In contrast to national efforts to suppress Black historical narratives, Mobile is making deliberate moves to highlight its own history.

Twice in the past month, the city has publicly acknowledged its deep, and often painful, ties to Black history. It celebrated its Hall of Fame athletes with towering bronze statues and broke ground on a $5.1 million Africatown Welcome Center that is a tribute to a community founded by survivors of the last known slave ship to reach the U.S., the Clotilda.

These acts of remembrance come as President Donald Trump’s administration pushes to dismantle cultural institutions it deems promoters of “improper ideology,” especially those focused on race and Black history. In March, Trump signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, demanding the removal of exhibits that, in his view, “divide Americans based on race.”

As Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood put it, the timing is stark: the city’s reckoning and the federal government’s retreat are both unfolding in what she calls the “era of erasure.”

“Fortunately, we are a community that has said that this is our story, the good the bad and the ugly and all of the warts and that we cannot heal and move forward from this unless we take on the hard truth of this,” she said Monday, standing near the future Welcome Center that will greet visitors to Africatown.

“People are coming to Africatown from within and outside our community,” she added. “They are leaving with new information. I believe that the more you know, you have the opportunity for your perspective to shift.”

Athletes

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The Welcome Center groundbreaking came less than a month after the unveiling of six 9-foot-tall bronze statues honoring Mobile’s legendary Black athletes — all Hall of Famers — who made their mark on American sports and history.

But the stories of these athletes included struggles to overcome Jim Crow and segregated Mobile before they emerged as professional athletic stars.

• Hank Aaron often recalled his mother telling him to stay away from white neighborhoods, and he learned to hit a baseball by swatting bottle caps because he wasn’t allowed to play the sport with white children.
• Satchel Paige was arrested at the age of 12 and sentenced as a juvenile to five years in a Montgomery detention center for a shoplifting charge. Paige long credited that experience with giving him the discipline to pursue a career in professional baseball.
• Willie McCovey and Billy Williams spent their formative years in segregated Mobile. Ozzie Smith, born in Mobile, was also in segregated Mobile.

“People don’t realize that these athletes were making a way for the things we love most today which is our independence and freedom,” said Cleon Jones, an Africatown activist and longtime resident who experienced racial discrimination while he was a professional baseball player in the 1960s.

“It was about helping Martin Luther King and others to realize their dreams by sacrificing on the field and integrating cities and towns and areas … we were the lead group,” he added. ”We were explorers. We were trailblazers who would integrate cities like Atlanta, and into Virginia. You can go on and on but we were part of the mainstream because we were athletes.”

The statues, which also includes Robert Brazile of the National Football Hall of Fame, are placed in a prominent spot along Water Street and adjacent to the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center. Each statue is atop a pedestal. A seventh, 1-foot-tall pedestal will be left empty, allowing visitors to step on top of it and take a selfie amid the Hall of Famers.

“For once, and from my perspective, we are on the right side of this one,” said Eric Finley, a tour director and storyteller with the Friends of the African American Heritage Trail.

Some of the Hall of Fame athletes went on to become civil rights icons as well. Aaron broke Major League Baseball’s home run record in 1974, amid racial animosity toward him. Paige became the first player from the Negro Leagues to be inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame in 1971.

“I don’t know if we’ve focused on that,” said Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson about city’s latest development celebrating the city’s Black history. “But from my perspective, Mobile has embraced the civil rights. Africatown and the Clotilda, it’s not something we are sweeping under the rug.”

Stimpson said during the unveiling of the statues last month that he could envision Mobile being a key stopping point along an African American Trail featuring historic sites throughout Alabama and the rest of the South.

“I can see this being a destination,” he said. “It has a lot of opportunity.”

National cuts

The efforts to spotlight an unvarnished telling of Mobile’s racial past comes at a moment when the Trump administration is making headlines to do the opposite.

Federal cuts affecting Alabama include those to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Endowment for the Ars (NEA), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The cuts, specifically, would limit the Alabama Humanities Alliance, an NEH affiliate, to support local history projects, storytelling festivals, community cultural celebrations, and humanities-focused podcasts and documentaries.

A $25,000 NEA federal grant to support the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham was slashed earlier this spring, putting the state’s largest film event in flux.

Trump’s orders also have stirred controversy over how history is presented by the federal government. After Trump’s executive order to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government, a video highlighting the history of the Tuskegee Airmen was temporarily removed from a military training course.

Hilary Green, a Civil War and Reconstruction scholar and former professor at the University of Alabama, said the cuts have had “devastating effects on many local projects, including in Alabama, who were committed to telling the full American experience and the contributions made by African Americans, Indigenous communities, women, and other marginalized communities.”

She said the effect has led to a scramble to fill in the funding gaps, firing staff, and lawsuits.

The federal climate, Green said, might contribute to more slowdowns and delayed openings of much-anticipated projects. And future efforts to raise money for tourism sites in Africatown and elsewhere, Green said, will likely focus on public-private partnerships.

But Mobile’s efforts, she said, illustrates the “many local communities and institutions who are committed to their efforts.”

“Executive orders is not policy,” Green said. “Nor does it negate many constitutional protections. It also does not shape how individual communities and institutions chose to tell their history and do the work of telling Black History as foundational and not separate from American history.”

Cultural Heritage Tourism

Joe Womack, executive director of the organization, Africatown CHESS (Clean, Healthy, Educated, Safe, Sustainable), said the reason why Mobile is embracing its history full throttle is because of the financial benefits to do so.

State and local tourism officials have said, in recent years, that cultural heritage tourism is a rising force in attracting visitors to cities. The type of tourism is to bring people to cities and regions to experience the places, people and activities that provide authentic stories of the past.

“Mobile realized that there is money to be made on cultural heritage tourism,” Womack said. “Mobile has known about Africatown for years and the city realizes that if it is to have the tourism impact it wants, it needs to develop Africatown.”

He added, “Africatown is a world brand. When I write (about Africatown), it’s not just for the people of Mobile, but for the entire world. We have to take advantage of that.”

Mobile City Councilman William Carroll said the Africatown story, highlighted in the Heritage House that opened in 2023, is unique to the city and cannot be told anywhere else making it a unique natural lure for visitors to coastal Alabama.

“The people who came over and were enslaved (aboard the Clotilda), there is no other place int he world where they can trace their roots and heritage and be able to tell that story where they came from,” he said. “There is no other place in the United States, or in the world, that can tell this story.”

Finley, who highlights the city’s cultural heritage past during his tours, said he believes the elevation of the city’s uncomfortable past is not going to fade anytime soon.

“I truly believe we are city that is evolving,” Finley said. “It comes down to changing the narrative. When we do the tours (along the Heritage Trail), I make it clear that none of us lived in the past but that if we don’t know the past, it’s difficult for us to map out the better future for the finite time we are going to be on this earth.”