Rutherford B. H. Yates Museum

The Rutherford B. H. Yates Museum was founded in 1996 by Catherine Roberts and other descendants and allies of the Yates family. It occupies restored Victorian houses on Victor Street in Freedmen’s Town, the Fourth Ward neighborhood that African-American freedpeople built from 1865 forward and that successive waves of clearance, from the 1938 San Felipe Courts project through decades of downtown expansion, reduced to a remnant of its original 40-block settlement.

The Museum is named for the Reverend Rutherford B. H. Yates, son of the Reverend John Henry “Jack” Yates, who led Antioch Missionary Baptist Church from 1868 until his death in 1897 and organized the purchase of Emancipation Park. The collection holds the Yates family archive alongside photographs, oral histories, and material culture from the broader ward, including bricks recovered from the original hand-laid freedpeople streets. Those bricks, fired and laid by freedpeople in the 1870s and 1880s, are among the most physically immediate artifacts of post-emancipation African-American community-building anywhere in the South.

The Museum collaborates with the Freedmen’s Town Conservancy on brick-street preservation campaigns and with the African American Library at the Gregory School on archival access for researchers and community members. Its educational programming connects the founding generation’s self-built infrastructure to present-day preservation and anti-displacement organizing in the ward.