USA Faculty-Student Team to Support Community Public History Project

---

Posted on August 5, 2024

Joy Washington

---

---

Dr. David Messenger, chair of the Department of History, and several of his students at the University of South Alabama will help create a community public history project for Africatown.

“It’s important that South supports the efforts of Africatown,” Messenger said.  “I reached out to the Africatown community to see how I could use my professional expertise to help. Not only will I support this project, but I get to mentor students who will get hands-on experience. They will also have this great opportunity to serve their community.”

Messenger and his students will work with the Mobile County Training School and the Africatown community, along with middle school students.  

Mobile County Training School alumni and the affiliated groups of Africatown comprise one of eight teams nationally to receive a $100,000 grant from the funding agency The Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit public art and history studio, for the 2024-25 academic year. 

The combined group, including Messenger and his students, will serve as one of the cohorts for 2024. Other key team members include Archaeologist Alexandra Jones, Mobile County Training alumni member Bill Green and President Anderson Flen.

“This team comes together with a desired outcome to serve the community. My overall work on this project is to support this grant as an academic and public historian,” Messenger said. “My students will help archive the numerous historical artifacts that will be exhibited at the new space in the Mobile County Training School."

Mobile County Training School was originally built for Black children to earn an education during the Jim Crow segregated South with the support of Booker T. Washington, the founder and first president of Tuskegee University, and Julius Rosenwald, a businessman and philanthropist. 

The project is expected to be completed by spring of 2025. 

The public history project at Africatown is supported by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, which has sub-granted $1 million across 10 collaborative teams of artists, educators, storytellers and organizers to change the public imagination by reimagining public monuments.

---