A mulatto, Mike Lunnon was born in 1830 in either Mississippi or Tennessee and moved to Houston in the 1850s presumably with the Cage family. In 1870, Lunnon purchased seven and a half acres of land on Yates Gully (Michaux Gully) in the Luke Moore Survey from Cage for $200. Lunnon’s house-hold consisted of his wife Margarette Clyberg Lunnon and their seven children, three sons and four daughters, born between 1859 and 1877. In 1891, Lunnon bought eleven more acres in the Samuel Williams Survey from Col. John Thomas Brady. On these lands, the family resided, held church services, and attended elementary school, which met in the Mt. Gilead Missionary Baptist Church. The family continued to grow as two of Lunnon’s daughters married the Williams brothers, Frank and Charles, and both had several children. When Mike Lunnon died in 1906, he left a will that, when probated in 1909, gave all of his property valued at $5,000 debt-free to his wife, an impressive accomplishment for a black man who could not read or write. It was also admira-ble that an African American man in that era had competed in the capitalist society and owned property, which equated to power in the eyes of many. The Lunnons had created a foundation that allowed a black family to thrive during Reconstruction—an era that, for the first time, offered African Americans the opportunity to control their own destiny and fulfill their Constitutional right to pursue the American dream. Mike Lunnon was part of the first generation after slavery came to an end that bequeathed an estate to his family. Jack Yates, a respected leader among Houston’s population of newly freed slaves, thought the road to prosperity and peaceful coexistence between the races required blacks to live in separate–but not distant−communities.6 Although Reconstruction was intended to provide this space and an opportunity to succeed, it did not last.