The Africatown Heritage House took another step forward Friday.

“Everything that you see happening here on this campus has been because a lot of people pulled together, a lot of organizations, a lot of entities,” Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, who has spearheaded the creation of the heritage house, said. Ludgood presided over the day’s ceremony.

On Friday, the Mobile County Commission hosted the unveiling and dedication of “The Memory Keeper,” a sculpture by Charles Smith and Frank Ledbetter, at the site of the future Africatown Heritage House. The sculpture features aquatic animals native to both Alabama and West Africa and honors the people of Africatown, as well as the 110 West Africans that were enslaved and brought to the United States on the Clotilda in 1859.

In addition to the dedication of the sculpture, Dr. Meg Fowler, director of the History Museum of Mobile, announced the long-awaited opening date of Heritage House and “Clotilda: The Exhibition:” July 8. The heritage house had been set to open last summer but had experienced delays in construction.

Around 100 people turned out for the dedication. State Rep. Adline Clarke, who represents Africatown, Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson and Jeremy Ellis, president of the Clotilda Descendants Association were among the speakers. Deborah Ferguson, a professor at the University of South Alabama, led a “Libation to Elders” ceremony. Theodore Arthur, a member of the Excelsior Band and a descendant of the survivors of the Clotilda, performed a musical medley.

But while the focus of the celebrations was largely on the heritage house and on the story of Africatown, the speakers also linked the story and legacy to the present. Ferguson honored Tyre Nichols, a Black man who died in January after being beaten by police in Memphis, Tenn., during her ceremony.

In his remarks, Ellis commented on the Florida Department of Education’s recent threat not to approve the College Board’s newest Advanced Placement course on African American Studies unless certain changes were made related to content involving the Black Lives Matter movement and reparations, among other topics.

“We’re living in a time where Black history is being challenged, and Black history is being re-written,” Ellis said. “Was the idea of ‘The Memory Keeper’ to be the caregiver of America’s lost memory, so that we would never let the world forget the 110 souls that came over here via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?”

And the benefits of the Africatown Heritage House extend far beyond preserving the memory of the Clotilda and the Africatown community: officials hope that the museum will become a tourism draw and bring attention—and revenue—to the area.

On Thursday, National Geographic in the United Kingdom named the Africatown Heritage House one of the six “best new museums in the U.S. for 2023.” Margaret Brown’s documentary on Africatown, “Descendant,” has been a hit on Netflix since it was released last fall.

David Clark, president of Visit Mobile, predicts that there will be between 500,000 to one million visitors to Africatown every year. The revenue generated from those visitors, he said, will provide much-needed funds for infrastructure improvements around Africatown. And the renewed attention to the neighborhood will attract new businesses to the area.

“I’m calling it the ‘anchor of tourism;’ this is the start of tourism as we know it today in Africatown,” Clark said. “When there’s an economic engine, it revitalizes things.”

Dr. Kern Jackson, a professor at the University of South Alabama who co-wrote “Descendant” with Brown, said that he hopes the heritage house will bring some much-needed help to the Mobile County Training School, which sits next to the museum. He says the school is in dire need of new ceiling tiles and other improvements, and he hopes the Mobile County Board of Education will be persuaded to sustain the school after seeing renewed attention on the area.

“I don’t think Africatown is just for tourism, it’s for people living here,” Jackson said. “This [the heritage house] is nice, that [the training school] is where we send our children.”