Cotton Museum working on mapping historic Black communities

Feb. 2—This Saturday at the Greenville Municipal Auditorium, during this year's Legacy Awards, volunteers with the Audie Murphy/American Cotton Museum will be collecting information on Greenville's historic Black communities.

The primary focus of the project is to map out the boundaries of the old neighborhoods, and as such, the volunteers will have a map on display in the Municipal Building and will be distributing/collecting paper surveys.

Those who wish to turn in their surveys on a later date are asked to drop them off at Love & Integrity Funeral and Cremation Services at 4900 King St. in Greenville.

Some of the neighborhoods that the museum is trying to collect information on are: Easthill, College Hill, Darktown, The Wash Out, The Westend, and Washington Heights.

Those neighborhoods and others were discussed in local author and historian Brenda Huey's book, "The Blackest Land The Whitest People: Greenville, TX," but the boundaries of the neighborhoods were not defined in the book.

The Legacy Awards (which will be going on at the same time as the survey) is an event in which Greenville-area residents are recognized for their contributions to the local Black community.

It will begin at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, at the Greenville Municipal Auditorium.

Tickets are available for purchase at www.showtimeatthegma.com for $10, and they can also be purchased in-person from members of the Legacy Awards Executive Committee, who are: Carolyn Traylor, Sandra Linson-Bell, Kimetha Thompson Spoon, Cedric Dean, and Emily Thompson.

The museum's project ties in with this year's Legacy Award's greater focus on local Black history.

"We're definitely going to focus on local Black history, because I can almost assure you that close to 95% of Greenville's citizens don't realize that this town was once home to a thriving Black business community," Legacy Awards Executive Committee member Kimetha Thompson Spoon said.