Clarksville families used to fill Sweet Home Missionary Baptist, the little white church on West 11th Street, every Sunday. Most stopped coming as hostile developers turned the once all-Black neighborhood into one of Austin’s wealthiest, and whitest. Homecoming, the church’s annual anniversary celebration, brings them back.
“Sweet Home is the foundation, the hub,” said Ada Bolden, who grew up spending Sundays at the church. “If we don’t do anything else, we’re gonna come home. We’re gonna come to Sweet Home.”
Bolden, known to former Clarksville neighbors as “Lady,” has since moved neighborhoods to Windsor Park and membership to David Chapel Missionary Baptist. When the cost of living in Clarksville began to climb after gentrification took hold in the early Eighties, staying in the neighborhood her ancestors helped build – according to her, the Boldens were the second family of freed slaves to settle the West Austin enclave in the 1870s – was no longer an option. She still comes back to celebrate Sweet Home anniversaries…