Home in Georgia - city of Macon - Special Supplement: Georgia's African American Heritage

American Visions, August-Sept, 1994 by Henry Chase

Sitting on the dock of the bay in San Francisco, having roamed 2,000 miles from his Macon home, Otis Redding lamented, "I left my home in Georgia ..."

It was more than the beauty of Macon's cherry-blossomed streets that inspired his plangent song, more than the imprint of the city's powerful musical lore (which runs from Lena Home through Little Richard all the way up to the Allman Brothers), more than the enveloping warmth of a populace and place that have escaped the soul-parching aridity of urban skyscrapers and blight.

It's small wonder that Redding's mind wandered home, for he grew up not merely in rural Georgia (which offers sundry pleasure - catfish ponds, frogs, hounds, hunting, piney woods, mules and barns-to its young), but outside Macon: a town blessed with African-American heritage, black endeavor and civic cooperation.

All that's needed to discover this rich past is a little initiative and the city's excellent "Macon, Georgia: Black Heritage" brochure.

Start your exploration of Macon's black past at the Harriet Tubman Museum. From the moment you step inside the doors of Georgia's largest African-American museum, your interest is seized, for on the wall immediately to your right is "She," Wini McQueen's collage that highlights truth and apocrypha from more than a century of black struggle and achievement.

Note particularly McQueen's incorporation of Ellen Craft, for Craft was one of the 19th century's great stories of initiative, escape, adventure and commitment. The daughter of her master and his slave Maria, Craft at the age of 22 conceived an ingenious plan to escape bondage. Aided by her nearly white complexion, she dressed up as an invalid Southern gentleman and had her enslaved husband-acting the role of a manservant-escort her to Philadelphia for "medical treatment."

In 1849, a year after their escape, the Crafts achieved fame as two of America's best-known fugitives on the abolitionist lecture circuit. Moving to England one step ahead of slave catchers the Crafts formed an abolitionist circle, wrote the book Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom and established a vocational school. They returned to the United States in 1869 and established a school in Byron County, Georgia-from which they had escaped decades earlier.

Complementing "She" is the Tubman's mural gallery, whose centerpiece is Macon artist Wilfred Stroud's "From Africa to America." Stroud's seven panels trace the transformation of abducted Africans into African Americans and the latter's hard climb to achievement.

The museum also offers three galleries of original works by contemporary black artists, ranging from the well-known to the emerging, from the intensely political to the purely abstract, from those working in traditional forms to those at the cutting edge of new media.

Africa, too, figures at the Tubman, whose holdings cover the breadth of the continent. Paintings and tapestries from Ethiopia, carved ivory from Tanzania, and wooden carvings and household implements from Kenya yield a sense of East Africa, while West Africa is represented by masks and wall hangings from Liberia, textiles from Ghana, and masks, musical instruments and textiles from Nigeria.

Primed by the Tubman and guided by the city's black heritage brochure, you're well prepared for a tour of the town. in years gone by, Macon's black community centered on Pleasant Hill, which is now a National Historic District. Here were the homes of Lena Home and Little Richard.

Today, Little Richard's childhood home (1437 Woodliff), where one of the wildest musical forces of the modern age first let loose his piercing screams, is a private residence that can only be viewed from the sidewalk. One day, when justice triumphs, Graceland will be rivaled by the birthplace of the man who gave America "Good Golly Miss Molly," "Tutti Frutti" and so much more!

Till then, if you want to learn more of Macon's African-American past, just walk around the comer from Little Richard's childhood home. Here you will find the Booker T. Washington Community Center, which houses memorabilia, correspondence and photographs of Redding, and other artifacts of Macon's black community.

Directly across the street from the center is the old Romer Congregational Church, a product of a late-19th-century Northern missionary effort to educate Macon's freedmen. Today, it is in the process of being restored for use as a community theater.

Walking down from Pleasant Hill toward the center of the city, you will pass still older churches central to Macon's story, including Washington Avenue Presbyterian, Georgia's oldest black Presbyterian church, whose separate black congregation dates back to 1838; Holsey Temple Christian Methodist Church, which began in 1848 as an African-American splinter of First Methodist; and First Baptist Church, established by a black congregation 25 years before Emancipation.

Not far from First Baptist, you will find the Sgt. Rodney M. Davis Monument, which pays tribute to the only Macon native to have won the Medal of Honor. The U.S. Marine sergeant was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967 when he threw himself on a hand grenade to save comrades in his platoon.