Red Sea was there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's What years were you in DC?
Speaker 2:Oh, no. You're gonna make me give away my age. Let me even think about it.
Speaker 1:You've earned it.
Speaker 2:So let's see. Let me see. We started, '81 to '84. That was where the years that I was in school, and then I came and went. When did you study
Speaker 1:it, Howard?
Speaker 2:I studied African American studies, but specifically English literature because I wanted to write. So that's how I met, Toni Morrison. That's how I met, Joe, the guy who wrote the River Niger, which was the only, Tony award winning black play at the time, Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee. You know, just just kinda take your pick. Between DC and New York, it was a cultural touchstone then, and it still is now, especially for African Americans or black Americans.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I wanted to go to that. I wanted to to be there. And, I managed to, you know, find a way to, get in mostly again through my grades and so forth. And, I got a full scholarship there too. So I was able to get my master's degree, and I was headed toward the doctorate.
Speaker 2:I did my master's research on Zora Neale Hurston, in anthropology, her anthropological takes on, the black world, and wanted to, you know, go ahead and continue, but decided I'd come back to Texas for a while. So so I I did, and then I I got married to Ed Kasperic, and then I we both moved to California, where I've been trying to get for a long time. I I love the ocean.
Speaker 1:Where in California?
Speaker 2:San Diego. We moved.
Speaker 1:I lived there too for six years. Oh my gosh, Ross. This is this is bananas.
Speaker 2:We live you know where Lucadia is? Of course.
Speaker 1:Swami's Beach. Yes.
Speaker 2:That's that was it. That was it. Between Encinitas and Lucadia, we had a small house, a little beachfront home, and, you know, we I'd always lived at the beach. I I lived at the beach in, you know, Seattle. I lived at the beach, in part of DC.
Speaker 2:Part of my time there. I lived in, where is it? In Dallas? No. Dallas didn't have any water.
Speaker 2:Dallas was a lot
Speaker 1:of of
Speaker 2:the beach? Yeah. We dreamed of it. What's interesting about the beach, though, to bring it back around to the Alexander Farm, is our land was once an Atoll. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Sort of like a peninsula.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:And the dormant extinct volcano, that's the reason for our community name, which is Pilot Knob, was a 83,000,000 is an 83,000,000 year old dormant, subterranean extinct volcano. Which means
Speaker 1:the soil is rich.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's black clay. But the deal about it was the dinosaurs could walk from Dallas halfway underwater, and then they'd sun at our farm 83,000,000 years ago, because we were the beach. So that was a real good justification when when it was time to come back home, to Austin because, you know, after all, it was beach, and
Speaker 4:I've been searching for beaches in the living room. Beach. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you came back.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And did you then devote your folk full time focus back into documenting and maybe for the first time, many of these?
Speaker 2:The reason I came back was one of the reasons that I'd left. There was a second attempt in 02/2019 to take our land via imminent domain. That attempt is still active.
Speaker 1:Okay. Tell us about, tell us the first attempt. Now we're, let let's go here in the conversation.
Speaker 2:We were taken from a total of four times our land. Our great great grandfather Daniel's land that he acquired as an enslaved person, was taken from four times by the county, the state, the US government through highways, and through developers, developers who've encroached upon our land. In 02/2019, we got a postcard from, and this is all, you know, a matter of what's on the website. Our website, by the way, is wwwthealexanderfarm1847.org. This entire story, much of what you heard earlier is, documented there on the website.
Speaker 2:It's for our farm. In 02/2019, I came back because we were threatened with another taking under the fifth, amendment of, the, clause in the constitution that says you can take private land for public use as long as you pay for it. Our land is a 78 years old. I'm a sixth generation person. There are seven, arguably eight generations who have attached themselves to our land in our family.
Speaker 2:It's not just some fodder for cars, and it's certainly not a place for a bunch of slabs, for flippable houses. It is a historic place. It is a special place. I call it my freedom place, not just because of the underground railroad connection, but because great great grandfather, against all odds, managed to keep his land. He didn't do it by himself because he died in 1883, and he is buried Choctaw style in our historic family farm, cemetery.
