Finally got the news? - Savannah, Georgia - Special Supplement: Georgia's African American Heritage

American Visions, August-Sept, 1994 by Henry Chase

Not long ago, when I introduced Savannah to an acquaintance who had spent some years living in France, she insisted that the city was as lovely as Paris. Le Monde, France's world-famous newspaper, is not so bold, merely calling it "the most beautiful city in North America."

Savannah's beauty is not only renowned; it is defining. The town is a profusion of green squares graced by monuments and fountains. it is moss-draped oak trees overlooking streets, daily witness to the rival demands for attention between gorgeous Colonial houses and banks of azaleas and camellias and rows of blooming dogwood. It is more than 2,300 architecturally and historically significant buildings, all located within the 2 1/2-square-mile Historic District that can be viewed from horse-drawn carriages. It is also the "Factors Walk," a nine-block Riverfront Plaza that stretches along the Savannah River, where old cotton warehouses with walls of oyster shell and narrow passageways and cobblestone streets recall the city's Colonial founding.

While the Historic District, the Colonial houses, the squares, the oaks, dogwood, magnolias and azaleas gently lull one into serenity, the riverfront quickens the senses, for here are found scores of outdoor cafes and restaurants, taverns, studios, shops, museums and opportunities to board sightseeing riverboats.

Savannah's visual appeal alone is compelling justification for anyone's visit - but the unknown story about the city is that Savannah is as richly laden with the history of the African-American experience as it is with beauty. And in more than one instance, the two dovetail.

A walk around Greene Square and Washington Square in Savannah's Historic District reveals this dovetailing in all its glory. Greene Square introduces the visitor to the Second African Baptist Church, and thus to Savannah's monumental role both as the home of America's first autonomous black church and as the host city of pastors who went on to become the earliest African-American missionaries to the West Indies and Africa. Second African dates back to December 26, 1802, and still stands on its original site, calmly gazing down on Greene Square as if to settle the competing claims of beauty and history, the sacred and the profane.

The church's historical importance is not restricted to the early Federal period, nor simply to matters ecclesiastical and local. In the closing months of the Civil War, Second African was the site of the meeting between leaders of coastal Georgia's black community and General William Tecumseh Sherman and Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. At the Second African Baptist meeting, Sherman read out his historic Field Order 15, setting aside Georgia's Sea Islands and abandoned rice fields 30 miles inland for newly freed slaves, to whom he promised 40 acres and a mule.

In the square opposite the church is a historical marker outlining some of this history; another historical marker fronts the church, whose original foundation is still visible - mute testimony to centuries of black initiative.

Bordering Greene Square is President Street, which retains the largest number of free black houses from the Colonial and Federal periods. (All these houses, whether then owned by wealthy rice planters or by free black merchants and craftsmen, are clapboard, which was the norm until the 1820s and '30s and the rise of cotton production and conspicuous mansions. All, too, are today private homes and offer exterior viewing only.) Look for the 1810 Cunningham House, once the home of a Second African pastor, and the 1818 Wall House.

Nearby is Washington Square, another noted free black neighborhood. Look particularly for the old home of Jane DeVeaux on St. Julien. The daughter of a Second African pastor, DeVeaux returned to Savannah from a Northern education in 1847 and conducted a secret school for blacks until Shennan's forces entered the city almost two decades later. During these years, she regularly hid her charges in the attic when white civic patrols entered her home (as they did the home of any free black) in search of runaways or students.

But more than just old, attractive homes set around eye-catching squares tell the tale of Savannah's black past. Visitors will surely want to stop by the King-Tisdell Cottage, in the 1890s a middle-class African-American residence and today the city's black heritage museum. Outstanding artifacts on view include slave bills of sale from the late 1700s onward, newspapers from the 1830s and '40s, woven baskets from the Gullah culture established on the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, photographs of former slave quarters on St. Catherines Island, and the Arabic-language meditations of Ben-Ali, a black Sapelo Island gave driver.

Near to King-Tisdell is the each Institute, where visitors will find a range of works by local black artists. The highlight here is the Ulysses Davis collection, which covers 67 years of the sculptor's work, from his earliest surviving carving, executed when he was 10, to the creation he completed just before his death.