A little more than a week ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the Austin Chronicle correcting another of the many puff pieces about the historic Rosewood Courts public housing project located in Austin. I’ve held off publishing the voluminous record of my efforts to preserve Austin’s public housing over the years. When you are in the middle of activist fights, including runs for public office, you don’t have time for scholarly reflection. All of my anti-poverty activism in Austin has been conducted as an unpaid volunteer, at great personal and professional sacrifice and expense. But it has been ten years, and most of Rosewood Courts has been demolished. With the halcyon “new Austin” brought to us by our leaders and their concubines now upon us, perhaps the time seems ripe for us to think more deeply about what could have been.
First things first. Since the National Park Service has chosen to not produce online listings of my Santa Rita Courts Historic District nor my Rosewood Courts Historic District for pdf download, I am including copies of them here. You may notice that the Texas Historical Commission did not officially notify me of the successful listing of the Rosewood Courts Historic District until five years later.
Download link for the Rosewood Courts Historic District Nomination
Download link for the Santa Rita Courts Historic District Nomination
I have attached two important documents to the end of my Rosewood Courts nomination. The first is a letter from me to Mark Wolfe, the Texas State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO), in which I explain why my nomination for the historic district under all four criteria at the national level of significance makes sense, and the second is a copy of NPS (National Park Service) historian Paul Lusignan’s analysis of the first draft of my nomination. I should note that the first draft of the nomination was just that–a draft–and was written under considerable activist pressure to get “something submitted” in order to keep the Austin Housing Authority from moving forward with its demolition plans without due consideration of historic preservation. I thoroughly dismantle Lusignan’s claims in my SHPO letter and within the nomination itself and expose the THC’s efforts to disparage the nomination as grounded in political scheming not empirical fact. The links below are for those documents themselves, in case you do not wish to read the entire nomination.
Download link for Fred L. McGhee’s letter to the Texas State Historic Preservation Officer
Download link for NPS Historian Paul Lusignan’s evaluation for the nomination’s first draft
I had not read my SHPO letter in ten years. What strikes me in 2026 isn’t just its tone, but its palpable sense of frustration. It ain’t easy being black trying to do actual black historic preservation in a state whose entire “heritage” bureaucracy is staffed by political hacks, many of whom are actual neo-Confederates, and in a city where whitesplained and servile “black history” grounded in public relations must continue to reign and govern, lest the restless multitude start to put the historical pieces of the puzzle together about why their 2026 rent or property taxes are too damn high.
In my letter to the editor I indicated that I was in the process of authoring a book about Austin’s public housing. It should be obvious that much of it will be based upon my National Register nominations. But it will also include a chapter or two of reflection about my activist efforts on behalf of public housing residents nationwide and my subsequent scholar-activist attempts to protect one of the most maligned and misunderstood aspects of the New Deal. Stay tuned, I’ll post more later.