Speaker 2:He didn't do it by himself, but he taught us. He taught us how to keep our land. He taught his sons. He taught his daughters. It worked.
Speaker 2:It didn't work for much of black America. Some 16,000,000 acres of land has been lost since the turn of the twentieth century. It's all black land. Systemic reasons, all sorts of reasons why it's been lost, but most of them have to do with some sort or level of unfairness. Loans that Werner Law, offered to black farmers, tax, exemptions that we're trying to secure right now, that were available to some people but never for whatever reason, afforded or allowed to black landowners.
Speaker 2:So there is a black land loss phenomena and epidemic. It's 02/2019. They're threatening to take, through a highway expansion of 183, a good portion of the rest of great great grandfather's land.
Speaker 1:Our Florida federal government?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's US. Well, it's but it's through TxDOT. TxDOT is the ipso facto USDOT.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:So I kinda have to try to explain why that's just the most untenable thing. And despite the fact that we had been taken from before, like most black people are, in increments, a few acres here, a few acres there, and then it's all gone. Partitioned parts, and then it's all gone. And everybody's going, well, what happened? What happened?
Speaker 2:Why didn't you keep it? Why didn't you? And it's just this overwhelming set of distractions and reasons why people lose their historic land or their non historic land, and they're black. As my sister-in-law put it, she put it best. This is magic land.
Speaker 2:This is magical. There there are people who walked here who were my forebears. I know who they were. A lot of black folk don't know who their forebears from eighteen hundreds were. They don't know their names or they don't know anything about them.
Speaker 2:I know a lot about my forebears. I've learned a lot. We were very lucky. We're a very lucky family in that regard because we know. And knowing, I simply can't ignore it.
Speaker 2:It's too special. It's too important. I watch people on finding your roots and all sorts of other shows and all kinds of other efforts where people find out, oh, I'm from this place or that place. Oh, this is life changing. I've known that since I was born, and I'm walking on the land where they walked, and I can go to the place where their remains are.
Speaker 2:I can go to the place where great great grandfather trained the horses. We have a bit of that training track on our land. People who were from my blood placed those rocks. I can touch them. I can go into our house that we renovated, that was a Pony Express house by some more, and I can say this was the place where my brothers and fathers stood when hurricane Carla came through.
Speaker 2:And the house should have blown down, but it didn't, and there were only a few tiles missing. This is a house, in all likelihood, built by enslaved hands. This is a house that changes like a chameleon for what its need is for. It can be a house to live in for a family. It can be a place for kids to gather at our kids' food school.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it it's it's deep
Speaker 1:and it's wide in significance. And so in 2019, when you received this postcard or notification, what has the the the struggle looked like? How how are you moving to protect it?
Speaker 2:We've hired, and engaged a number of lawyers, to help us in our struggle. One of the things that I wanna make sure to say on your broadcast that a lot of people don't say because a lot of people don't know it. Anybody that you talk to from mayor Adderley, who's a eminent domain attorney.
Speaker 1:A mayor Adler?
Speaker 2:Adler. I'm sorry. We're in the ETJ.
Speaker 1:Not Akina Adderley, who's an amazing black musician in town. Hi, Akina.
Speaker 2:No. No. We're in the ETJ, so we don't get to vote for the mayor of Austin. We're in the extraterritorial jurisdiction, which is another complication. So we're in the auspices of the county, but not of the city of Austin.
Speaker 2:But, you know, Travis County and Austin are in some ways inextricable. So there's lots of overlap, And a lot of that overlap has to do with, you know, permitting.
Speaker 1:And so now it's Watson. But so during the time, it was Yes.
