An organization formed last year with a focus to revitalize the Africatown community with improved housing stock and to attract development named a local attorney and former municipal judge as its first executive director.

Karlos Finley’s tenure as the head of the Africatown Redvelopment Corp. is effective immediately. He will participate in a “meet and greet” for the community at 4:30 p.m. on December 6 at the Robert L. Hope Community Center, located in the heart of Africatown. He will attend his first board meeting today at 4:30 p.m., according to state Rep. Adline Clarke, D-Mobile.

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Finley will lead an organization that was formed through legislative action aimed at improving Mobile’s historic Plateau community, long known as “Africatown” and to preserve its history and develop commerce there. The Africatown Redevelopment Corp. (ARC) was formed after the hull of the Clotilda was discovered in 2019, sparking renewed attention to the community and interest in redeveloping the site for tourism.

The community once had over 10,000 residents. It is now a community of about 2,000, and has long struggled with a proliferation of vacant and deteriorating structures, and has been held up as an example of environmental injustices due to the location of heavy industry within a short distance of Africatown’s neighborhoods.

“Our primary goal is to revitalize housing in Africatown by constructing new affordable single-family homes and obtaining and rehabilitating vacant houses,” said Marc Jackson, board chairman of ARC.

ARC will obtain abandoned properties in Africatown from the city of Mobile through the city’s Neighborhood Renewal Program. Some of these properties are vacant, while others contain houses that will need to be rehabilitated.

Jackson said that the Mobile County Commission has allocated $3 million to the organization to begin the revitalization process. He said the organization will need to raise more funds to make Africatown a sustainable community. ARC also has funding from the city to pay its operational expenses for approximately two years.

Fundraising, Jackson said, will be one of the primary responsibilities for the executive director. The organization is also companies and philanthropic organizations interested in making contributions to ARC to contact Finley at 251-533-4344 or [email protected].

Finley comes to ARC as a well-known attorney and former municipal judge in Mobile. He ran for mayor in 2021, finishing a distant third place behind incumbent Mayor Sandy Stimpson, who won a third term to office. Councilman Fred Richardson placed second.

Finley has practiced law for over 20 years and has served as a municipal judge from 2015-2022. He is also a former Mobile County assistant district attorney. He earned his law degree from Miles Law School in Fairfield, and was valedictorian of his class and president of the Miles Law School Student Bar Association.

Finley is the president of the board of directors of Friends of the African American Heritage Trail, founded by his late sister Dora Franklin Finley to educate, preserve and mark historic contributions of Blacks in Mobile.

Finley has a background of working in Africatown, having worked as a machine operator at the Scott Paper Co., now Kimberly-Clark Corp.