Freedmen’s Town
How one photographer documented the disappearing landscape of Houston’s Fourth Ward
Photographs by Elbert D. Howze
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.
I, , a Black Vietnam War veteran in his 30s, was studying photography at the University in 1866—one of many such enclaves founded in the Reconstruction era. Its streets were still paved with bricks that had laid in intricate patterns. Soon he was visiting the Fourth Ward with his camera “practically every day,” his widow, Barbara Howze, told me.
