Lois Walker stands beside the piano inside the music room at the Julia C. Hester House, belting out Donnie McClurkin’s gospel classic, “Search Me, Lord,” amid about a dozen other seniors during their weekly choir practice at the historic Fifth Ward community center.

Each member takes a turn leading the group through different gospel renditions, their voices spilling out of the room’s open door and through Hester House’s main hallway. 

At one point, Walker begins to cry. She removes her glasses to wipe away the tears as her neighbor rubs her shoulder, but never stops singing.

The 75-year-old Fifth Ward native recently overcame a health scare that left her briefly hospitalized.

Reflecting on that experience as she sings among her peers only underscores why she agreed to take part in Hester House’s oral history project: to document the stories of her community, and showcase the reality of what her neighborhood is like, while she still can.

“When you say Fifth Ward, everybody is like, ‘You stay in that area?’ But you don’t know the history that we have in our heart,” she said. “And that’s what I would like the people to learn, the younger generation, to learn.”

Hester House long has been a pillar of the Fifth Ward community, offering youth and senior citizen programming, social services and a wellness center. Its decades-long history, however, has not been well-preserved.

Sherea McKenzie, the director of Hester House, fears that without intervention the community center’s history could be lost forever. 

To avoid that, Hester House has partnered with a team of professors from Texas Southern University’s School of Communication to undertake an oral history project. The plan is to produce a documentary film featuring interviews with dozens of neighborhood residents, mostly between 70 and 90 years old, sharing stories about what Hester House has meant to them, and the broader Fifth Ward community.

Decades of history

Hester House originally was created as a settlement house, an organization providing educational, recreational, and other social services to a community, in 1943.

Its roots, however, go back much further. 

The community center is named after Julia C. Hester, a Fifth Ward resident who opened her home to care for and educate neighborhood youth beginning around the turn of the century until her death in 1940. 

McKenzie originally had hoped to create the documentary for Hester House’s 80th anniversary in 2023. Once the interviews began, though, it became clear to TSU Professor Toniesha Taylor that she would blow through that deadline.

“When you start interviewing people, and they start telling you their stories, it sometimes takes a little longer than you think,” said Taylor, who serves as department chair of TSU’s Department of Communication Arts and Sciences. “When you’re talking about something that’s so centrally important, and is so much a part of people’s core cultural memories, it’s really easy to get people to talk about what they love about that space.” 

Taylor, one of the three TSU project leads, along with professors Zantel Nichols and Tyrone Dixon, thought the project would include only a handful of interviews, but it quickly grew.

Taylor and her team interviewed more than 40 people for the project, compiling dozens of hours of footage.

Each interview consisted of 10 baseline questions designed to probe people’s memories. 

It was important, Taylor said, not to rush the interview process. Making participants feel comfortable, allowing them to read questions ahead of time, or see how they looked on camera, helped lead to more thorough answers and engaged participants.

For Taylor, oral history work is deeply personal, but also a way to build community connections.

“It’s something that you can share with your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, that lets people know that you were here,” she said. “That you had a connection to a community, that you were important, and the things that you cared about are important, and things that you want are important. And I think that’s something that’s really salient to people.”

Engaging community elders

The heart of the Hester House project, Taylor said, is preserving and advancing the organization’s legacy.

That legacy, she said, often is kept by community elders, making the work especially timely.

The first few generations of children who attended Hester House already have died, their stories about the community center’s impact untold. That makes it crucial to talk with senior citizens who still remember the Hester House of the late 1950s and 60s, Taylor said.

People like Frank Henderson, 86, who first came to Hester House as a 14-year-old in 1952, and still participates in its senior programming.

He remembers attending sock hops and after-school activities alongside a young Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland.

“Its important to get that history out there,” Henderson said of the project.

Dorothy Steele, 80, who has been coming to Hester House since she was a young girl, said she took part in the project to honor the safety and security the community center has provided to her, her children, even her grandchildren over the years. 

Anything you need help with, she said, Hester House can provide it.

For Walker, taking part in the oral history project was about more than Hester House itself.

Walker’s ties to Fifth Ward go back to her grandmother building a life there. She is proud of her neighborhood. Watching it be reduced to punchlines and nicknames like “Bloody Fifth,” she said, do not embody the Fifth Ward that she knows and loves. 

She wants younger generations to know the history of her home — of the cultural mecca once called “the Harlem of the South,” and the economic opportunities for Black business owners along Lyons Avenue, otherwise known as Houston’s own “Black Wall Street.”

“I’m a Fifth Ward native, and I love Fifth Ward no matter what,” she said.

What’s next?

The documentary is in the rough edit stage, Taylor said. Originally, the film was planned to be about 30 minutes long, but because of the amount of footage the team has collected, they may lengthen the final product to an hour.

McKenzie is hoping for an early 2025 release, possibly coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, but those details, along with the scale of the launch event, still are being planned.

While details of the documentary’s release are being finalized, it is clear to both McKenzie and Taylor that the work must continue. 

Being interviewed has become such a hot commodity among Fifth Ward seniors that Taylor has been stopped in public and asked if someone could participate. For her, it is a testament to the importance of keeping community stories alive.

“You don’t know how rich a place is until you start asking people.”

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