The tarps on the roof, donated vinyl from old billboards, billow and rustle. The wind doesn’t care about the State of Texas historic plaque in the front yard. To the rain, it means nothing that in 1907, J. Vance Lewis, one of the first African American lawyers in the United States, built what he called “the Van Court,” an elegant Victorian cottage in Freedmen’s Town, one of the country’s most prosperous black communities.

Lewis was a controversial, flamboyant lawyer of the sort that frequently rivets modern Houston — a turn-of-the-century version of Tony Buzbee, Jolanda Jones or Dick DeGuerin — and the Van Court was his autobiography’s happy ending, proof of his success. In “Out of the Ditch: A True Story of an Ex-Slave” he proudly described the house at 1218 Wilson as “the modern building which the author built for his queen,” his wife Pauline, whom he described as “singing and playing upon the piano her favorite song, ‘Love Me and the World is Mine.’”

The world is no longer J. Vance Lewis’. He died in 1925. These days at the Van Court, when the wind blows, the rain gets in and rots the wood. The Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, which owns the house, can’t even afford a $4,500 commercial-grade tarp to protect the place until there’s money for a proper restoration — which, according to board member Evan Michaelides, would likely cost around $600,000.

The Van Court is hardly alone. Historic preservation is, to put it kindly, not Houston’s strong suit. But even by the area’s low general standards, preservation of African American history lags behind. Though rediscovered black graves and the remains of slave plantations seem constantly in the news, preservationists struggle to pay for even the basics.

That struggle comes as interest in black history is running high.

“We’re at an important inflection point in the nation,” said Brent Leggs, author of “Preserving African American Historic Places.” “More Americans care now about African American history, and they’re looking to rediscover places where African Americans made their mark.”

Leggs is also executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the largest preservation campaign ever on behalf of African American history. Since 2017 the fund has raised more than $23 million of its original $25 million goal, and so far has invested nearly $3 million in 38 projects around the U.S.

But that’s a drop in the national bucket. Those 38 winners were chosen from 1,300 proposals. To fund them all, Leggs estimates, would cost $130 million. The oversupply of worthy projects, he says, shows how undervalued and underfunded African American preservation has been.

As of last week’s deadline, the fund had received 562 grant proposals. The Yates Museum has applied, of course — organizers aim to turn the Van Court into a museum of law and education — but the fund has turned down the museum before, and the odds this time are no less daunting.

Controversial, flamboyant

Historians agree that Lewis’ autobiography doesn’t strictly adhere to inconvenient facts, starting with his birth date. There’s good historic evidence that Lewis was born around 1863 on a plantation near Houma, La., and so would have been a toddler when slavery ended.

Lewis, though, tells a more entertaining story. By his account, Emancipation came when he was a boy, apparently around 10 or 11. His mother, he wrote, announced that “Mr. Abe Lincoln done set us free.”

Lewis’ best friend, “the young master,” confirmed this. Lewis wrote that personally, he saw no reason to rejoice: “It was my opinion we were being driven from our homes and set adrift to wander, I knew not where.” Besides, there was the matter of parting from his friend, and having to divvy up the three coon dogs they shared.

Instead, Lewis’ family chose to stay on the plantation, which continued to grow cotton. His father, Doc Lewis, supervised the plantation’s ditch gang, and Lewis was educated with 200 or so black children of different ages, all of whom started together as first graders at the plantation’s new school.

Orphaned, Lewis saved $64 and set off for college at Leland University in New Orleans. After graduating, he found work teaching in East Texas, and in 1894 graduated from law school in Ann Arbor, Mich. He soon won a string of high-profile criminal cases, and settled awhile in New Orleans. But he found that city “old and fixed in its way of doing things,” and so moved to what he called “the beautiful city of Houston, Texas, the garden spot of the world.”

Piano and wallpaper

“I wanted to get into a city that was young, vigorous and enterprising,” Lewis wrote. That was certainly Houston — and in particular, Freedmen’s Town.

From Emancipation until the 1920s, Freedmen’s Town and its surrounding Fourth Ward were not just the cultural and economic center of black life in Houston, but known across the country as a place where African Americans were thriving.

Tyina Steptoe, an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona, grew up in Houston, but hadn’t known much about Freedmen’s Town until she began researching her book “Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City.” Reading archived African American newspapers, Steptoe found that Houston was a place that African Americans in other parts of the country bragged about.

Part of that success, she said, was because more than in other cities, African Americans in Houston intentionally did business with members of their own community, rather than patronizing white businesses.

In his first major criminal trial here, his client was pronounced not guilty. “The news of the verdict spread rapidly throughout Houston,” he writes, “the reason being that a Negro lawyer, the first and only one that had ever appeared before a Harris County bar, had secured a verdict in favor of a Negro client.”

Though prosperous and prominent, Lewis frequently ran into trouble. At one point he was barred from practicing criminal law; at another, he was thrown in jail. In his autobiography, he explained that many people, both black and white, were jealous of his success.

Those problems, though, didn’t stop him from traveling the United States and abroad, making money with inspirational speeches. “I say to you, my friend, the South is the place for us,” he said in one. “Great opportunities confront us here.”

In his autobiography, Lewis about his marriage to Miss Pauline Gray and their happy home at the Van Court. Pauline, a teacher, had grown up in Freedman’s Town, in the house next door to the Van Court. Her mother, Isabella Simms, gave the couple the land.

The Yates Museum owns the Isabella Simms house, too. Like the Van Court, it’s water-damaged, tarped and awaiting repair. To date, the museum has restored only two of the six historic Freedmen’s Town buildings it owns: the Rutherford B.H. Yates house and a tiny barbershop, both of which were named in 2019 as sites on UNESCO’s Slave Route project. Volunteers are finishing work on a third, the Jacob Nicholson (Nixon) house, which will become an archaeology field lab.

On the Van Court’s rickety front porch, visitors must put on hard hats before entering. The bedraggled house’s foundation is wobbly, its wood water-damaged. But inside it’s easy to see how elegant the place once was, with its high, high ceilings, its transom windows, shiplap and bullseye rosette moldings. Pauline’s piano must have been in one of the Van Court’s front parlors — maybe the one to the right of the hall, with the lovely bay window; or maybe the one to the left, where rain gets in and buckles the pine floor.

Astoundingly, hand-painted wallpaper still clings to the hallway walls: Pastel cherry blossoms alternate with Lincoln Memorials and Washington Monuments.

Catherine Roberts, the museum’s co-founder and acting executive director, foresees no problem restoring the house — if and when her group has the money to do so. The Van Court, she says, is in better shape than the Rutherford B.H. Yates house was before restoration made it a UNESCO-worthy showplace.

“It will restore beautifully,” she said.

lisa.gray@chron.com