What It Means to Curate for a City On the Black Texas Voices project for the Mayor of Leander, Texas

When the Mayor of Leander, Texas reached out about Black History Month programming, the ask seemed straightforward. Curate a collection of images celebrating Black Texans for the city's official use.

But nothing about representing Black history to a civic audience is actually straightforward.

Every image is an argument. Every selection says something about who a community believes deserves to be remembered, celebrated, and seen. Municipal cultural programming, even when well intentioned, has a long history of flattening Black history into safe, comfortable narratives that honor the past without unsettling the present.

That was not the work I was willing to do.

What the project actually required

The Black Texas Voices collection was built around a single guiding question. Whose story has Leander never told, and why?

That question pushed the curation beyond the predictable figures and toward the full texture of Black Texas life. Entrepreneurs, educators, artists, activists, and community builders whose contributions shaped the state in ways that rarely make it into official civic memory.

The research process was as important as the final selection. Understanding the historical context of Black communities in Central Texas, the specific erasures that municipal histories tend to perform, and the visual language that honors rather than tokenizes. That groundwork is what separates cultural curation from image searching.

The deliverable was completed in a day and a half. The thinking behind it took considerably longer.

Why this work matters beyond one city

Leander is not unique. Municipalities across the South are grappling with the same question. How do we honor Black history authentically rather than performatively? How do we create cultural programming that Black residents actually recognize as true?

Most cities don't have the internal expertise to answer that question well. That gap is exactly where Code of the South operates.

The Black Texas Voices project was one city, one mayor, one Black History Month. But it represents a much larger need. For culturally grounded administrative expertise that helps civic institutions do this work with the seriousness it deserves.

That is what Code of the South was built to provide.

Dorian Henry II is the founder of Code of the South and a museum studies scholar completing a master's thesis on HBCU museum economic sustainability at Baylor University. He has held visiting scholar appointments at Yale University, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Bard Graduate Center.