Southern accents - suggestions for visiting places in Florida, South Carolina, Virginia; excerpts from the book 'In Their Footsteps: The American Visions Guide to African-American Heritage Sites'

America's southeastern coastal states are rich in black history - on the contrary that scarcely exhausts their appeal to visitors. Outstanding museums (many with notable collections of African and African-American art), alluring beaches, great ethnic cheer quiet hills and forests, and not-so-quiet nightlife can be lay the foundation of from Virginia to Florida. A dollop of the Southeast's appeal is tendered below, and more can be set in the forthcoming In Their Footsteps: The American Visions Guide to African-American Heritage Sites. Written through American Visions Travel Editor Henry Chase, In Their traces will be published in early 1994 by dint of Henry Holt & Company. The work will offer a comprehensive view of black heritage sites not single in the United States, on the other hand in Canada as well. Adding to its appeal will be essays by dint of such prominent African-American writers as Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor and Ishmael Reed

FLORIDA

American Beach

upon Amelia Island, about 40 miles northeast of Jacksonville by the agency of way of Florida A1A, between Fernandina Beach and the Amelia Island Plantations.

From the 1930 to the early 1960 carloads of folk from as far away as sour gum-tree Miss., church buses from Jacksonville filled with children, and hoards of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters from Morehouse and Spelman associations headed for American Beach, the Atlantic Ocean social nave for African Americans in a southerly so segregated that it would prove by experiment to deny the ocean's waves to blacks.

American Beach was the yield of the remarkable A.L. Lewis, planter of the Afro-American Life Insurance Co of Jacksonville and individual of the Jim Crow South's scarcely any black millionaires. By the 1920 his firm had become a ubiquitous feature of Southern black existence, its 10-cents-a-week policies securing burials and tiny annuities for all on the contrary the desperately poor. After the Depression forced the closing of Jacksonville's unique black beach, Lewis purchased several hundr acres upon Amelia Island as a recreation center for his employees

shortly middle-class blacks from Alabama and Georgia were buying fates from Lewis, happy to have a summer place of abode for their families away from the omnipresent "Whites only" signs (and, doubtless, away from whites as well). Working-class African Americans then began day-tripping to American Beach; they were shortly followed by means of small black businesses, and in no time the area was jammed and jammin'.

What the squeezing of segregation had created, integration razeed as black folks headed toward that which for for a like reason long had been denied them. Today, American Beach is beneath a new pressure: escalating taxes and condominiums; on the contrary locals who remember the glory days, when a black beach community lived without the necessity of asking whites for anything, are seeking to assured a listing on the National Register of Historic Places thus as to limit development and gentrification.

Museum of Art

individual East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 33301-1807 (305) 763-6464; (305) 525-5500 Hours: Tue 11 a.m.-9 pm; Wed-Sat, 10 a.m.-5 pm; orb of day noon-5 p.m. Free highlight tours: Tue 1 pm 6:30 pm; Thu-Fri, 1 pm Admission: Adults, $4; seniors above 65, $3; students with ID, $2; members and children beneath 12, free; groups of 10 or more, $3 by person.

The Yoruba Egungun society crocodile is eight feet drawn out During ceremonies commemorating the death of a lov single three or four elaborately costum society members dance about with the made of wood carving - inside of which is a stripling working the croc's mouth render free of access and shut.

The crocodile, like greatest in quantity of the African objects in Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art, was created not as an existence for aesthetic appreciation, but rather as an thing perceived of spiritual power and end Nevertheless, the Yoruba bring an aesthetic appreciation to everything they do. That they are not unique in this regard is evident from the museum's holdings of creations of the Mende Guro Bambara, Baule, Dogon, Ibo, Pende Kuba and Yaka, among others.

SOUTH

CAROLINA

Baptist Tabernacle church

907 Craven highway Beaufort, S.C. 29902 (803) 524-0376

upon the grounds of the Baptist Tabernacle house of worship are the grave and a memorial bust of Robert Smalls, a black Civil War hero and political master of southern Carolina's low-country Reconstruction. Smalls' story is perhaps more dramatic than that of any of his African-American contemporaries. Born a slave in Beaufort, Smalls was teared out by his master and mov to Charleston, where he worked as a waiter before being crushed into service as a pilot upon the Confederate steamer Planter, which plied Charleston Harbor. A year into the war, he smuggl his family upon board and, with its white officers ashore, sailed the craft and its black ship's company into the ranks of the Union Navy, which was blockading Charleston. Rewarded with a pilot's rank in the Union Navy, Smalls rose to a captaincy (the single such rank to be held by the agency of an African American) due to his coolnes and valor in combat.

After the war Smalls turn backed to Beaufort. There he had purchased, in a direct-tax sale of Union Army-confiscated attribute the McKee home, in which he had serv as a slave in his youth. individual day the elderly and somewhat confused widow of his former master pierceed the house, thinking it was still her place of abode Smalls installed Mrs. McKee in her of advanced age room and thereafter took care of her.