Mobile trail gives visitors glimpse of city’s multicultural beginnings
While conducting a tour of Mobile’s historic Africatown, Karlos Finley said his most moving experience was when a group of African visitors realized it was their ancestors who had sold fellow tribesmen into slavery, condemning them to a life of captivity thousands of miles away.
Finley had taken the group from Yoruba, Africa, to visit Union Baptist Church, which was founded and organized by the survivors of the schooner Clotilda.
The last known U.S. slave ship, the Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay in 1860 with 110 African captives. The ship owner, Timothy Meaher, had made a bet that he could smuggle Africans into the United States, although the importation of slaves had been outlawed for more than 50 years. Soon after arriving in Mobile, the 86-foot schooner was scuttled and burned to destroy the evidence, and the wreck was not uncovered until 2018.
“When I took those people out to Africatown and showed them where the Clotilda survivors went to church and were buried, they dropped on their knees, wailed and wept, and begged forgiveness for selling their brothers into slavery,” Finley said. “It was a transformational experience for them.”
The church is among 45 historic landmarks that make up the Dora Franklin Finley African-American Heritage Trail (DFFAAHT) in Mobile. The 5-mile trail traces the city’s multicultural heritage by linking significant contributions and events with sites. It preserves the contributions of African Americans in Mobile since the city’s founding more than 300 years ago.
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“Our greatest strength in Mobile is that we are a rich gumbo, a mixture of diverse peoples that create the unique flavor of our community,” said Finley, president of the DFFAAHT board of directors and brother of the trail’s founder. “The trail represents that tapestry of flavors and showcases the contributions of all Mobilians – African Americans, Native Americans, Creoles and Americans.”
The late Dora Franklin Finley established the trail in 2005 at the request of Mobile City Councilman William Carroll.
While visiting Boston as part of a Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce fact-finding trip, Carroll took the Massachusetts city’s African American heritage trail tour and quickly realized that Mobile has many contributions that rivaled those in Boston. After returning home, he tapped Dora Franklin Finley to take on the task of creating the trail.
“Dora was the natural choice to lead this endeavor,” said Finley, noting that he and his sister are fourth-generation Mobilians. “Anyone who knew her knew she had this great knowledge of history. Our mother was a high school history teacher, and history was the topic of conversation at our dinner table every night.”
Finley said his sister was a “leader her entire life.” Like her parents, she became a civil rights activist in the late 1960s and, at age 15, was arrested and taken to jail for marching and picketing. As a 17-year-old, she wrote a grant that helped start a student-led civil rights movement in the city.
After living and working in Iowa and Michigan during the 1970s, Dora returned home to Mobile and eventually worked for 25 years in logistical management at Scott Paper /Kimberly Clark. It was after her retirement that Dora accepted Carroll’s challenge to share Mobile’s African American heritage with the world.
Finley said his sister spent hundreds of hours researching Mobile’s history. She pored over materials and resources found through organizations such as the Alabama Historical Commission, Emory University, the city of Mobile Archives, University of South Alabama Archives and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Finley said Dora uncovered and shared previously “unspoken of” contributions and information. During their childhood, the siblings learned from their mother the story of the Clotilda and the Africans who lived in squalor aboard the ship. Dora was friends with the great-granddaughter of Kazoola (Cudjo Lewis), who was one of the survivors.
“That story had really been suppressed in Africatown because the Meaher family was very prominent, and anyone who talked about it could be killed,” Finley said. “This is the kind of historical information that had been hidden for more than 300 years until Dora began looking it up.”
Finley said another unforgettable moment came in 2010 when the Plateau Cemetery was added to the trail. The graveyard in Africatown is the final resting place of many Clotilda survivors.
“When we unveiled that marker at the cemetery, one of the descendants, Lorna Woods, said in a Mobile-Register article, ‘This is our Super Bowl. We didn’t think anyone would ever recognize us,’” Finley said.
The trail begins with a stop at the replica of Fort Conde’, which was built by Mobile settlers and played an important role in the city’s history. Although it was originally made of wood, the fort located in present-day downtown Mobile was replaced with a brick structure. It was designed and built in 1711 with the help of five free African American brick masons.
Finley said the trail ends at another momentous point – the marker that tells the story of Wallace Turnage, who at age 17 gained his freedom after trying to escape slavery four times. He succeeded on his fifth attempt, accomplishing his goal in the midst of wartime Mobile in the 1860s by walking south 25 miles, swimming across two rivers and paddling a rowboat into the Mobile Bay. There, he was saved from drowning by Union soldiers.
Other notable stops along the trail include some of the oldest churches in Alabama, including the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, which houses the birth, death and marriage records of Creoles who helped found the city.
Another stop is the home of Bettie Hunter, an African American woman who started a horse-and-carriage service in the 1870s after gaining her freedom. She was wealthy when she died at age 27. Her home is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The trail also highlights the lives of well-known Mobile natives, such as baseball players Satchel Paige and Hank Aaron; Vivian Malone, the first African American to graduate from the University of Alabama; and Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the super-soaker water pistol and a rocket scientist who worked on the space shuttle.
“When we take children on this tour and they find out all of these amazing things African Americans have done in the heart of the South, it lets them know that they are capable of doing anything,” Finley said. “When kids hear these stories, they don’t think, ‘I’m a victim and I can’t accomplish anything.’ They see that if these people can overcome in the 1800s and 1900s, then ‘I can study and be anything I want to be.'”
There are several versions of the trail tour, he said.
Visitors can take the downtown walking tour or the online self-guided virtual tour, which Dora had the foresight to create long before the pandemic. A school bus tour is designed specifically for fourth grade students. The “step-on” motor coach tours are not available at this time, in light of the need for social distancing.
Finley said the tour allows visitors to travel back in time and get a picture of Mobile’s diverse roots.
“Our motto is you can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been,” he said. “It’s very important that we, as a community, as a state and as the world, understand the accurate history from whence we have come so we can know exactly how to plot our course going forward.”
For more information or to get details about the tours, visit https://www.dffaaht.org/index.php.