Even approaching the newly-renovated Fort Bend Museum in Richmond, itâs easy for one to believe theyâre about to enter some place in one of the worldâs centers of culture â a New York, a Paris, a Tokyo.
A comforting white exterior and glass doors greet visitors on their approach, and the entry is filled with local art and historical trinkets and T-shirts depicting Fort Bend County history.
âThis used to be basically a big brick box,â said Claire Rogers, the executive director of the Fort Bend History Association, which oversees the museum.
The museum, 550 Houston St. in Richmond, reopened to the public on July 17 after being closed about six months for $2 million in renovations, according to Fort Bend History Association, which runs the museum.
While touring the newly-renovated Fort Bend Museum, I was perhaps most struck by an exhibit discussing the controversy surrounding the Jaybird Monument in Richmond.
Even the presentation of the issue was interesting, with recent newspaper articles laying out the controversy, which culminated in the Fort Bend County Commissioners Court in October voting to move the long-standing monument to a new location.
The monument stood in Richmond for years, a longstanding reference to a former local political group that disenfranchised Black voters and instituted white-only primaries for voting until 1953.
âOne day today will also be a part of history,â Ana Alicia Acosta told me when I asked about it.
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A few years ago, I found myself at the Texas Supreme Court building looking for information about the first Black attorney in Texas history. As I toiled away in the building’s basement archives, poring over the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of dusty record books, I thought about how my quixotic quest had started more than two years before.
The Texas Bar Journal had published a feature called “We Were First,” which told the stories of the state’s legal pioneers: the first Asian-American judge, the first woman admitted to the bar, and so on. A member of the