Speaker 2:At that point in time, it was mayor Adler. Uh-huh. In any case, we
Speaker 1:you asked. Yeah. What how are you you can get you you hired you lawyered up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We did. And the lawyers helped. They provided, some assistance, which, well, we're not really supposed to talk all that much about. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But once again, the route is active. There was a, the expansion route is active. There was a community meeting back in September to get some more community feedback on expanding the road. Interestingly enough, when the television cameras came, the only person that they got on camera said that she felt like the historic places ought to be kept. Yay for her.
Speaker 2:And it was not me, and that, perhaps an expansion wasn't the best cause or the best way. There are myriad organizations in the state and country dealing with the inappropriateness and alternatives to highway expansions that obliterate not just historic places, but people's communities
Speaker 1:And the and the climate. I mean, there are many angles for this.
Speaker 2:Environmental and all the rest. We've we've had some of that. So there was activity from the legal community. We engaged. And at the same time, it's important to realize that there have been instances where imminent domain was stopped.
Speaker 2:Two in Texas. Two notable ones. Every lawyer that you'll talk to will say, it's codified. It's legal. It's in the constitution.
Speaker 2:There's no real way to stop it. You can get lucky, but maybe not. Two instances. The first, the King Ranch. The King Ranch took TxDOT, Texas Department of Highways at the time, to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2:Does anybody know of any highways at the King Ranch?
Speaker 1:No. Just 77 near it. I grew up in South Texas.
Speaker 2:Not in it.
Speaker 1:Well, the King Ranch has a lot of power.
Speaker 2:And it has a lot of land.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And a lot of land.
Speaker 2:And it has not been, usurped by, the highways.
Speaker 1:What's the second?
Speaker 2:The second one is Fort Worth post office. Interesting story there. Shared with me by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Lovely people there. Skip Gates, Henry Louis Gates is on the is one of the advisory boards.
Speaker 2:There's a person named Brent Leggs who's, you know, an incredible African American historian and so forth. But in any case, the post office was going to be touched by an aerial expansion of the freeway in Downtown Fort Worth. It's an historic post office. The community got together. They formed a, like, save our springs type organization, of Fort Worth, individuals.
Speaker 2:They took TxDOT, Texas Department of Highways to court. They lost. They took them to appeals court with the help of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And they not only won the expansion being stopped, they got the whole highway moved out of Downtown Fort Worth. That's not a trillion years ago.
Speaker 2:That's in I should have looked it up. It's either in the I think it was in the eighties or the seventies. It's not a million years ago, but it was such a pivotal case. Mhmm. Little old Fort Worth.
Speaker 2:They got TxDOT to have to literally dismantle. If you've been to Downtown Fort Worth, you've seen it. Yeah. The the highway goes around the downtown. It's not in the downtown.
Speaker 2:They were required by the court to move it. So
Speaker 1:This is this is a really encouraging share out that you're giving us right now, and that that, I'm sure, keeps you filled with hope.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And we are running real short
Speaker 1:on time. So I wanna make sure that, that we can hear what's on the horizon for Alexander Farms and, again, point people to information, if they're interested in getting involved. And then how do people get involved, and how do people visit? What ways is, are folks engaging with the farm?
Speaker 2:We've started, the kids food school, which is basically a field trip. Kids don't know where their food comes from. We've been growing food, both animal and plant for hundreds years now, hundreds of years now. And so we thought it was important to share with kids some of the history lessons. Black history is American history and American history is black history.
Speaker 2:So what we share with the kids is the history of the purple whole pea, courtesy some good folks in another community in Texas in a Freedman's colony. And the purple whole pea is a black eyed pea, just a different variety. It was brought from Africa. It first appears in American history in the, journals, the botanical journals of Thomas Jefferson and Saladin.
Speaker 1:A lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yes. Thomas Jefferson said purple hull peas are good for the soil, good for the animals, good for people, and they, you know, put back nitrogen in the soil and so forth. They were brought to this country in the hair of people of African descent who were on the slave ships. So that's how the purple hull peas and rice and some other things got here, some other seeds. They needed to have food wherever they were going.
