At churches across Houston’s Third Ward, Vacation Bible School is a ritual of summer. Between lessons, music often peals out of the windows as children gather for games and food. The adults who supervise them laugh and gossip. For Dolores Rodgers, who grew up in the Third Ward, it was practically an extension of home—while she was growing up in the ’60s, her family lived next to Jerusalem Baptist Church on Tuam Street where she attended VBS. But Rodgers’ family no longer calls the house on Tuam home. A few years ago, the City of Houston claimed the land to build a parking lot.
Rodgers’ family, like many families with roots in the historically Black Third Ward, is no stranger to displacement. Her grandparents were displaced by the construction of Highway 288 in the early ’60s. She left the neighborhood to go to college in the late ’70s, but when she came back, she noticed the slow losses, the disappearance of independent businesses like barber shops and grocery stores. Still, she wanted to make a home in the Third Ward.
“It was just part of my identity as a person,” Rodgers said.
