Tennessee Tourism Celebrates Designation Of Two New Sites Along The U.S. Civil Rights Trail

Jefferson Street Sound Museum and the Museum of Christian and Gospel Music are officially designated as sites along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development (TDTD) announced.

“Tennessee is proud to be home to 17 sites along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. From Memphis to Nashville to Clinton, visitors can learn about the brave men and women who fought for their Civil Rights,” said Commissioner Mark Ezell, TDTD and Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail Marketing Alliance. “These destinations shine a light on the triumphant and impactful stories at historic places across the state that shaped our nation's history.”

Located in the heart of historic Jefferson Street, Jefferson Street Sound Museum showcases how music, culture and activism intersected. During the 1940s-1970s, Jefferson Street stood as a vibrant hub - home to clubs, studios and venues where artists like Jimi Hendrix, Etta James, Ray Charles, James Brown, Tina Turner, Little Richard and countless others performed. Jefferson Street and its artists played a central role in shaping both Nashville's musical legacy and the Civil Rights Movement. Today as a museum, it offers both musical and educational programming that celebrates the R&B sounds that once flourished in Nashville, along with a fully functioning music studio.

The Museum of Christian & Gospel Music looks at the powerful role the genre and its musicians played as the sound served as a source of hope, unity and inspiration during the fight for Civil Rights. Visitors can experience state-of-the-art exhibits that celebrate today's artists, honor the trailblazers of the past, and inspire future generations. Through interactive displays and personal artifacts, visitors can explore how gospel music sustained faith-based communities and how pivotal artists set the stage and contributed to the Civil Rights Era and beyond, whose courageous voices created life-changing music.

Both museums join Nashville's Civil Rights' legacy with destinations like the National Museum of African American Music and the Civil Rights Room at Nashville Public Library, among others. Additional locations statewide include the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, which opens a new Legacy Building this spring, and Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton.

Four additional historic sites were also added along the national U.S. Civil Rights Trail, including the Historic Caroline County Courthouse Campus in Bowling Green, Virginia; Gloucester Museum of History in Gloucester, Virginia; Texas & Pacific Railway Depot in Natchitoches, Louisiana and Jacksonville Civil Rights Trail in Jacksonville, Florida.

ABOUT THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL

Launched in 2018, the U.S. Civil Rights Trail is a collection of more than 130 churches, courthouses, schools, museums and other landmarks primarily in the Southern states where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice. The people, locations and destinations included in the Civil Rights Trail provide a way for families, travelers and educators to experience history firsthand. For details about the sites and stories from Civil Rights pioneers, visit CivilRightsTrail.com

At International African American Museum Opening, A Reclaiming Of Sacred Ground For Enslaved Kin

When the International African American Museum opens to the public Tuesday in South Carolina, it becomes a new site of homecoming and pilgrimage for descendants of enslaved Africans whose arrival in the Western Hemisphere begins on the docks of the lowcountry coast.

Overlooking the old wharf in Charleston at which nearly half of the enslaved population first entered North America, the 150,000-square-foot (14,000-square-meter) museum houses exhibits and artifacts exploring how African Americans’ labor, perseverance, resistance and cultures shaped the Carolinas, the nation and the world.

It also includes a genealogy research center to help families trace their ancestors’ journey from point of arrival on the land.

The opening happens at a time when the very idea of Black people’s survival through slavery, racial apartheid and economic oppression being quintessential to the American story is being challenged throughout the U.S. Leaders of the museum said its existence is not a rebuttal to current attempts to suppress history, but rather an invitation to dialogue and discovery.

“Show me a courageous space, show me an open space, show me a space that meets me where I am, and then gets me where I asked to go,” said Dr. Tonya Matthews, the museum’s president and CEO.

“I think that’s the superpower of museums,” she said. “The only thing you need to bring to this museum is your curiosity, and we’ll do the rest.”

The $120 million facility features nine galleries that contain nearly a dozen interactive exhibits of more than 150 historical objects and 30 works of art. One of the museum’s exhibits will rotate two to three times each year.

Upon entering the space, eight large video screens play a looped trailer of a diasporic journey that spans centuries, from cultural roots on the African continent and the horrors of the Middle Passage to the regional and international legacies that spawned out of Africans’ dispersal and migration across lands.

The screens are angled as if to beckon visitors towards large windows and a balcony at the rear of the museum, revealing sprawling views of the Charleston harbor.

One unique feature of the museum is its gallery dedicated to the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee people. Their isolation on rice, indigo and cotton plantations on coastal South Carolina, Georgia and North Florida helped them maintain ties to West African cultural traditions and creole language. A multimedia, chapel-sized “praise house” in the gallery highlights the faith expressions of the Gullah Geechee and shows how those expressions are imprinted on Black American gospel music.

