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Mr. Wayne Sadberry describes the origin of Freedman Town

Mr. Wayne Sadberry: You're free now, but you have limited resources, so you're more dependent on each other. And so that's how Freedmen's Town becomes a... I read something the other day that says, "Statistics are such that there weren't many blacks that lived in Bryan." Well, that was because the ones that did live in Bryan, lived in a shack behind the house, the main, the big house, or they had a room in the house. So there was no real places for Freemen's Town that developed. This was a subdivision that somebody had laid out 20 or 30 acres of land or something, and start selling plots of land for people to develop. And so, obviously, they're going to develop. You find quite a few Freemen's Towns scattered throughout Texas. I'm sure they are in other states too, but there were just places where the freed blacks would begin to congregate.

Mr. Wayne Sadberry: And, over time they all have commerce. They'll have different little businesses. They have barber shops. And they had quite a few businesses that they began to depend on, that you'd have to go downtown to get a loan or something. But as far as a meal or some entertainment or something like that, they had those sorts of things. So this was the Freedman's Town. This part over here. If you look at where the library is, that was really downtown Bryan. That was Bryan. But in between there, there's some distance. And that's the way it is. That's the way most towns are laid out in Texas. You'll see the cemetery was always on the end of the town.

Mr. Wayne Sadberry: Okay? And, where the black people lived, that was on the end of the town. We didn't have a large Latino population here, but I'm sure that they had a little section somewhere, and that you'll see, historically. You'll see this area was settled by not one group of people, but it was settled by a hodgepodge of people. Originally, a quarter of the people that came to settle in Texas, those 300 families, a quarter of them, not the families, but a quarter of the 1700 people were African Americans. So blacks came here from the very beginning. Latinos, some were already here in this area. And so it was an interesting thing as to how that all came to be. And, the sad part is that we have history where we fear each other, and we didn't realize how much in common we had.

Mr. Wayne Sadberry: But that's a kind of interesting thing. We had Asians. They went to Europe to recruit people to come to settle in this part of the country. And you had periods of time when you had large Italian populations come here. You had Germans that come through. You had Czechs. And you can see bits and pieces of all of that. And that's interesting.