Speaker 2:They didn't know where they were going, so they braided it into their hair. That's a bit of black history that is uniquely American. In the civil war, after Sherman came through and burned much of the South, the only thing that would grow was black eyed peas, purple hull peas. Black folks knew how to do that. Black folks knew how to create land by planting rice in water.
Speaker 2:So we've made our own food. Mhmm. And that's American history.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There would be no food in the South for formerly enslaved people or their enslavers to eat were it not for these things that we brought from Africa. Mhmm. Okay. So we share that with the kids. We teach them how to not be afraid around large domesticated animals.
Speaker 2:We have horses. We have black rodeo riders. We have all kinds of folks that help the kids understand and adjust. I have three beautiful longhorn cows. One's named sweetness.
Speaker 2:One's named Rosie, too. And one's name's Rosie, too, too. They are beautiful. I love them. They are very, very dear.
Speaker 2:And, do
Speaker 1:you have open farm days or how some people visit?
Speaker 2:We had been strictly inviting, you know, classes or school classes or people in community with churches who wanted to come. It's strictly by invitation only. So you can go to the contact page in w w w the alexander farm eighteen forty seven dot org, and simply ask me if you want if you'd like to come and when you'd like to come, etcetera. We try to accommodate as many as we can. It's entirely self funded with the exception of a a bit of money to do certain things from places like Prairie View.
Speaker 2:They bought us some rock, so the kids weren't in that black clay when it rains. Oh, yeah. So that that sort of thing, we get a little funding for, but it's always a use like that. So the rest of it comes out of my pocket or our pocket, our collective pocket. We have experts, of course, from the various universities, HBCUs, etcetera, who are teaching the kids about farming, about farming science, about animal husbandry, the whole nine.
Speaker 2:So that's one way to go. We've also had quilting, quilting shows. We are currently in the museum, the Witte Museum for the Black Cowboys and American Story exhibit, which is here, in San Antonio through March. Sometime this spring, it travels to Los Angeles, fires willing, fire recovery willing, to the Gene Autry Museum where, California's cowboys, and black cowboys and ranchers and farmers will be added to the exhibit, and then it will tour the rest of the country back ostensibly or hopefully to, DC, the Smithsonian Museum there. So, certainly, the Witte has our story as well.
Speaker 2:You can if you go to the website, you can see a bit of our story. There is a piece that was produced by some friends from my broadcast days at UT, who freelance now. Where? Where is that? Very top of the page
Speaker 4:on the website,
Speaker 2:the wwwthealexanderfarm1847.org.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, Roz, we're out of time for now to be continued, and you are welcome back anytime on the show. Mhmm. Thank you for tuning in. You have been listening to Racism on the Levels, part of the Austin Cooperative Radio Hour.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, Stacey Fraser. The music you heard and almost every month is from my comrade, Shoyinka Rahim, and her 2016 album Bebo Love. This and previous episodes are available anywhere you listen to podcasts. I archive this conversation. And, up next is Democracy Now.
Speaker 1:And remember, in all things and all ways, love is the highest level.
Speaker 5:I gotta get some. In this world, you only need one song. To live your life like you visualize it for a land purpose. I take it nothing. Never giving up on the love to let your light shine like a sunshine.
Speaker 5:A celebration, no separation. You got a love song. I got a love song. Begin the love song. Travel the world, sharing your time
Speaker 4:with the young and the old and
Speaker 5:the rich and the poor. The conversation, let them move your soul. You got a love song, I got a love song. We in the love zone. You see, I'm again.
Speaker 5:You're again. Together, we create melodies. So with harmonies, we're making peace for the world to see. You got a love song? I got a love song.
Speaker 5:We in the love zone. Thank you, love. Thank you, love. Thank you, love. Thank you, love.
Speaker 5:You know I breathe for you. Thank you, love. You know I sing for you. Thank you, love. You know I stand for you.
Speaker 5:Thank you, love, you know I dance
Speaker 2:for you. Thank you, love.
Speaker 4:K o