On Saturday, the museum grounds buzzed with excitement as its founders, staff, elected officials and other invited guests dedicated the grounds in spectacular fashion.

The program was emceed by award-winning actress and director Phylicia Rashad and included stirring appearances by poet Nikky Finney and the McIntosh County Shouters, who perform songs passed down by enslaved African Americans.

“Truth sets us free — free to understand, free to respect and free to appreciate the full spectrum of our shared history,” said former Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley, Jr. who is widely credited for the idea to bring the museum to the city.

Planning for the International African American Museum dates back to 2000, when Riley called for its creation in a State of the City address. It took many more years, through setbacks in fundraising and changes in museum leadership, before construction started in 2019.

Originally set to open in 2020, the museum was further delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, as well as by issues in the supply chain of materials needed to complete construction.

Gadsden’s Wharf, a 2.3-acre waterfront plot where it’s estimated that up 45% of enslaved Africans brought to the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries walked, sets the tone for how the museum is experienced. The wharf was built by Revolutionary War figure Christopher Gadsden.

The land is now part of an intentionally designed ancestral garden. Black granite walls are erected on the spot of a former storage house, a space where hunched enslaved humans perished awaiting their transport to the slave market. The walls are emblazoned with lines of Maya Angelou’s poem, “And Still I Rise.”

The museum’s main structure does not touch the hallowed grounds on which it is located. Instead, it is hoisted above the wharf by 18 cylindrical columns. Beneath the structure is a shallow fountain tribute to the men, women and children whose bodies were inhumanely shackled together in the bellies of ships in the transatlantic slave trade.

To discourage visitors from walking on the raised outlines of the shackled bodies, a walkway was created through the center of the wharf tribute.

“There’s something incredibly significant about reclaiming a space that was once the landing point, the beginning of a horrific American journey for captured Africans,” said Malika Pryor, the museum’s chief learning and education officer.

Walter Hood, founder and creative director of Hood Design Studios based in Oakland, California, designed the landscape of the museum’s grounds. The designs are inspired by tours of lowcountry and its former plantations, he said. The lush grounds, winding paths and seating areas are meant to be an ethnobotanical garden, forcing visitors to see how the botany of enslaved Africans and their descendants helped shape what still exists today across the Carolinas.

The opening of the Charleston museum adds to a growing array of institutions dedicated to teaching an accurate history of the Black experience in America. Many will have heard of, and perhaps visited, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation’s capital, which opened in 2016.

Lesser known Afrocentric museums and exhibits exist in nearly every region of the country. In Montgomery, Alabama, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the corresponding National Memorial for Peace and Justice highlight slavery, Jim Crow and the history of lynching in America.

Pryor, formerly the educational director of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, said these types of museums focus on the underdiscussed, underengaged parts of the American story.

“This is such an incredibly expansive history, there’s room for 25 more museums that would have opportunities to bring a new curatorial lens to this conversation,” she said.

The museum has launched an initiative to develop relationships with school districts, especially in places where laws limit how public school teachers discuss race and racism in the classroom. In recent years, conservative politicians around the country have banned books in more than 5,000 schools in 32 states. Bans or limits on instruction about slavery and systemic racism have been enacted in at least 16 states since 2021.

Pryor said South Carolina’s ban on the teaching of critical race theory in public schools has not put the museum out of reach for local elementary, middle and high schools that hope to make field trips there.

“Even just the calls and the requests for school group visits, for school group tours, they number easily in the hundreds,” she said. “And we haven’t formally opened our doors yet.”

When the doors are open, all are welcome to reckon with a fuller truth of the Black American story, said Matthews, the museum president.

“If you ask me what we want people to feel when they are in the museum, our answer is something akin to everything,” she said.

“It is the epitome of our journey, the execution of our mission, to honor the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our nation’s most sacred sites.”

BY AARON MORRISON

Oldest Schoolhouse For Black Children In US Moved To Museum

A building believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children in the U.S. was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and moved a half-mile Friday to Colonial Williamsburg, a Virginia museum that continues to expand its emphasis on African American history.

Built 25 years before the American Revolution, the original structure stood near the college campus of William & Mary. The pinewood building held as many as 30 students at a time, some of them free Black children studying alongside the enslaved.

Hundreds of people lined the streets to celebrate its slow-speed trip into the heart of the living history museum, which tells the story of Virginia’s colonial capital through interpreters and restored buildings.

For historians and descendants alike, the Bray School contradicts the belief that all enslaved Americans were uneducated. But the school’s faith-based curriculum — created by an English charity — also justified slavery and encouraged students to accept their fate as God’s plan.

“Religion was at the heart of the school, and it was not a gospel of abolition,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of William & Mary’s Bray School Lab.

“There was this need to proselytize and to bring salvation while still not doing anything to destabilize the institution of slavery,” Lee said. “Save the soul, but continue to enslave the body. It was the here versus the hereafter.”

