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When the word of Emancipation spread through Texas in the summer of 1865, black Texans found themselves with an important choice to make: stay on as a laborer with their former master or strike out on their own. The choice they made often depended on the age of the black farmer and their opinion of the white landowner in question. Generally, the older farmers tended to stay, while the young tended to go. An interrelated system of labor laws, “Black Codes”, homesteading laws, and the beginning of the segregation of public facilities combined with an outbreak of violence in the years following the end of the war made life for black farmers unassociated with white landowners exceedingly difficult. For many, the answer was sharecropping. This arrangement, which was usually a verbal agreement and referred to by black sharecroppers as farming “on halves”, kept the big plantations operating and often with conditions that closely resembled Antebellum times. Long days were worked from “can’t see to can’t see,” and by the late 1870s, large sharecropper cotton farms dominated the fertile soils across the eastern half of Texas.
"I ain't never been to heaven but I'd rather have this here outside of anything I know. I can do anything I want to. All of it's mine. Nothing can be more enjoyable."
-Freedom colony landowner
"At the end of remote roads, along county lines, and down in the river bottoms, few such places had been incorporated, or platted, or even properly listed on county maps. These were unofficial places by their very nature, some so much that the sheriff or the census taker only rarely intruded on their affairs."
-T. Sitton & J.H. Conrad
Against the backdrop of the rise of sharecropping, debt slavery, and increasingly harsh Jim Crow policies, black land ownership in Texas following the war rose more than in any other state in the South. Peaking just after the turn of the century at 31%, most black landowners resided in freedom colonies, unincorporated settlements held together by a church, school, and the recognition of the community by the residents. Freedom colonies were a way for black farmers to subvert the social and legal pressures trying to funnel them into sharecropping. The origins of these communities were often informal. Those that left their former slave owners in the early days following Emancipation often sought to get as far from white settlements as they could which resulted in many black Texans settling on land that was considered undesirable by white farmers. In Brazos county, this meant that settlements began to spring up in the bottomlands near the Brazos river. Bottomland homesteads were environmentally richer but much more difficult to clear and maintain and the proximity to the river meant that deadly mosquito-borne illnesses were common. Many of the first black farmers in these areas, which would soon become freedom colonies, were technically squatters occupying, farming, and improving land that had been ignored by white landowners. Many squatting freedmen pursued legal ownership through squatting laws, one of the few avenues open to them, and land ownership jumped in the years from 1870-1890. For these and many other reasons, most freedom colonies existed for years before legal documents began to record their existence.
Butt Randle Draft Registration Card
Several hundred of these colonies were established in Texas between 1870 and 1890. Most communities never legally developed past the “settlement” stage. They were rarely incorporated, and most visitors would only see a few farmsteads with perhaps a small church or school to represent what was, in fact, a thriving freedom colony. The lack of official governmental recognition of these settlements has had far-reaching consequences for the preservation of this part of the history of Texas. Local courthouse records, land records, tax records, and even federal census data often poorly recognized even the existence of freedmen’s settlements. For descendants, historians, and community members today that are trying to record, document, and preserve the history of freedom colonies, that makes the knowledge preserved in places like Canaan Cemetery even more important."
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