Darwin Hamilton still remembers hopping the fence to go next door to his grandmother’s house. 

The home at 912 E. 11th Street was important to him. It was a generational home and headquarters for his family since his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Edward Dedrick — a formerly enslaved man — built it during Reconstruction in 1875. 

Hamilton, a fifth-generation Austinite, knew it was a rarity for a Black family to have roots that deep in a city with a history of segregation and urban renewal. But the house stayed in the family, passed down to his grandma and eventually to him and his cousins. It was the oldest home continuously owned by a single Black family in East Austin.

The city took properties — including Hamilton’s own childhood home next door to his grandmother’s — from his family in 2003 under eminent domain for less than $100,000 each, according to Hamilton. City Council records show the houses were originally slated for demolition. Forced to move to Pflugerville after losing his home, Hamilton continued to fight the city, and ultimately saved his grandmother’s house. 

Part of that building was preserved and folded into the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility (AACHF) that opened in 2013. Now known as the Dedrick-Hamilton House now bears his family name — a legacy Hamilton calls “bittersweet.”

Hamilton believes the facility was an “afterthought.” While the city installed a mosaic mural of Thomas Dedrick’s son William on its wall, promising Hamilton the AACHF would carry his ancestor’s legacies by becoming a thriving cultural hub, Hamilton has long feared the property would fall neglected and unused.

Community members and former employees at the facility say that Hamilton’s fear has come true — and Hamilton agrees. 

“Most people who visit the house walk away feeling empty because it doesn’t tell them anything,” Hamilton said. “You don’t even know what’s significant about it.”

The Dedrick-Hamilton House has remained mostly locked and unused  for much of the past two decades. And the AACHF has cut much of its programming. According to two former employees —  Brenda Malik and Florinda Bryant — what was once envisioned as an epicenter for Austin’s Black culture and enterprise has instead struggled with chronic understaffing and limited city funding.

Brenda Malik came out of retirement in 2015 to take what was supposed to be a temporary front-desk at the AACHF. She ended up staying for nearly a decade out of a sense of obligation to a place she believed had potential but never received the support it needed to thrive.

“We were hoping for a long time that they were going to give us more support, but it really never materialized,” Malik said.

Throughout the years, Malik felt the facility was not recognized for the “jewel that it was.” The AACHF emerged from a 2005 city initiative to improve the quality of life for African American Austinites. Backed by a 2006 bond election that set aside $31.5 million for cultural centers, the project was listed in the initiative’s 2008 final report as a key accomplishment toward that goal. 

Over the past decade, city documents have described the facility’s mission as fostering cultural engagement, economic development and creative partnerships within Austin’s Black community. State Rep. and former City Council Member Sheryl Cole, who helped lead the bond campaign, said she envisioned the center as a “cultural hub for the African American community.”

But Malik said that vision never took shape.

“The facility was underutilized,” Malik said. “The city’s Audit Office did a couple of studies and came up with what we already knew — that the community needed it for evening and weekend hours, and we were just too understaffed to do that.”

An organizational chart for the newly created Office of Arts, Culture, Music & Entertainment (AACME) — the department now running the center — shows that the AACHF currently staffs only two full-time employees, including the director, with one position vacant. By contrast, the city’s other three cultural centers have between 11 and 33 employees.

The AACHF receives roughly $360,000 in annual funding, according to the city’s 2026 budget — about $1 million to $2 million less than its peers. The Asian American Resource Center receives $1.1 million, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center $2.7 million, and the George Washington Carver Museum about $1.4 million.

As Austin’s flagship Black cultural center, the Carver Museum receives more city funding and staffing than the AACHF. Still, the two facilities have different missions.

According to its website, the Carver is meant to serve as Austin’s anchor for Black history and culture, preserving local stories while celebrating the global contributions of Black people. By contrast, the AACHF was created to be more forward-facing — fostering cultural activity, business opportunity and creative collaboration within Austin’s Black community, similiar to the city’s other cultural centers.

But departmental reshuffling blurred that focus. When the Austin Public Library took over the AACHF in 2024, the facility shifted toward archival work and historical documentation, according to former staff.

Transferring the facility to the library was a move that many — including former employees and Six Square Executive Director Pam Benson Owens — called misguided. Six Square is the nonprofit that stewards the African American Cultural Heritage District where the AACHF is housed.

Owens, who has advised the city’s African American Resource Advisory Commission, said the library takeover muddied missions and duplicated work already being done by the Carver. She brought up her concerns to city staff, but she said her concerns were ignored.

“I realized that they were kind of trying to do some of the historic pieces under the library,” Owens said. “And my call to them was, ‘the heritage facility can’t get lost in the sauce.’ And they said, ‘It won’t get lost in the sauce.’ Well, I think it was.”

