Reflections on the Legacies Initiative: Austin College

Between 2020 and 2025, Austin College in Sherman, TX, served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. The college is located in the shadow of a notorious 1930 lynching and race riot, which began just a few blocks from campus; with this legacy in mind, the project team focused on the theme of Racial Violence and Resistance. The project was led by historians Felix Harcourt and Claire Wolnisty and dean of humanities Greg Kinzer. Major activities included faculty and student research into the history of the local Black community, pedagogy workshops for local K–12 instructors and college professors from across the region, and supporting the installation of a state historic maker to commemorate the violent events of 1930.

From the project team’s final report:

A theme that quickly emerged in our work as part of the Legacies grant was the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, loosely translated to mean “looking back in order to move forward.” The faculty, staff, and students at Austin College, along with an array of local partners, worked to help our campus and our community wrestle with our area’s histories of racial violence and resistance. In so doing, we saw both new local efforts to reckon honestly with these past injustices and an insistence on continuing a decades-long tradition of entrenched resistance to facing that historical truth. To this day, there are those in the area who refuse to call the murder of [local farm worker George] Hughes a lynching, clinging to the tendentious argument that he was killed by fire rather than by hanging. Too many are made too uncomfortable by the idea that the violent legacies of American slavery hang over their own personal or familial histories. We need look no further than the efforts to restrict what students in Texas public schools can learn and understand to know what power such feelings still hold.

These are impacts of the work at Austin College that we believe will have lasting positive effects:

1. Research and academic work, much of which was student-led. Student researchers focused on the impact of the violence of 1930 on the Black population of Sherman. Using city directories, census data, tax records, and newspaper archives, they were able to create full databases of the Black population of Sherman in 1928 and in 1935.
2. Silence-breaking efforts. Working with community groups like Grayson United, the county chapter of the NAACP, Grace United Church, and others, we developed and implemented public programming designed to overcome [local] resistance and active denial of history. This ranged from the creation of walking tours to public talks and symposia to the creation of a memorial scholarship for high school seniors to discussion panels with descendants.
3. A pedagogical workshop series for faculty in higher education that grounded the teaching of our legacy theme in broader pedagogical processes, including place-based learning, trauma-informed teaching, and best practices in community engagement. Beginning with a pilot program for Austin College faculty in summer of 2021, we were able to offer the higher education workshop again in 2022, 2023, and 2024. We were also able to hold a version of the workshop targeted towards K-12 educators in March 2024. [Download the resource guide created for K–12 educators.]
4. The creation of a regional network of institutions studying slavery and its legacies (in collaboration with Prairie View A&M, Texas Christian University, and others): Texas Consortium of Universities and Colleges Studying Slavery & Race.

👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.