Minority tourism, it’s called. The trend is lucrative and family oriented, but otherwise no day at Disney World. Consider some of the bloodstained sites found on what the brochures refer to as African-American Heritage Tours. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where in 1965 police attacked a crowd of interracial marchers. The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 23 years ago. The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., designed by Vietnam Veterans Memorial artist Maya Lin, which lists the names of 40 people killed in the cause of racial equality between 1955 and 1968. Not that every stop on these tours commemorates grief and violence. The King National Historic Site in Atlanta is a complex that includes the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the comfortable Victorian home where King was born-and the crypt where he is buried. As Mrs. Linda Williams, who traveled to Atlanta with her husband and their four foster sons from Newport News, Va., said last week, “The children can see from this that not all blacks lived in shacks.”
What has motivated government on every level to preserve and market these monuments to black Americans? The answer is a sudden enlightenment-not so much about the contributions of an oppressed people but about their disposable income. According to one recent study, blacks constitute a “travel market” of $15 billion annually. “We bring our families, we tend to stay longer and spend more money than our average white counterpart,” says Caletha Powell, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Network. Alabama’s tourist office now distributes a slick color brochure urging blacks to visit areas from which, 25 or 30 years ago, they were forcibly driven by police dogs and fire hoses. “What’s fostering the interest in Mississippi and elsewhere is pure economics,” says John Horhn, director of that state’s Division of Tourism. “When you look at the travel impact of the black community that’s a very appealing market to go after.”
Southern states that were slow to respond to the trend are now playing catch-up. Florida recently announced it will increase its tourism spending on minority advertising, and Tennessee has created a list of black historical sites. Natchez, meanwhile, is typical of the towns that are aggressively marketing themselves to Northern blacks as, in this case, the birthplace of novelist Richard Wright and the home of William Johnson, a free black businessman whose 19th-century diary is considered one of the most important documents of Southern history. Tourists, says Powell, “will pay money to learn about the richness of a city when they visit as opposed to just looking at the buildings.” Others are looking for the excitement of, say, a football game between two traditionally black colleges. On a recent Saturday in Atlanta, two such rivalries attracted some 80,000 people, many of whom traveled a distance and stayed the weekend. Most of the money generated by minority tourism still goes to white-owned businesses. Cities such as New Orleans, however, now have programs that help black entrepreneurs tap into the flow of black tourist dollars.
As in any boom time, some people seem to be overdoing things a bit. The month-old Memphis museum, housed inside the rebuilt Lorraine Motel, has been criticized for being too theme-parkish–and, though the $5 admission goes into the operating costs of the museum, too expensive. One exhibit allows visitors to sit at a model of a segregated lunch counter among statues of protesting students; another simulates a bus ride with Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give her seat to a white passenger marked a pivotal moment in the civil-rights movement. Does such gimmickry trivialize American history? The truth is, the incidents being commemorated on the heritage tours are powerful enough to render most objections moot. Ozie Gonzaque, a Los Angeles housing commissioner, felt her eyes welling as she entered the Ebenezer Baptist Church last week. “All that Reverend King lived and died for,” she says, “is in your emotions when you walk in there.” It is also, oddly enough, in the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., which this summer opened “Before Freedom Came,” a graphic depiction of how blacks lived and died in the South between 1790 and 1865. Some people objected to the 300-plus paintings, artifacts, manuscripts and photographs of slave life–but museum attendance has lately been up about 50 percent. The truth, it seems, cannot only move mountains; it can spin turnstiles, revitalize the restaurant business and fill motels.
Travelers in search of a usable past are heading south in record numbers. Some popular stops:
Call (404) 331-3920.
Call (404) 688-7263.
Call (901) 521-9699.
Call (205) 264-0286.
Call (800) 647-6724.
