Marilynn Poole-Webb, an accomplished lawyer born and raised in Austin, discusses Rogers Washington Holy Cross, an East Austin neighborhood built by and for black professionals after World War Two. She talks about memories of her family and friends, gentrification, the neighborhood today, remembrance, and more.
Interview Highlights
Remembering her Aunt Irene
“My mother was a young mother, and we were raised beautifully as a young mother would. But my aunt for all of us, she’s the one who introduced us to at least some social graces. She always said, ‘it was better to know how things are to be done and then when you’re doing it wrong, you know you’re choosing that.’”
On Gentrification in East Austin
“When I first came back to Austin in about 2014, I was living with my father on the corner, and I became active in the neighborhood association. East Austin – it was changing. The demographics were changing rapidly and the news was full of protests and cries of gentrification and all of that.And as a neighborhood, we decided that a lot of the change was inevitable, and we embraced it by sharing with our new neighbors our memories of this neighborhood. A lot of what we considered landmarks of East Austin were being taken away. Definitely the schools and the names of the schools. I know my thinking was it’s hard, though, to honor and respect something if you don’t know that history.”
Community building today
“And so rather than getting angry at someone throwing away something they just didn’t know, you don’t know the value of something until you know – we would share with our new neighbors. ‘Oh, you’re moving into this house? Well, you know who used to own that house?’And we would tell them histories and tell them about the families.You will find this is still a very warm neighborhood. And we know each other and we invite each other over for breakfast and for lunch, and we attend meetings and we discuss changes in the neighborhood. And we’ve kept that spirit, that neighborly spirit. So I’m very proud of what we’re doing here in this neighborhood.”
Remembering Rogers Washington Holy Cross
“I’d like for it to be known that a segregated black community was a lot more than how TV depicts it, or even how you’re reading. That this was a community that was supportive and it was a community of people who built special and lived special and really served to build the greater East Austin community educators, business people.”