It was a brand of duplicity that fit easily into the larger contradictions of the country’s founding, when the Democracy being forged explicitly denied rights and freedoms to many of its people.

Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which England established in 1607. The colony was supplied with enslaved Africans for labor just a dozen years later. A century and half after that, Black people, most of them still enslaved, represented just over half of Williamsburg’s 2,000 people.

The Bray School was established in 1760 at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, chairman of a London-based Anglican charity named after philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray. The charity also set up schools in other cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

The curriculum ranged from spellers to the Book of Common Prayer. But even within the schools’ paternalistic framework, the education could still be empowering, perhaps even subversive.

“I was going through a facsimile of one of the books, and there are words like ‘liberty,’” Lee said. “What did learning those words do to expand these children’s sense of themselves? Their sense of the world?”

Isaac Bee, a Bray School student, would run away as an adult from a slave owner named Lewis Burwell. An ad that Burwell placed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 offered a cash bounty for his return and warned that Bee could read.

The white teacher, a widow named Ann Wager, lived upstairs at the school, and taught an estimated 300 to 400 students, whose ages ranged from 3 to 10, according to surviving records.

The Williamsburg Bray School operated until 1774; only Philadelphia’s reopened after the Revolutionary War. The structure became a private home for many years before it was incorporated into William & Mary’s campus.

The former schoolhouse eventually was moved from its original spot to make way for a dormitory. The original structure had 1.5 stories, with a small upstairs. It was expanded over the years to include two full stories, and was last used as an office for ROTC, the college program that prepares military officers.

Historians believed they had identified the original Bray School building, but it wasn’t confirmed until 2021, through the use of dendrochronology, a scientific method that examines tree rings in lumber to determine the wood’s harvest date.

“This is a remarkable story of survival,” said Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of architectural preservation and research. “And for us, it’s so important to put it back (to its original state) and tell the full and true story.” The Bray School was exceptional: Although Virginia waited until the 1800s to impose anti-literacy laws, white leaders across much of Colonial America forbid educating enslaved people, fearing literacy would encourage their liberty. South Carolina criminalized teaching slaves to write English in 1740.

Inside the schoolhouse, the original post at the bottom of the walnut staircase still stands, its square top rounded and nicked from centuries of use, Webster said, adding that it’s a “very powerful piece for a lot of people.”

For Tonia Merideth, the Bray School Lab’s oral historian, the building stirred up many emotions upon her first visit. It was material proof against the narrative that her ancestors were illiterate and dumb.

“Everything that I learned about my ancestors was wrong,” she said. “They could learn. They did learn. They were able.”
Merideth added: “Regardless of the intentions of the school, the children were still taking that education and possibly serving it for their own good and aiding in their community.”
Merideth can trace her roots to the Armistead family, which enslaved people in the Williamsburg area and is known to have sent at least one child, named Locust, to the Bray School. But only three years of student lists have survived.

The moving of the Bray School is part of Colonial Williamsburg’s ongoing reckoning over its past storytelling of Black history and the nation’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1926 but did not tell Black stories until 1979.

In 2021, it uncovered the brick foundation of one of the nation’s oldest Black churches. Last year, archeologists began to excavate graves at the site.

The Bray School’s new location is right next door.

“We’re going back and we’re getting that school and we’re getting that legacy,” Merideth said. “And we’re bringing it back to the historic area.”

By BEN FINLEY

Projects Examining Richmond Virginia's History Win $16M In Funding Including An Interpretive Center Honoring The Memory Of Enslaved People

The former Confederate capital has secured an $11 million grant to build an interpretive center that city officials hope will someday be part of an ambitious, long-envisioned memorial campus honoring the memory of enslaved people.

Richmond’s grant is among more than $16 million in total funding The Mellon Foundation is providing to recipients in Virginia’s capital city for projects that are “examining, preserving and reimagining” its “rich historical narratives,” the New York-based nonprofit told The Associated Press ahead of a formal announcement Tuesday.

Among the other grant recipients are a public art project, a museum and an initiative uplifting the story of a historically Black neighborhood. All are part of a push in Richmond — which recently removed its massive collection of Confederate statuary — to highlight other parts of its history.

“Richmond has been the site of many stories that have shaped our understanding of who we are as Americans, but public commemoration in Richmond historically has been limited to only a few,” Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement.

“Today, the people of this city are lifting up the collective memory of its historic Black communities, unflinchingly addressing the city’s past as the capital of the state with the most enslaved people prior to the Civil War, and participating in the reimagining of the city’s public spaces to better reflect the fullness of its history,” Alexander said.

City officials said in an interview and in written plans shared with AP that the $11 million grant will fund the creation of an “interpretive center” in 12,300 square feet of space in the first floor of the sleek, glassy trainshed of historic Main Street Station, a landmark visible to motorists cutting through the city on Interstate 95.

