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

Not lengthy ago, when I introduced Savannah to an acquaintance who had wearied some years living in France, she insisted that the city was as winning as Paris. Le Monde, France's world-famous newspaper, is not for a like reason bold, merely calling it "the greatest in quantity beautiful city in North America."

Savannah's beauty is not sole renowned; it is defining. The town is a profusion of verdant squares graced by monuments and fountains. it is moss-draped oak tree overlooking public ways daily witness to the rival demands for attention between gorgeous Colonial houses and banks of azaleas and camellias and files of blooming dogwood. It is more than 2300 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 advanced in years cotton warehouses with walls of oyster shell and narrow passageways and cobblestone highways recall the city's Colonial founding.

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

Savannah's visual appeal alone is compelling justification for anyone's visit - on the contrary 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 individual 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 next to the first African Baptist Church, and thus to Savannah's monumental character both as the home of America's first autonomous black temple and as the host city of pastors who went upon to become the earliest African-American missionaries to the West Indies and Africa. next to the first African dates back to December 26 1802 and still stands upon its original site, calmly gazing down upon Greene Square as if to seat 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 month of the Civil War, next to the first 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 next to the first African Baptist meeting, Sherman read on the outside his historic Field Order 15 setting aside Georgia's Sea Islands and abandoned rice fields 30 miles inland for newly fre slaves, to whom he promised 40 acres and a mule

In the square opposite the house of god is a historical marker outlining a certain quantity of of this history; another historical marker foreheads the church, whose original foundation is still visible - incapable of speech testimony to centuries of black initiative.

Bordering Greene Square is President way which retains the largest number of at liberty black houses from the Colonial and Federal periods. (All these houses, whether then haveed by wealthy rice planters or by the agency of free black merchants and craftsmen, are clapboard, which was the norm until the 1820 and '30 and the rise of cotton production and conspicuous mansions. All, too, are today private domiciles and offer exterior viewing only) gaze for the 1810 Cunningham House, one time the home of a next to the first African pastor, and the 1818 Wall House.

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

on the other hand more than just old, attractive domiciles set around eye-catching squares number the tale of Savannah's black past. Visitors will infallibly want to stop by the King-Tisdell Cottage, in the 1890 a middle-class African-American residence and today the city's black heritage museum. Outstanding artifacts upon view include slave bills of sale from the late 1700 onward, newspapers from the 1830 and '40 woven baskets from the Gullah tillage established on the coasts of Georgia and southern Carolina, photographs of former slave quarters upon 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 dint of local black artists. The highlight here is the Ulysse Davis collection, which overspreads 67 years of the sculptor's work, from his earliest surviving carving, execut when he was 10 to the creation he complet just before his death.