The Austin City Council has officially apologized for the role the city has played and may still be playing to disenfranchise Black Austinites – from the city’s founding in 1839, when the local economy depended on slave labor, through today as disparities between Black and white Austinites persist. As in all Texas cities, Austin’s early economy relied on the labor of enslaved people, working in agriculture around Central Texas and to haul those goods to market. After Emancipation (commemorated in Texas with the observance of Juneteenth), freedom settlements of Black men and women grew in places on all sides of the 19th-century urban core – such as