By the time the city took the Hamilton family’s properties in the early 2000s, the Carver was long established — and had expanded again by the time voters approved the bond to fund the AACHF in 2006 — leaving some to feel the AACHF was an empty symbolic gesture with no sustained plan for city support.

“It was evident to me that there was not enough thought into sustaining this kind of facility for the community,” Malik said. “It was just like, ‘Okay, here you go. Now y’all leave us alone.’”

In a written statement to the American-Statesman, AACME acknowledged these disparities and said its newly launched Creative Reset initiative aims to realign the facility’s operations with its original vision. 

“We are aware of past concerns regarding the AACHF’s utilization and resources,” the department said. “As a new standalone department, we see this as an opportunity to ensure that the facility becomes a thriving, accessible hub for arts, culture, and community gathering.”

As for the Dedrick-Hamilton house, the promises the city made to Hamilton fell through. The city had promised it would become a “heritage tourism site,” staffed as a visitor and educational center where people could learn about his family and East Austin. That never happened.

And part of the facility’s development, Hamilton’s childhood house was demolished and remains a largely empty dirt lot to this day, home only to a few beer bottles and soda cans strewn under a couple of trees. It’s mostly used as a dusty parking lot for the facility. 

“The city has held vacant, undeveloped parcels on Block 16 of 11th Street, like a land bank, in perpetuity for two decades,” Hamilton told the Statesman. “Meanwhile, robbing my family of its generational wealth appreciation in value, as the land has since quintupled in value.”

The failures of the AACHF are disappointing to Malik because, just a few years ago, in spite of its shortages, the facility seemed to be hitting its stride. But that progress was short-lived.

When artist, activist and educator Florinda Bryant took over as a program coordinator in 2022, she and Malik revived the long-dormant space with classes, performances and residencies. Bryant described a packed schedule of artist residencies, drumming lessons, single-mother support groups and pop-up markets that filled the center every few months.

The building, once quiet, “was alive again,” said martial arts instructor Da’Mon Stith, who taught African-based martial arts through the residency program. 

“You’d drive by at night and hear the drums,” Bryant said. “We were busting at the seams.”

During that time, the facility helped artists and teachers who used the space establish themselves in East Austin and obtain city grant funding, according to Bryant and Stith. The AACHF helped Stith apply for and win Austin’s Elevate grant, which the city describes as supporting “culturally vibrant and diverse artistic content.”

But by late 2023, that energy unraveled. According to Bryant and Malik, when the city hired a new supervisor and then transferred the facility from the Economic Development Department to the library, programming was abruptly shut down. Vendors and instructors were only given a week’s notice. 

The sudden closure forced Stith back into a nomadic teaching model — “moving from place to place,” he said — which made it hard to retain students or expand his practice.

“We haven’t really grown using that model of being constantly on the go,” he said.

He described returning to the building months later and finding the dance studio converted into a meeting room — a symbol, he said, of wasted potential. 

Malik said the new structure barred instructors from charging class fees and limited events to standard office hours, killing momentum.

The facility was transferred to AACME in 2025 after only a year under the library. AACME now oversees all four city cultural centers, consolidating management once split among multiple departments.

Before the transition to the library, the city had spent $132,359 in 2023 to hire a consultant to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for the facility. It outlined a long-term vision for sustainability and community-driven programming. But according to the city, the plan was never implemented — stuck in what Owen called “a holding pattern unnecessarily” because of the bouncing around between departments.

“The city spent close to $150,000 for a strategic planning process for the facility that has gone nowhere,” Bryant said. “Do you know what we could have done with that money?”

AACME said it has reviewed the plan and intends to incorporate it into its current work. Although the plan was never formally adopted, officials said it contains valuable community feedback that will guide the next phase of development. 

But Owens is skeptical. 

“That’s code for ‘buying our time, and we’re not going to adopt it,’” she said. “They’ll just hire another consulting firm to tell us what we already know again.”

AACME, which officially became a standalone department on Oct. 1, said it is still in the early stages of defining its role and structure. Phase II of its Creative Reset initiative — which launched on the first of this month — will include community listening sessions, facility assessments and program reviews across Austin’s cultural network, including the AACHF. The department said it plans to engage artists, vendors and residents “to co-create a path forward” and strengthen stability and communication in future partnerships.

“We are deeply committed to working alongside the community to activate the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility as a space that honors history, uplifts creativity and embodies the shared vision of a more equitable and culturally rich Austin,” said Angela Means, AACME’s inaugural director.

Officials said their long-term goal is to rebuild trust and ensure the facility fulfills the vision set out nearly two decades ago — though they did not specify what steps they plan to take to reach that goal.

For Hamilton, the city’s promises still feel unfinished.

The remainder of Hamilton’s former property will likely be developed into multifamily housing after the City Council approved plans in 2024.