Downtown Houston is about to change.
Remembrance Park will soon occupy three city blocks amidst the city’s courthouses and government buildings. Championed by Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, Remembrance Park is a memorial and civic space designed to confront Houston’s history of racial violence while creating a place for reflection and community gathering.
“Remembrance Park is about remembering honestly and carrying that memory forward,” Ellis said. “By honoring the lives lost to racial violence and those who fought for freedom and justice, Remembrance Park will help future generations understand the truth of our past and the unfinished work that still shapes our future.
The park’s construction is expected to begin in the fall of 2027 and be completed in 2029, funded through a combination of park bond funds, Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) infrastructure funds, hotel occupancy tax funds, philanthropic support, and partnerships. It will transform land stretching from the Harris County Courthouse to Buffalo Bayou into what Ellis says will bear testament to the ongoing pursuit of justice.
Historical markers and a Freedom Marker commemorating four Harris County victims of lynching, John Walton, Burl Smith, John White, and Robert Powell, serve as focal points within the park.
Why is this park important to the Black community?
Dr. Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and Prairie View A&M University and the President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University, said projects like Remembrance Park are essential at a time when history is increasingly contested.
Ellis credited Simmons, who is serving as the principal strategic advisor for the park per Ellis’ office, with helping shape the project’s commitment to confronting Houston’s history.
“To establish Remembrance Park helps us move forward together, drawing strength from the fact that we do so in acknowledging where we have been, creating a place for community reflection,” Simmons said. “Creating such a place of community reflection and an ongoing recommitment to the powerful values of truth and justice is a supremely important gift to this multi-ethnic international city that we love.”
The park
The park’s design draws inspiration from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Architects Walter Hood and Michael Murphy said the project is intended to use landscape and public space as tools for healing and education.
“Spaces can actually transform us, can heal us, can heal our communities from national trauma,” Murphy said. “Amidst the street names after Confederate soldiers, we will have a truth-telling device for generations to come.”
The proposed park will feature a series of interconnected spaces designed to immerse visitors in the history of freedom movements and racial justice struggles. Plans for the park include a Witness Grove anchored by mature live oaks and a Memory Pavilion built on the site of the former Rice Home and Plantation.
“I pray that the darkness that overtakes us in every period will be kept at bay by a multitude of efforts like Remembrance Park, that remind us of the heights to which we can rise when together we embrace what history can so powerfully teach us…We can be on our toes, alert to efforts to destroy our recognition of who we are and what we’ve been through. Everybody must do that, not one person, not a singular individual, not a commissioner, but all of us owe that to those who came before us.”
Dr. Ruth Simmons
It also includes Hush Harbor Gardens, inspired by secret gathering places used by enslaved African Americans, and a Bayou Overlook with views of Buffalo Bayou and the Houston skyline.
A large shade canopy will span all three blocks, while the Bayou Mirror, a reflective water feature that can also serve as a performance space, will display imagery related to African American history and faith traditions.
The historical markers are also significant in the park’s planning.
Family members weigh in on the importance of remembering
Norma Bradley, a relative of Powell, who was lynched in June 1928, said she had known fragments of the story since childhood. Seeing Powell’s name etched into a permanent marker finally made it real.
Powell is one of four Harris County men whose lynching deaths will be memorialized in the park.
“It [marker] will make us aware of actually what happened,” Bradley said. “Even though it happened way before I was born, he’s still my cousin. I was close to his sisters and brothers. He’s my people.”
Congressman Al Green echoed those sentiments, describing the park as a local project with national significance.
“We shall overcome, but we’re not going to do it until we fight and fight back against any form of racism that exists,” Green said. “It [the park] does mean a lot to the history of Houston because it’s the truth. And we always want the truth to prevail. The truth about enslavement, brutality, and the lynchings and the murder of people of African ancestry has not been publicly realized, and we have to make sure that it is.”
