All tagged Mobile
Davis Avenue, named after the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was called The Avenue by locals. It was the center of business, shopping, socializing and entertainment for Black Mobilians who were unwelcome in many other parts of the city.
The Avenue was born during Reconstruction as a safe place for Black people to live and own property. As the population grew, Davis Avenue prospered through entrepreneurship and community, despite the restrictive laws of Jim Crow.
But that economically independent community collapsed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, urban renewal, integration of schools and families moving away.
Those who grew up on The Avenue gave additional reasons for its decline: the closing of Brookley Field, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the opening of shopping malls, racism, crime, drugs and blight.
Located across the chain-link fence from the well-tended Catholic Cemetery on Martin Luther King Avenue, Oaklawn is an overgrown, forgotten burial ground for Blacks in Mobile. Most of Oaklawn’s 18.5 acres was established in the 1930s and 1940s with simple gravestones facing east. Death, like life, was segregated for many buried here.
Every day a stranger comes into my life. We have a conversation that changes me in some way and then they disappear like we never met. Just an empty place where they used to be. What if I had been there a minute sooner or later and missed them? Or missed them because I wasn't paying attention.
