South to freedom: Mobile, Alabama’s Dora Franklin Finley African-American Heritage Trail
He went south to freedom. Wallace Turnage, enslaved by a merchant in Alabama, escaped during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. He walked 25 miles down the western shore of Mobile Bay, and then after three harrowing weeks he paddled into the waters of the bay where Union sailors saved him from drowning. Later, upon his arrival in Fort Gaines, he earned his freedom. I learned about Turnage at the end of an in-depth guided tour this summer in Mobile, Alabama. It was the last stop on the city’s Dora Franklin Finley African-American Heritage Trail.
Our tour guide, Eric Finley, is a local traveling Mobile historian whose family has deep roots in the city. After meeting in front of the History Museum of Mobile on a rainy day, we climbed into the family’s motor coach. Fully aware that he was guiding a small group of Alabama and Louisiana natives, including my husband, in-laws and myself, Finley began the tour with a few jokes about the original Mardi Gras city. For many in New Orleans and throughout the United States, Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday) is unique to New Orleans. But anyone who has traveled throughout the country knows that you find Mardi Gras in other cities (especially if we include the Caribbean Carnival). In the Deep South, residents of Mobile celebrate the festival at the same time as people in Louisiana, always the day before Ash Wednesday. While debated, Mobile’s French colonizers observed the first Mardi Gras as early as 1703. But as much as Finley interjected a sense of humor throughout the ride, he simultaneously offered a history of Mobile that more mainstream, white-washed tours in the South may deliberately ignore. For instance, the tour began with an acknowledgment that the founding of Mobile can be traced back to the French colonists who settled on the Mobile River in 1702 and the forced arrival of enslaved Black women from Saint-Domingue (now known as the islands of the Dominican Republic and Haiti).
At some point during the tour, Finley told us a story about a Black doctor who climbed off a train in 1919 after fleeing his hometown Evergreen, Alabama. The doctor had escaped a lynching after news about him saving a white woman’s life from the influenza epidemic spread. The doctor fled to Mobile, where he happened to arrive in what is known today as Africatown. He served the community for the next 53 years. His name was Dr. James A. Franklin, Sr., the grandfather of the trail’s founder, Dora Franklin Finley. As he drove around the city and stopped at various historically significant locations, Eric Finley occasionally held up a book from the messenger bag that sat in between the two front seats. David Blight’s book on Wallace Turnage, A Slave No More, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ were two among a handful of books featured during his oral stories of Mobile’s notable Black figures and socially significant physical spaces.
As Finley drove through Africatown, the area of Mobile known as the site where the last human ‘cargo’ of West Africans landed in 1860, he detailed a story that features the slave ship called Clotilda and a disgusting bet made between white men including Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Irish-American landowner and enslaver. Recently, the Clotilda made national news when maritime archaeologists and divers confirmed and authenticated the remains of the vessel. The drive included a stop at Africatown’s cemetery, the site where Clotilda’s survivors were buried.
As we drove through Africatown, I thought about the presence of our pasts. And I was struck by another current intersection of slavery and capital. Finley addressed the presence of polluting chemical factories surrounding the historic area. But this is not a story unique to Mobile or Africatown. Throughout the South and across the country, the chemical and oil industry has become adept at re-colonizing land on which communities of color live. And while local activists have fought them and sometimes succeeded in stopping more industrial factories from smothering adjacent neighborhoods, these corporations keep encroaching on them.
Among the many other stops included the city’s slave market, the Creole Firehouse (a firehouse department made up of volunteer firemen who identified as Creole), and the National African-American Heritage Archives and Museum.
As we headed back to the beginning, Finley drove us through an intersection where he rendered visible another past. I could see it. Black businesses lined up on both sides of the streets. The ghosts of Black wealthy patrons and entrepreneurs are always present in the Deep South and across the county. But would we know this history without the Franklins who have diligently conducted research to reveal their own family genealogies, and the city’s rich and troubling history? In fact, we might even say that this tour is not only about Mobile’s Black history but is central to the city’s founding. It is a refreshing perspective that takes us beyond the usual white-washed Lost Cause myths of the South. Instead, it’s a deep reminder of the importance in placing Black citizens at the center of national, regional and local histories.
Cristina Mislán, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Journalism Studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri.
This story was originally published August 3, 2022 at 9:00 AM with the headline "South to freedom: Mobile, Alabama’s Dora Franklin Finley African-American Heritage Trail."