Scholar-Activist

Dr. Andrea Roberts is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship, which raises awareness of the entrenched racial biases impeding documentation, recognition, and preservation of historic Black settlements’ cultural assets. She created what she calls a Place Preservation research model (collect data, connect descendants, and co-create solutions), which focuses on descendant community involvement and project-based learning for students.

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Cultural Landscapes

Dr. Andrea Roberts is the Project Co-Director with Dr. Thaisa Way for the NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—”Towards a People’s History of Landscape, Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital. During the three-week institute, participants will collaborate to develop online, open-source curriculum modules that teach landscape-oriented social histories, centering Black and Indigenous historical narratives in the founding of the United States and the District of Columbia.

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Engaged Public Scholarship

As Director of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™, Dr. Andrea Roberts trains student researchers, volunteers, and the freedom colony diaspora to contribute place histories and memories to The TXFCP Study and Atlas, a publicly accessible map and settlement database. The goal of The TXFCP is to prevent the erasure, destruction, and decay of cultural properties within settlements in partnership with descendant communities.

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Critical Pedagogy

Dr. Andrea Roberts's teaching philosophy is grounded in a desire to train future leaders to move marginalized communities’ histories, planning methods, and agendas from the periphery to the center of practice and policymaking. Her approach is situated in a space of radical possibility between didactic teaching of core competencies and critical pedagogy.

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Never Sell the Land Cover

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Never Sell the Land: Freedom Colonies, Black Storytelling, and Keeping Home

Chronicling the stories and resilience of Texas freedom colonies facing erasure, and of the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard them.

Since Emancipation, Deep East Texas has been a place where Black Texans have experienced oppression yet also have created free Black communities. Well into the Jim Crow era, the area was home to communities where formerly enslaved people farmed their own land and ran their own affairs, now called freedom colonies. At one point, more than five hundred such communities existed in the state. Yet only a handful of these freedom colonies remain today, and they are in danger of disappearing from the record and from historical memory.

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This book is a true gift, an exquisite testimony to the history, tenacity, foresight, and organizational skills of Black residents of East Texas “freedom colonies.” An engaging work narrated by an exceptional researcher and theorist, it uses a deep array of grounded investigation skills—including participatory action, storytelling, family history, and interviews—complemented by clear conceptualization, affecting photographs, and thoughtfully composed tables and charts. Roberts transports readers through a convincing explanation of residents’ homegrown “planning repertoires,” including practical ways of guarding land, community, and identity. Her work has the potential to transform how we think about community building, place making, and planning in marginalized communities, in many places far beyond Texas.

June Manning Thomas

University of Michigan, author of Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina