By Mary Moore Mason
On November 14, 1960, three six-year-old black girls – protected by US Marshals against the racially-abusive crowd below – marched up the steps of New Orleans’ previously-all-white McDonogh 19 Elementary School and opened up a new page in America’s history.
The days ahead were both lonely and potentially ominous as the three little girls were educated alone – all the white children had been removed by their families – and were limited to a small portion of the building and forbidden to use its playground.
But on May 4, 2022, the three former classmates, now in their late sixties, returned to the school they once had to struggle to attend to cut the ribbon on the pioneering TEP Center, its name inspired by their surnames: Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost.
The long-abandoned school had actually been bought by Ms Tate with the aid of various supporters and now houses on its ground floor the headquarters of two organisations focused on racial harmony and community outreach. Even more remarkably, its two upper floors have been transformed into 25 affordable flats for local people who are 55 years and older.
This is just one of the many inspiring stories of African American entrepreneurship now emerging throughout the ‘New South’ and beyond at the same time as new museums open covering the country’s racially-diverse heritage.
One of the attractions of Ohio Riverside-sited Paducah, Kentucky – named a UNESCO Creative City – is the 1908 Hotel Metropolitan. Founded by local black visionary Maggie Steed during the racist Jim Crow era it became a popular destination listed in The Green Book for Negro Travelers who were denied accommodation in whites-only hotels, restaurants and other places.
Destined for demolition, it was brought back to life in 1999 by Betty Dobson, who, in the role of Ms Steed, gives tours of the rooms once occupied by touring superstars Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Ike and Tina Turner as well as star athletes, the Harlem Globe Trotters.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, another former Green Book house – which included in its guest list Gladys Knight and author James Baldwin – is now thriving as The Historic Magnolia House Hotel under the ownership of the local black Pass family, with an interpretive museum planned to be built next door.
Other former such hotels are opening elsewhere in the South, perhaps inspired by the 2018 Oscar-winning film, The Green Book, which was based on the real-life experiences of black concert pianist Dr Don Shirley as he toured through the racist South with his white driver. Among them is the AG Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, which is scheduled to reopen later this year after a total renovation. In the past it had been a Civil Rights base for Dr Martin Luther King Jr, as well as an overnight home-from-home for Duke Ellington, Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin.
Because of its heritage it should be an ideal overnight stop for those visiting Birmingham’s Civil Rights Institute en route to Selma, site of the landmark Edmund Pettus Bridge, which viewers of the powerful 2014 film Selma will remember was the location of the horrific 1965 racial attacks against marchers headed to the state capital Montgomery to appeal for voting rights. And there they will find a treasure house of sites that include the Freedom Rides Museum in a former bus station, the Rosa Parks Museum, dedicated to the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white person and thus started a major bus boycott, and the house where Dr King and his family lived when he was the pastor of a local church.
The legacy of Dr King becomes particularly vibrant in Atlanta, Georgia, where you can visit his family home, museum and the tomb that was later shared by his wife, Coretta, as well as the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, which is where he was assassinated in 1968.
Memphis and the nearby Mississippi Delta Country are also full of museums devoted to the heritage of such black musicians as BB King and Muddy Waters who lived and/or musically thrived in the area. And in January 2021, Nashville, best known for the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry, which primarily feature white musicians, broadened its scope as the eponymous Music City USA with the launch of the National Museum of African American Music.
Scheduled to open this June in Charleston, South Carolina, is the long-awaited International African American Museum. Built on Gadsden’s Wharf, one of the local harbour points through which an estimated 45 per cent of all African slaves arrived, its professed aim is not just to share the story of their victimisation but also ‘how they shaped the economic, political and cultural development of the nation’. Among its exhibits will be a genealogical chart of one of those slaves, an ancestor of Michelle Obama.
A particular insight into the life they faced is also provided by the opera Omar, based upon the autobiography of a Carolinas-based slave from Senegal. It premiered in June 2022, at Charleston’s prestigious Spoleto Festival and then went on tour across the country.
For even more of an insight of slave life, visit the McLeod Plantation Historic Site just across the Ashley River from Charleston, where guides poignantly tell stories of the slave children who were often sold away from their parents, and where descendants of slaves continued to live in – and pay rent for – the plantation cabins until the 1990s, when they were evicted by developers. Meanwhile, the façade of the once simple great house was transformed with white columns to make it more what visitors enamoured by the Old South might expect.
Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, has also veered away from the romanticised Gone with the Wind image of pre-Civil War life by offering tours, as does McLeod, of its slave cabins with narrative descriptions of the everyday, often brutal, life of its enslaved inhabitants.