Officials hope the center will be a space to welcome and orient visitors to Shockoe Bottom, one of the oldest neighborhoods in one of America’s oldest cities. The neighborhood was once a hub in the domestic slave trade, though that history is barely visible now.

Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were jailed, bought and sold in Richmond, and shipped across the South in the decades preceding the Civil War. For a time, Richmond was second only to New Orleans as a slave-trading center.

Community activists have long pushed for public site in the neighborhood telling that history and honoring enslaved people, but the initiative has moved forward in fits and starts.

The preservation of Shockoe Bottom rose to national attention in 2014 when former Mayor Dwight Jones proposed a baseball stadium-centered economic development project in the area that was ultimately scuttled in the face of outrage from community members who said Shockoe Bottom was sacred ground.

Today, modest remembrances to the neighborhood’s slave-trading past are tucked away in a hard-to-find area adjacent to I-95, a parking lot and rumbling train tracks.
In 2020, Richmond officials joined by community activists outlined plans for a Shockoe Bottom heritage campus that would include a museum and a park for reflection. The state has chipped in funding and the city has set aside almost $28 million for the project, including the museum planning, which is in its earliest stages, faces flooding-related zoning hurdles and will require significant additional money.

The interpretive center will offer “a space to educate and immerse audiences in the history of Shockoe and is one of the first steps in bringing the larger Heritage Campus to fruition,” Mayor Levar Stoney said in a statement.

Officials say the center will provide educational and artistic content about Richmond’s role in the slave trade, and space for visitors to Shockoe Bottom to escape the elements and orient themselves to the neighborhood, which includes other historical sites, including the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

Richmond’s role in the slave trade,Among Mellon’s other Richmond grantees is The Valentine Museum, which is dedicated to the city’s history, and plans to use the money in part to “reimagine” the studio of Edward Valentine, a sculptor of Confederate figures.

The foundation is also backing The JXN Project, an initiative aimed at telling the story of the role Richmond, and especially the historically Black Jackson Ward neighborhood, played in the Black American experience.

Also receiving support are Reclaiming the Monument, a public art project that captured national attention for its projections on the now-removed base of an enormous Robert E. Lee statue; Untold RVA, an existing project that aims to tell hidden histories; and Cary Forward, which plans a “multidisciplinary arts space, interpretive center, artist/scholar residency, and archival library.”

The foundation said its award to Richmond was the first ever grant to a municipal government from its Monuments Project, a $250 million funding commitment launched in 2020 that aims to reimagine history-telling in public spaces.

In an interview, Alexander said the project had supported initiatives including the Kansas relocation of an approximately 25-ton stone considered sacred to the Kaw Nation, and the Irei project, an effort to build a memorial to people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in camps during World War II.

In Richmond, which Alexander said she visited over the summer, the foundation found a city unusually eager to “contend and grapple” with its past.

“The only way to move forward anyplace is to really look truthfully at our past and to envision a better future that is based on truth-telling and reckoning,” Alexander said.

The foundation, which was established in 1969 by the children of industrialist, statesman and philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon, bills itself as the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities.

By SARAH RANKIN

Church Of MLK’s 1st Leadership Position Gets Museum Funding

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — As the Alabama church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was elected to his first leadership position in the civil rights movement marks its 155th anniversary, work has begun to make a museum out of the crumbling building where that vote was taken.

King was 26 when the Montgomery Improvement Association met at Mt. Zion AME Church on Dec. 5, 1955, the first day of what turned out to be a yearlong bus boycott that ushered in the civil rights movement.

In his 1958 memoir about the boycott, King wrote that his election “happened so quickly that I did not even have time to think it through. It is probable that if I had, I would have declined the nomination.”

The church, which marked its 155th anniversary Sunday, moved to another building in 1990, so the 19th century structure is now an annex. It became known as “the fall-down church” after an interstate project split the neighborhoods around it, the Montgomery Advertiser reported.

Now the Central Alabama Community Foundation has begun work under a $500,000 grant to renovate the church and turn it into a museum.

The National Park Service approved the grant in 2018 with an eye to opening the museum in 2020. However, a series of problems, including the coronavirus pandemic, delayed the money’s arrival, foundation President Charles “C.P.” Everett told the newspaper.

The building was saved from demolition nearly 20 years ago by $75,000 from a Central Alabama Community Foundation fund, but its future remained uncertain.

With the grant in hand and a second $500,000 National Park Service grant expected, work has begun to rehabilitate the fellowship hall and install a sprinkler system throughout the building. As that work progresses, officials will start the bid process for the second grant, which Everett said will let the foundation create and open the museum.

Everett said the church was unveiling a banner Sunday to announce the beginning of construction.

“We’re moving forward,” he said.