This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and every other Thursday in the Tuskegee News. Guy Trammell is an African American man from Tuskegee, Alabama, and Amy Miller is a white woman from South Berwick, Maine.
By Guy Trammell Jr.
Tuskegee has two great walking trails. The Bartram Trail, in Tuskegee’s National Forest, features the flora and fauna illustrated by English naturalist William Bartram on his travels in the Southeast. The Carver Fitness Trail, beginning at Tuskegee University and ending at the Tuskegee History Center, features tips on leading a healthy lifestyle.
Now we have the Tuskegee Civil Rights and Historic Trail, featuring personalities, events and organizations from the fight for equal justice in the U.S. This was made possible by the Tuskegee University Archives under the direction of Dana Chandler, with funding from the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.
The 13 markers include one for Tuskegee-born Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, who became the “Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement," and another for Charles G. Gomillion, who sued Tuskegee’s Mayor Richard Lightfoot for redrawing the city limits to exclude all but a handful of eligible colored voters. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1960 in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that “gerrymander” for racial exclusion is illegal.
Also featured is Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, the second Tuskegee Institute archivist after the great sociologist Monroe Nathan Work, who established the Negro Year Book, an expansive variety of material on the African American experience, including lynchings. After Work's death, Parkhurst Guzman took over chronicling lynchings for the Associated Press. She also was the first African American to run for office in Macon County, in 1954.
Another marker is for William P. Mitchell, who sued the Honorable Edward Johnson, Macon County’s district judge, for excluding Negroes from jury duty. In a county with five colored people for every white eligible juror, 12 white names were in the jury selection box for each colored name. Also, the jury list was recycled, using the same list of white citizens with a few colored names added to appear fair. The U.S. District Court ruled the practice illegal.
Many churches in Tuskegee are honored for opening their doors to strategy-planning meetings on justice and equality in the community, putting them in danger of being fired into by angry Knights of the White Camellia, or mysteriously set on fire in the night.
The Tuskegee Institute Advancement League is honored for their stand on justice. As students, they continued their studies but between classes collected bail money for schoolmates jailed during protests. On weekends and holidays they organized Lowdnes County Alabama’s and the country’s first Black Panther Party to elect blacks to office.
These “scholar activists,” along with other Trail honorees, were fighting not only for their own rights; they believed civil rights are for everyone. Please explore the Trail, then let’s all live its meaning. Let each of us not be satisfied until equality is a reality for everyone.
By Amy Miller
From the point of view of former history teacher Nicole St. Pierre, tracking down the story of South Berwick’s past is about people making connections in the present.
“I think it’s so important that people have a sense of belonging and telling the story of this place and land is a way to make you feel connected and like you belong to this little piece of geography,” St. Pierre says as she begins our drive into the town’s 400-year history.
St. Pierre brings me first to the edge of Vaughn Woods on the banks of the Salmon Falls River. This, she tells me, is where it all began. By “all,” she means the British settling down and calling the area home. The Europeans found fields here that were already cleared and farmed. It must have looked like a gift from God to the Brits, she mentions.
This gift from God, however, reflected a century of Indians being decimated by disease carried by Europeans passing through to fish and explore. The British found the abandoned area perfect for lumbering, and for over 100 years tall ships were built here and sent 10 miles downriver to the Atlantic to travel the world.
After winding through the area of the grist mills and water power stations, we end our tour in today's downtown. This was a village that was settled in the 1800s, when railroads had lured industry off the river and up to one of four train lines that criss-crossed South Berwick. By then the lumber was gone, and the main industry was fabric and shoes.
For about a decade St. Pierre has worked on the town’s Hike Through History, a walking tour created by the Old Berwick Historical Society to introduce all local third graders to our town’s history. Some years students learn about trades, other years about journeys, children or the river.
Now St. Pierre wants to create a trail for adults. She envisions an innovative phone app that will make history come alive for visitors as well as locals.
As Maine gets set to celebrate its first Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Oct. 14, becoming only one of a handful of states to replace Columbus Day with this acknowledgment of the original inhabitants, St. Pierre recognizes this part of the story is complicated.
But this is, nonetheless, a part of the story and the seeds of our town’s heritage. St. Pierre devotes untold volunteer hours to this work, and if the story of our town’s relationship with Indians is not easy, it is still part of what she sees as the path to connection.
“I just try to be honest with it — about the betrayals and broken treaties,” St. Pierre said. “I try to just present the facts and to ask where do we go from here. It’s all about connection and these are our stories.”
Amy and Guy can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.