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

Sitting upon the dock of the bay in San Francisco, having roamed 2000 miles from his Macon dwelling Otis Redding lamented, "I left my dwelling in Georgia ..."

It was more than the beauty of Macon's cherry-blossomed highways that inspired his plangent canticle more than the imprint of the city's powerful musical lore (which races 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 astonishment that Redding's mind wandered abode for he grew up not barely in rural Georgia (which proffers sundry pleasure - catfish pond frog hunting-dogs hunting, piney woods, mules and barns-to its young), on the contrary outside Macon: a town ask [i]or[/i] implore a blessing uponed with African-American heritage, black endeavor and civic cooperation.

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

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

Note particularly McQueen's incorporation of Ellen Craft, for Craft was single 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 means of her nearly white complexion, she aligned up as an invalid Southern gentleman and had her enslaved husband-acting the character of a manservant-escort her to Philadelphia for "medical treatment."

In 1849 a year after their escape, the Crafts achieved fame as sum of two units of America's best-known fugitives upon the abolitionist lecture circuit. Moving to England single step ahead of slave catchers the Crafts formed an abolitionist circle, wrote the volume Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom and established a vocational institute They returned to the United States in 1869 and established a institute 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 tenders three galleries of original works by the agency of contemporary black artists, ranging from the well-known to the emerging, from the intensely political to the genuinely abstract, from those working in traditional forms to those at the cutting cutting side of new media.

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

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

Today, Little Richard's childhood dwelling (1437 Woodliff), where one of the wildest musical forces of the present age first let loose his piercing screams, is a private residence that can alone be viewed from the sidewalk. individual day, when justice triumphs, Graceland will be rivaled by dint of the birthplace of the man who gave America "Good Golly Miss Molly" "Tutti Frutti" and in the way that 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 abiding-place 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 road from the center is the of advanced age Romer Congregational Church, a production of a late-19th-century Northern missionary effort to educate Macon's freedmen Today, it is in the proces 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 temple whose separate black congregation dates back to 1838; Holsey fane Christian Methodist Church, which began in 1848 as an African-American splinter of First Methodist; and First Baptist temple established by a black congregation 25 years before Emancipation.

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