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Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award, 2006
Best Book on East Texas, East Texas Historical Association, 2007

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South.

Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century.

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.

Never Sell the Land is a work about Black agency—specifically, how agency is secured through bottom-up planning and preservation in the face of unequal access. Andrea Roberts traces the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard the land and heritage of settlements in Jasper and Newton Counties, which abut the Louisiana border. She follows the descendants of these Black-built places as they deploy creative approaches to education and revitalization built on traditional community practices. Never Sell the Land tells the origin story of The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas and Study and shows how preservation becomes self-determination—and how grassroots projects are exhuming the freedom colonies from history books, personal archives, and oral histories, and fighting to physically cement them within the landscape of Texas today.