Also providing more of a focus on its African American heritage than it has in the past is Richmond, Virginia, which doubled as the state capital and the Capital of the Confederacy during the 1861-1865 American Civil War. Remaining is its outstanding Civil War Museum, set in the former Tredegar munitions factory; gone are the equestrian and other statues of the Confederate generals that once guarded grand Monument Avenue. In fact, the only remaining statue is of the late, local black tennis superstar Arthur Ashe, whose name has also been added to the Boulevard that runs in front of the renowned Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And it, in turn, has been fronted since 2019 by the Rumours of War statue, created by Kehinde Wiley and inspired by a former Confederate equestrian statue, except that its rider is a casually-dressed young African American man.
Once known as ‘The Harlem of the South’, the city’s Jackson Ward neighbourhood also has statues to two other local black superstars – famous early-20th-century film and TV star Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson and Maggie Walker, America’s first woman bank president. Her nearby home is open to the public and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia is also close by.
A great meeting and eating place is the Ward’s Mama J’s restaurant, opened in 2009 by Lester Johnson and his friend, Jonathan Mayo, and named after Lester’s mother, Velma Johnson, well-known as a fabulous soul-food cook. In fact, an increasing number of black-owned restaurants are opening up across America – and getting awards. For instance, the prestigious James Beard Foundation has bestowed American Classic Awards on the nearly-century-old Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in small-town Mariana, Arkansas, and on Atlanta’s popular Busy Bee Café on Martin Luther King Jr Drive, which has, since 1947, been dishing out such yummy comfort food as meatloaf and chicken giblets with rice.
That’s not to forget the James Beard-nominated Sambou’s African Kitchen in Jackson, Mississippi, which features owner Joseph Sambou’s Gambian-inspired cuisine or Laura’s Two restaurant, in Lafayette, Louisiana, which is run by three generations of the same family headed by Madonna Broussard – who has 8,400 Facebook followers –and offers delicious Creole cuisine that was featured on CNN TV.
Louisville, Kentucky, is best-known as the home of the world’s most-famous horse race, the Kentucky Derby, which in both its museum and a hall mural in the adjacent Churchill Downs racecourse features tributes to the black jockeys who won 15 of the first 28 Derbys. Almost as well-known are the Muhammad Ali Center, which covers the life of the colourful world championship boxer, and, to a lesser degree, the city’s role as America’s ‘Bourbon City’. And there the drink industry’s African American heritage is being increasingly acknowledged.
The Evan Williams distillery’s Bourbon Experience features a barman posing as Tom Bullock, the first African American to write and publish a cocktail book, and the Brough Brothers Distillery, run by brothers Victor, Bryson and Chris Yarbrough, is Kentucky’s first black-owned distillery. And to its east, Lexington’s Fresh Bourbon, owned by Sean and Tia Edwards, is also making waves with its blend of Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee whiskey.
Meanwhile, the Nearest Green Distillery in Shellbyville, Tennessee, has two unique claims to fame – it’s the first and only major distillery in America whose CEO is an African American woman, Fawn Weaver, and it’s named after Nathan ‘Nearest’ Green, the first known African American Master Distiller – he taught Jack Daniel his trade! His great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Eady Butler is the distillery’s award-winning Master Blender.
Of course, not all African American heritage is found in the South. Cincinnati, Ohio, is home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which focuses on the network of routes and safe houses that enabled slaves to escape to areas in the US and Canada where they could be free.
The Greenwood Rising interpretive site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a tribute to the once-thriving local community known as ‘The Black Wall Street’. On May 31, 1921, it was torched, bombed and devastated, with many fatalities by a white mob and local officials inspired by the inaccurate claim that a young black man had molested a local white girl. Detroit’s Charles H Wright Museum of African American History claims to hold one of the world’s largest collection of African American objects, and the city is also home to the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum, which pays tribute to the acclaimed World War II squadron of black airmen, as does a museum in Tuskegee, Alabama, where they were trained.
And there are such specialised attractions as the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri; Houston’s Buffalo Soldier’s Museum, which is focused on the soldiers of colour who helped open up the Wild West; the Black American West Museum in Denver, Colorado, which features both cowboys and other early settlers; and Chicago’s Pullman Porter Museum, which pays tribute to the African American porters who were indispensable to the often-segregated railway system.
But of them all, the place you definitely should not miss is Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its five stories above ground – another five are underground – overlook the museum-lined National Mall. It was opened on September 24, 2016, by President Obama and is now the world’s largest African American museum. Among its 40,000-or-so objects are everything from a slave cabin and the Bible of Nat Turner – who led an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia – to Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and a Tuskegee Airman’s World War II Purple Heart medal for bravery beyond the call of duty.
