They highlighted for us how Black communities —eleven in Franklin County and one Pelham in Grundy County —grew up around schools for African American children. Through these conversations, we learned what they already knew: that these schools were community pillars that linked and bound to one another through networks of kin, vocation, and neighborly connections.

Many African American people with roots in this region have not forgotten this history. The Asia School Restoration Project and the Townsend Cultural Centerhave been working for 20 years or more to preserve that history —and with little support from the area’s cultural institutions, like the University of the South. With few resources beyond “sweat equity,” they have organized to preserve the places and histories of African American enterprise and community life that gave opportunity, meaning, and joy to generations of people in this region.

The blacksouthcumberland.org alliance and website seeks to redress this imbalance and provide a stable and durable foundation for making public the African American history of the region. It entails a partnership between a well-funded and -resourced institutional base — the Roberson Project at the University of the South —and local organizations.