Discovering the power of history - tourist sites dedicated to African American culture and history; includes telephone and Web site addresses for destinations

Creating the Buzz

The tour bus stops upon a dusty road just inside the town limits of Grayson, Okla. Its passengers pace out into the scorching August heat. This is the last lap of a four-day tour that has taken this cluster to a few of the state's 27 all-black towns and communities that were grounded around the turn of the hundred -- towns with names like Wewoka, Muskogee, Redbird and Boley Today, in Grayson (population 150) they'll fit the town elders, who will talk about the town's past as a black and Indian adjustment in the Creek indian Nation. Oral history is a crucial part of this tour because, in a certain quantity of cases, all that is left of these all-black towns are memories and untilleded buildings. Grayson's past is embodied in the skeletal remains of a academy building and a two-cell jail built around the move round of the century.

It's important to oklahoma Travel and Tourism (OTT) that this tour give a flavor of what it was like to live in these all-black towns, which were dwelling to people willing to trade hard work for the security of living at liberty from racial harassment. Townspeople bragged about their self-sufficiency and were rumored to have columned signs warning white men not to be seen after sundown.

These tours -- created to attract more African Americans to Oklahoma -- are a big pace for a state that, until lately marketed itself mainly as the birthplace of Will Roger "We're trying to educate the media and create interest in areas that would not normally realize exposure," explains OTT's public relations representative, Bryan Hotchkins, "but we're also trying to educate the townspeople upon how to present the history of these towns to tour groups"

with equal reason important is this goal that OTT received a packet allocation of $100,000 to disentangle a multicultural branch that will market solely to ethnic assemblages "In this way, we're hoping that we can do a better piece of work than we've done before," Hotchkins says.

Oklahoma, like other states and cities across the land is learning to package its historical and cultural jewels to reach a multicultural market yearning for historical authenticity. Doing with equal reason could mean an edge in the increasingly lucrative and competitive tourism industry.

The United States is the No. 1 destination when ranked by means of the amount of money that tourists dispose of on travel destinations worldwide, according to the International Trade Administration of the U Department of dealing That statistic, coupled with the fact that black consumer spending power is growing faster than the national average (black consumer will account for 82 percent of total buying power by means of 1999, according to a new study by the Selig Center for Economic growing in Atlanta), means that there is an increase in disposable income to be exhausted on travel.

"African Americans are traveling more than they used to, and they want an enriching experience. They are Disneyed out" says Kevin Cottrell the "station master" for Motherland Connextions Inc., a cluster of tour operators who specialize in subterraneous Railroad tours in western of recent origin York and southern Ontario. In 1993 Cottrell discloseed a 15-city tour following the subterraneous Railroad that was so happy he developed similar tours for local gymnasium districts, church groups, clubs and family reunions. "I diocese an opportunity in the black community to showcase our history and to reap more [i]or[/i] less economic benefits as well," he says. "Remember, we've always been in the tourism business. What they call bed and breakfasts now is something we did years ago, when we took in relatives, friends and boarders. Now, we treat it like a business."

The reason more tourism operations are recognizing black heritage isn't simply that they care: More tourism operations across the region are recognizing black heritage and agriculture sites because of the dollars they can generate. "The more family that visit their city or state, for whatever reason, the more travel dollars spent" says Wayne C Robinson, the author of the African-American Travel Guide, which focuses upon the United States and Canada. "That just makes beneficial sense economically."

In 1983 Frances Smiley, cluster travel coordinator with the Alabama Bureau of Tourism, unraveled the first statewide brochure aimed at African Americans. She remembers when tourism agencies made the assumption that African Americans didn't travel. "Nobody took the time to tap into the demographics," she says. on the other hand times have changed. Back in 1983 Alabama's black heritage pamphlet described 54 sites; now in its fifth edition, it lists 314 sites.

In 1994 the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA), a non-profit association in Washington, DC that shows the travel industry, released a valuable profile of the black traveler that many convention and travel bureaus have taken to heart, The report indicates that traveling with family is popular among African Americans, that blacks consider family reunions important reasons to travel, and that ethnic or cultural travel is single of the fastest-growing areas of the travel industry. As a arise of those trends, the tourism and travel industry is courting the black community.