Alabama Humanities Alliance grant supports historical exhibit and events

The Alabama Humanities Alliance has awarded $10,000 to the Wallace Center for an mixed media exhibit Emancipation and the Struggle to Make Home in the Wallace House in fall 2024. It will be accompanied by a public lecture at the Datcher History House on the antebellum period in Harpersville and then by a panel discussion The Origins of Alabama's Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1890 at the Beth-El Civil Rights Experience. This programming is our first exhibit in a series of historical interpretations. and will inform the use of virtual and augmented reality in a fuller house interpretation.

For more about this historical period….

The period between 1865 and 1890 brought shifts in labor arrangements and land ownership, with the rise of share cropping, tenancy, wage labor, and Black ownership of property. Beginning with reconstruction and the promises of full citizenship for freedman, violence by the Ku Klux Klan, continued economic subjugation, and segregation led to passage of Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and limited political access. Opportunities were scarce in rural Harpersville following Emancipation, and freedmen sought to make home, usually living on the plantation land and farming under various arrangements. Thirteen Black Wallace men registered to vote in 1867, a right usurped after Reconstruction. Of 16 residences of Black Wallaces in the 1880 census, seven were renters, four were sharecroppers and one owned their farm. All were proximate to the Wallace House. Institutions, such as the Scott’s Grove Baptist Church and others, were established. Under these shifting conditions, they were “making home” as freedmen. This period is significant because it set the parameters for white supremacy and economic inequality in Alabama.