“Let Our Light Shine For Truth” was woven throughout Africatown’s Fourth Annual Lantern Walk Weekend, encapsulating how this historic Black community has cultivated a radiant love and hope unshaken by injustice. The Africatown Lantern Walk is a cultural heritage event that honors the ancestors and key individuals who uplifted the community for over 150 years despite persevering through relentless human rights violations. Their enduring resilience, rooted in faith and fellowship, has sustained them through ongoing trauma as they continue in the struggle for freedom.
Soon after the Civil War’s end, Africatown was established and governed as a self-sufficient community by the African survivors of the Clotilda, the last known American slave ship that trafficked 110 individuals from West Africa in 1860. Although the transatlantic slave trade had been unlawful since 1808, slaveowner Timothy Meaher and Captain William Foster orchestrated a bet to import enslaved individuals into Alabama — a crime for which they were never convicted.
The Africatown Heritage House documents this history through a multi-sensory museum in the heart of the community. It is a site where horror and healing co-exist. The exhibits inside the building recount the consecutive suffering of Africatown’s founders and descendants, while the gardens surrounding the building are a restorative response to the environmental degradation presently unfolding. This duality is also evident in Africatown’s geography. The land has been pierced with concrete markers bearing the Meaher family name, bifurcated from highway development, and encircled by heavy industries. And yet, the Africatown Redevelopment Corporation’s construction of new homes over the last year has been an active resistance against disempowerment and erasure.
The Fourth Annual Lantern Walk Weekend is another testament to the inextinguishable light and strength of Africatown. Festivities between November 1 and 2 included a fundraising brunch at the Robert Hope Community Center, a Lantern Walk beginning at the Mobile County Training School, and a Sunrise Service at Plateau Cemetery. Each event carried spatial significance and was grounded in honoring cultural traditions and preserving memory to open up possibilities for repair and revitalization. The prayers and stories shared at each event not only reasserted the truth and dignity of those who came before but served as wellsprings for a reparative future.
The festivities involved descendant members of the community and invited individuals far and wide into the commemoration. One such invitation asked attendees to ring the historic bell at Mobile County Training School. The bell is a replica of the original bell taken from the Clotilda by the trafficked founders of Africatown. Through this participation people become not only observers but carriers of history. The person furthest away had come from Dublin, Ireland.
The wisdom emanating from Africatown is both a clear recognition of humanity’s interconnectedness and a deep conviction that intergenerational ties do not dissipate at death. Our purpose in this life is profoundly relational. The latest priority to unearth and document the history of Plateau Cemetery and of those who rest there exemplifies the community’s commitment to joyfully laboring for others: past, present, and future.
Please view the brunch video by Milan Hargrove.