MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Harpersville is a small town in Alabama. It's predominantly white. It is located in Shelby County, which the local Republican Party calls the reddest county in America. It is also home to a new museum exhibit about a particular chapter of Black history about what happened in Harpersville after formerly enslaved people were emancipated, granted their freedom and not much else. The exhibit is at The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. And on this Juneteenth, we have reached Executive Director Ebony Howard to tell us more. Hi there.

EBONY HOWARD: Hi. How are you today?

KELLY: I am great. Happy Juneteenth.

HOWARD: Same to you.

KELLY: So the exhibit, it's called "Out Of Whole Cloth." It follows three families, three Black families, after the Civil War. Tell me a little bit about who they were.

HOWARD: Like you said, there are three families. One of the families are the descendants of Lucy Wallace Baker, who married Albert Baker. During the Antebellum period, they were enslaved people, Lucy living on the Wallace Plantation, Albert living on the nearby Baker Plantation. They got married in secret because that was something that enslaved people could not do at the time. And after emancipation, they were able to form a life together. Their descendants live on today with a surname Datcher. They still live in Harpersville, as well as across the state and even the country, and they own land that their ancestors were enslaved on.

KELLY: Wow.

HOWARD: The second family is the McGinnis family, who came to the Wallace land around 1870 and worked that land as sharecroppers. And even though emancipation had happened and African Americans technically were emancipated, the plantation system actually persisted. And the Black people who worked that land continued to work that land under conditions that weren't that different from enslavement. Present-day descendants of the McGinnis family include the current mayor of Harpersville, Theo Perkins, who is a strong force in the town, even though it's a small town and, like you said, one of the reddest counties in the country.

KELLY: Yeah.

HOWARD: And then the third family, we don't know who they are, but we have these wonderful photos of them that were captured on something called tintypes. And tintypes were the photograph of the day. And if you are able to visit The Wallace Center's newest exhibit, then you'll be able to see the photos of these newly emancipated people dressed in their finest clothing as they take these pictures, and they look ready to take on a new life, a new world. You can see the determination in their faces. You can see the hope in their faces. You can see that they're ready and poised to move forward. And so those are the three families that we honor.

KELLY: And I - people listening will have picked up on you're talking about these families who lived at the Wallace Plantation, who worked the Wallace land. You're now the executive director of The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. This is telling the history of what happened on that same ground.

HOWARD: Yeah, that's right. So The Wallace Center is a descendant-led organization, and what that means is that the descendants of the people who were enslaved on that land or either worked that land as sharecroppers came together with the white descendants of the slaveholders to preserve the history of what happened at The Wallace Center, as well as to foster discussions about racial reconciliation to make a better and more equitable future. And so what is distinctive about The Wallace Center is that we are on six acres of what used to be the Wallace Plantation. Originally, the plantation was over 5,000 acres. So we recognize the horrors that happened on that land and in that house. While we have preserved the house, it's not with the purpose of allowing people to tour it, to sort of look at grandeur. It's to capture a time in history that demonstrates the resilience and survival of a people whose ancestry exists to this day.

KELLY: So tell me what people coming to see this specific exhibit will see, will experience, to try to capture something that is now unimaginable - that experience of a sharecropper on a plantation in the South.

HOWARD: You know, when you think about emancipation and when you think about it just, like, strictly from the viewpoint of what we learn in schools, if we learn about it in schools, it's, you know, the slaves were freed. Well, the reality is that these were people who had been living in captivity who, once emancipation started, had a whole world of things to consider and deal with that they had not before, right? So there's the question of - where am I going to work? Am I going to work somewhere different than being on this plantation? If I am on this plantation still, is it going to be much different than what it was before? There are questions about education, about how to get education, about how to form kinship groups, about how to establish churches and institutions. And then there are these very basic questions about having agency over yourself, having autonomy over yourself - right? - that they would have been faced with.

So if you come to this exhibit, we invite you to step into the shoes of these people who are living on the precipice of a change in history that none of them had been able to fathom until that very time. And we invite you to pick up and touch objects that they would have used - things as simple as water jugs, hay picks, land deeds - and to just imagine what their lives would have been like and to experience it through their viewpoint.

KELLY: Yeah. I noted that y'all are in Harpersville, which is a predominantly white town in a red county in Alabama. How has the exhibit been received by locals so far?

HOWARD: So while Harpersville is mostly white, there is a strong Black presence in the community, particularly from Black descendants at The Wallace Center. And so, of course, we have that support. But in terms of the wider Harpersville community, I am heartened to say that we have had interest, that we have had white visitors come to The Wallace Center, see the exhibit, express interest, express a commitment to racial reconciliation. You know, what's wonderful about when people of various races - not just Black, not just white - come to The Wallace Center, what's interesting is people expressing an interest in learning about their own ancestry and how their ancestry intersects with other people's ancestry. And so just being able to look at these actual people that lived in this time in space really seems to ground people in good productive conversations. And again, if that can happen in a small town like Harpersville, if in this community, people can at least express interest, then I think it's possible anywhere.

KELLY: Ebony Howard - she's executive director of The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. Thank you.

HOWARD: Thank you so much for having me.

KELLY: And the exhibit in Harpersville, Alabama, is "Out Of Whole Cloth: Marking History And Making Home."

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