Connecting trail of US civil rights
TWO years ago representatives from Southern state tourism departments gathered at Georgia State University to start work on what would become the nation’s first civil rights trail.
They knew their states were dotted with landmarks that commemorated significant events in the struggle for racial equality. In Arkansas, for example, there is Little Rock Central High School, where nine brave African-American students enrolled in an all-white high school. In Alabama the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site honours black pilots who risked their lives during World War II even as Jim Crow laws denied them rights at home.
While many sites were thriving on their own, some weren’t connected to one another, even ones nearby, said Lee Sentell, Alabama’s state tourism director. “No one had even done an inventory of civil rights landmarks,” he said. “They saw themselves as one-offs and didn’t realise they were part of a network.”
The group, under the umbrella of Travel South USA, decided to do something about it.
Along with research experts at the university, they made a list of 100 sites that seemed most significant. They linked them geographically, creating a map of how to get from one to another. The trail, called the US Civil Rights Trail, will be officially introduced on New Year’s Day (the date is significant: on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation).
The trail’s website will explain each landmark’s importance and feature interviews with heroes of the movement. The site also makes connections for visitors, showing how the events in one place affected those in another. For example Bruce Boynton, a law student who was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only restaurant in Virginia (a case later heard by the Supreme Court), was the son of the woman, Amelia Boynton, who invited the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to visit Selma and who helped plan the march from that city to Montgomery, Alabama.
“Hopfully when people hear about the civil rights trail, it will make them aware there are locations near where they are that changed the world,” Sentell said. “I’m just surprised this hadn’t been done earlier.”
In the past few years a loud debate has raged across the country over what to do with Confederate statues. While those arguments are focused on whether to tear down or remove monuments, other government officials, nonprofit groups and entrepreneurs have been more quietly constructing new ways to focus on the history of civil rights. Some efforts, like the US Civil Rights Trail, are intended to bring more attention to existing sites. Others are building structures that better explain what took place in the past.
“These projects are positive spins on the social injustice, monument discussion happening in our country,” said Jeanne Cyriaque, a cultural heritage consultant for the Georgia Department of Economic Development. “They describe a people’s movement that is very much at the forefront today.”
She played a major role in helping the state of Georgia create the Georgia Civil Rights Trail, which will launch in April 2018, in time to commemorate the 50th anniversary – April 4 – of King’s death. This initiative, which will have its own website, printed maps and signage, will take visitors to lesser-known sites like the brick house in Grady County where Jackie Robinson was born. Another stop is the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, one of the oldest operating AfricanAmerican churches in North America, which has colourful stained glass windows depicting black church leaders like the Reverend George Liele, who organised First African Baptist in 1773.
These projects are not just in the South. In 2016, New York state, in conjunction with the company Black Heritage Tours, began tours to teach visitors the hidden history among African, Native American and Dutch populations during colonisation. The tours, which last from one to three days, go from New York City to Albany along the Hudson River. Stops include the easily missed Harriet Tubman Statue in Harlem; African burial grounds; and mansions owned by Dutch settlers who owned slaves.
L Lloyd Stewart, author of the book A Far Cry From Freedom, went on one of the inaugural tours last summer with several other participants. “Americans can be very deficient in the history of their own country,” he said. “We don’t realise that enslavement began in New York state, and this tour gives you an idea about that. It gives you a picture of what life may have been like during that period.”
And there are more than just trails and tours. In Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, the nonprofit group Equal Justice Initiative purchased 6 acres on which it is building a memorial to honour the victims of lynching. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is expected to open in 2018. The renderings are powerful; 800 columns, one for each county where lynching took place, are suspended in the air like a body being hanged. The names of more than 4,000 victims are inscribed on them.
In Jackson, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is scheduled to celebrate its opening December 9. It includes eight galleries that explore the experience of African-Americans in Mississippi from the end of the Civil War until today.