Texas Southern University, University of Houston and Jack Yates High School is entering a cooperative collaboration to archive the history of Third Ward and its people for the very first time.

Third Ward, located southeast of downtown Houston, is in the process of aggressive gentrification as new loft apartments and coffee shops replace shot gun style row houses, middle income houses and black businesses that once made up the core of the community.

Caroll Parrott Blue, who is currently working with the University of Houston, is the coordinator of the project and also a Yates’ graduate. She’s originally from Third Ward and the collaboration was her idea. Blue, who is on a one-year leave of absence from University of Central Florida, will be working with Yates School of Communications instructors Ray Carrington, who teaches photography; Terri Williams, who teaches journalism and Lionell Hilliard who teaches media technology.

“I’ve been experimenting with how do we get people to tell their stories,” Blue said of her project. “I believe this will be a valuable learning lesson for the students.”

Blue contacted Carrington with the idea of the project. The School of Communications students will be performing the tasks that they’re learning in school. The journalism classes will conduct the interviews, the photography class will take various photos, and the media classes will videotape the interviews and subjects. By reporting the stories of the people of Third Ward, it is Blue’s hope that it will serve as a valuable historical archive for a community in transition.

Doing the project as an assignment will benefit the students in many ways, Carrington said.

“The project really ties in with the saying, ‘You never know where you’ve been until you know where you’re going,’ ” Carrington explained.

Lawyers, doctors, ministers, entrepreneurs of Third Ward, along with institutions such as banks, will be documented for the project. It is the goal of the archive to be an ongoing project, tracking the progress of what people in the community have done in the past, and what they are doing now in the present, and will do in the future.

The project was designed to be ongoing, and it will be uploaded on the Internet for the world to see. Blue is working with a number of churches and community groups to have a rotating kiosk where Third Ward residents can come and have family photographs scanned and be available for interviews with Blue's team. The website will be available as long as there’s any interest in the Third Ward community.

This project was invented to preserve the history of Third Ward. It is also an opportunity to do something for the neighborhood.

“There is so much richness and importance in the Third Ward community,” Carrington said. “They’re over 85 churches, and it is also home to many world renowned people such as Dr. John B. Coleman, the Allen Sisters (Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad), the late Councilman Judson Robinson, and artist John Biggers.”

Williams said she is excited about the project. When she first came to Yates, she helped her students start an ongoing series in the school paper called “Diary of Third Ward,” which features stories about news and features within the community. She said that it’s important for young people to understand how gentrification will ultimately transform the neighborhood, changing it from the way the teens now know it.

“I try to get the students to understand that the Third Ward of today will be no longer 10 or 20 years from now,” she said. “That’s why it’s important for them to appreciate the stories long time residents can tell them.”

Carrington agrees.

“The value of land is being changed right before our eyes,” Carrington said. “People should have a say-so of what’s happening here without being displaced.”