If we’ve heard of Austin’s 1928 Master Plan of forced racial segregation, it's probably because of the work of the City’s Equity Division (formerly the Austin Equity Office). If we participated in the George Floyd uprising in June 2020, we were safer because the Equity Division intervened on the APD proposal to implement a curfew and to crack down on protestors. We, or someone we know, or someone who matters to us were able to pay rent, buy school supplies, or keep the lights on because Austin was the first city in Texas to implement a Family Stabilization grant. That was also because of the efforts of the Equity Division.

Since 2018, the Equity Division has supported grassroots and volunteer-led efforts tackling significant challenges in our community, including COVID-19 recovery efforts, public safety, homelessness response, and immigrant inclusion. They have funded computer access for Latina girls, mentoring for African immigrants, and health resources and access to practitioners for Queer People of Color. These are just a few of thousands of ways that the Equity Division has made the lives of Austin residents safer and more just.

Given the transformative power of their work, it is no surprise that Trump’s Department of Justice has announced an investigation of Austin’s Equity Division. Charges leveled against the Equity Division in a September 2025 letter from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to Mayor Kirk Watson include their efforts to:

Delineate clear racial equity expectations
Minimize bias
Identify gaps in representation
Develop specific targets for eliminating gaps using national best practices

Even as we watch the gross miscarriage of justice under the Trump administration across the country, it is still a gut punch when it lands in Austin. When it specifically targets our City’s Equity Division.

This power house for racial equity in the City of Austin was not the brain-child of Council Members. In 2014, while Austin was widely listed as one of the most desirable cities in the country, a UT study documented it as simultaneously the most economically segregated city in the nation. While every other major city with an expanding population also had a growing number of Black residents, the number of Black Austin residents was declining. Families with multi-generational roots in Austin were leaving for communities with better schools. For neighborhoods without pothole-ridden streets and dangerous floods. And the City of Austin was complicit in the exodus.

For decades, the City forced segregation of Austin’s Black and Brown communities into neighborhoods east of IH 35. They encouraged the construction of dangerous gasoline tank farms, electrical power stations, wastewater treatment, and solid waste facilities within those neighborhoods. Rather than generous setbacks to protect natural streams in west Austin, east Austin creeks were lined with concrete. Measures of maternal health, education outcomes, wealth, and life expectancy across the City showed a consistent pattern: positive outcomes in Austin’s west and predominantly white neighborhoods; worse outcomes in the zip codes occupied mostly by people of color.

In response to this disturbing reality for Austin’s Black and People of Color residents, Communities of Color United for Racial Justice, a coalition of BIPOC organizations, demanded that the City of Austin evaluate how its policies and programs contributed to the struggles of their communities. They asked for an equity assessment tool. What they got was an office.

It was probably supposed to be a token gesture. Brion Oaks, the Equity Office’s first director, was planted in the City’s real estate division. But Brion hired Kellee Coleman. Kellee was born and raised in Austin, Texas and she understood the power of her community. Brion and Kellee worked together to ground the work of the Equity Office in a multi-racial, community-based organizing process.

It is their basis in community organizing that has made Austin’s Equity Division effective. Now, as the Trump administration comes to take it apart, community organizers are asking you, our Council Members and City Manager, to step up to defend what we value. Protect what we need. Protect what we love.

Austin: The only major fast-growing city with a declining Black Population:

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/67535bb2-810d-4b3d-a87c-89706e98d28f

Austin: the Nation’s Most Economically Segregated City:

https://www.texastribune.org/2015/02/23/austin-most-economically-segregated-metro-area/

https://news.utexas.edu/2015/06/30/underbelly-of-the-u-s-s-most-economically-segregated-city/

https://rogerlmartin.com/mpi/content/insight-segregated-city/index.html