At 6 years old, Marvin Pearson remembers riding through the streets of Pleasantville with his father, who would alert its residents of Election Day with a bullhorn days before and would offer rides to the polls.

“There was no such thing as you didn’t have a ride to vote,” said Pearson, who is now 77, last Tuesday morning while serving as an election clerk at the Judson Robinson Sr. Community Center. 

In the historic Black east Houston neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone, everyone went to the same schools and everyone worshiped together at Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church, it was easy to get people out to vote and hold each other accountable for doing so, Pearson said. Clergy would encourage members to vote from the pulpit and community members would do the rest in the streets.

“Everybody who was registered to vote, voted,” he said.

“It was a big deal. … There was no such thing as not voting.” 

As a result of collective grassroots advocacy and door-to-door canvassing, the neighborhood’s precinct once claimed the highest voter turnout in Texas. Voter turnout at Precinct 259 ranged anywhere from 86 to 100 percent, residents said, particularly from 1967 to 1971 during former City Councilmember Judson Robinson Jr.’s tenure as Precinct chair, making the 259th precinct one of Houston’s most powerful historically Black districts.

But today it’s far from its political heyday. Voter turnout at the once-powerful, storied precinct has steadily declined over the last several decades, ranging from 56 to 70 percent within the last six presidential elections prior to 2024. This year, voter turnout dropped even further to roughly 54 percent, nearly 13 percentage points, according to complete, but unofficial results from the Harris County Clerk’s Office. 

Voter turnout in Harris County took a significant dip this election year by nearly 10 percentage points compared to 2020 despite a rise in the number of registered voters, according to the county’s cumulative results reports.

Judson Robinson III, president and CEO of nonprofit organization Houston Area Urban League,  grew up in Pleasantville and his family’s legacy is enshrined in the neighborhood. He said change is inevitable. He also said that the environment and the needs of families during the 1960s are different from the needs and desires of families today. 

“Voting is something that we had to do because it was so many civil rights and community rights that we were fighting for that we had to vote,” Robinson III said. 

“A lot of stuff that people take for granted now because it’s already in play isn’t as big a deal to them because they have a park to play in, they have street lights, they have a community police presence, they have a walking trail. All those things that my parents and grandparents fought for that are now normalized are in place.” 

By 9:30 a.m. Tuesday on Election Day, 61 people had voted at the Judson Robinson Sr. Community Center. Two hours later, that number rose to just 86.

Although Pearson considered 61 people a decent number, especially given the morning rain, he said it’ll never compare to its political heyday of the 1950s to roughly the 1970s when voter turnout reached 100 percent. 

“When I was growing up, it didn’t matter — rain, snow or shine, it’d be a line,” Pearson said. 

Richard Johnson, a local politician who grew up and still lives in Pleasantville, used to volunteer at the polls as a young child.He said enthusiasm and voter turnout can vary depending on the election cycle, but still, the area has seen a steep decline in voter turnout over the last several decades.

“Growing up, we would think a very slow day would be 1,500 by noon,” Johnson said. “Today, we’re thinking we’re blessed to get to 500 by noon.”

‘The Black River Oaks’

Pleasantville, a historically Black community located in east Houston near the Houston’s Ship Channel, was the first master-planned community for Blacks in Texas. It was established in 1948 after World War II as a way for developers to provide homeownership to Black families struggling to find housing in Houston, largely due to redlining and racist segregation-era policies. 

From there, Pleasantville quickly emerged a beacon of hope and Black excellence in all facets from entrepreneurship, homeownership, to sports and civic engagement producing a number of lawyers, politicians, judges and athletes. The area also gave rise to community trailblazers, such as Judson Robinson Sr., a businessman and real estate agent who made an impact in Houston’s public housing as the first Black person to manage Kelly Homes, a public housing project later known as Kelly Village, and the first Black board member of the Houston Housing Authority. He also served as chairman of Precinct 259 in his community of Pleasantville and boosted voter participation to the largest turnout within the city. The area’s main voting center and community center at 1422 Ledwicke St. is named in his honor. 

His son, Robinson Jr., would follow in his footsteps as a businessman, real estate agent, and chair of Precinct 259, where he boosted voter participation to the largest in the state. He later became the first Black city councilmember in 1971.

“They used to call Pleasantville the Black River Oaks,” Pearson said. 

Mary Fontenot, president of the Pleasantville Historical Society and the Pleasantville Civic League, said Election Day used to be like one “big family reunion.” Now the people who grew up there have moved away, and older residents resort to alternative methods to vote, such as mail-in ballots, she said. 

“The lines that used to stretch around the corner at the elementary school, it’s different,” Fontenot said. “And the folk that we have here now, the new folk aren’t necessarily the voters that we grew up with.”

A handful of other Pleasantville natives and longtime residents liken the steady decline to a change in priorities, lack of education, loss of heritage and a shift in the neighborhood’s demographics from predominantly Black to now nearly split between Black and Latino residents.  

Robinson III said that given the neighborhood’s industrial nature, it’s not a neighborhood that today’s families are considering moving to.

“It always was a place where young families and starter families began their homeownership journey,” he said. “So I’m pretty proud of the fact that it’s still serving people to this day.” 

Longtime resident and Pleasantville native, Felicia Thibodeaux said the importance of voting, particularly for Black people, and some of the dark truths about Black history around voting are also no longer discussed as much as they should be. It’s now up to the community to teach Black history and civic education — two topics many schools no longer teach, she said. 

“We have to educate them on why people were marching. Why people were arrested and beaten,” Thibodeaux said. “We try to push that under the rug sometimes. We have to show them that women didn’t always vote. We’re dropping the ball with the younger adults.”

Although voter turnout on Election Day has declined in Precinct 259, she’s seen an increase in morale and overall enthusiasm since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential candidate. 

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“I believe [what] you’re seeing today is the result of just the push for early voting. Our clergymen, everybody on social media, we just pushed for early voting,” Thibodeaux said.

“In the past we’ve always kind of did the community thing because by us being a close-knit neighborhood we liked to go get in line to see a lot of people who we hadn’t seen in a while. It used to be more of a social thing; stand in line and talk and pass the time. This election was just so important I believe it just motivated everybody to vote early.”

That trend of voting early was prevalent throughout Harris County with more than 1.2 million votes cast during early voting including in-person and mail-in ballots, accounting for about 79 percent of the total votes cast in the Nov. 5 election, according to complete but unofficial results. That is one of the highest early voting turnouts in Harris County for a presidential election in decades. 

But some, like Pearson and Deborah Adams, who for at least the last 20 years have served as an election clerk and the election judge respectively at the Judson Robinson Sr. Community Center, are trying to uphold tradition and honor the community’s heritage. Pearson intentionally only votes there on Election Day.

“We’re trying to preserve it,” he said. “That’s (why) we do work in the community, but people just started moving and … it wasn’t passed down.”

That’s why he still lives in his childhood home blocks away from the community center and refuses to sell it, and why he works the polls every election trying to get the younger generation involved.

“All your power is with voting,” Pearson said. “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about anything.”

Data reporter José Luis Martínez contributed to this report.

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