Looking for a way to celebrate Black history? Check out these Visit Macon tours
When Janice Habersham narrates the African American Heritage Van Tour, she starts with a little jingle about herself.
Riders on the Visit Macon tour learn that the retired 38-year-media specialist for Bibb schools is a storyteller, a motivator, an educator and a pound cake maker.
She loves to cook, she loves to sew and she loves to dig in the garden.
She also loves to tell about Macon’s Black history from the daring escape of William and Ellen Craft from slavery in Macon to freedom in Philadelphia to the “Colored Waiting Room” carved in stone above a side entrance of the Terminal Station.
The van tour
The drive-by tour also included locations such as the Tubman Museum, which just opened the Tyler Perry Exhibition, and Cotton Avenue, once a shortcut to haul cotton down to the Ocmulgee River for shipping and where Black business owners later set up shop.
At the stop at Rosa Parks Square, named in honor of the civil rights activist known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott, Habersham also talks about Rodney Davis Jr., Macon’s only Medal of Honor recipient and Ozzie Belle McKay, a civil rights activist.
She shared about how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached to large crowd outside Steward AME Church on Forsyth St., how Grant’s Lounge was Macon’s first truly integrated bar and about blues and jazz legends like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and later a young James Brown performing at the Douglass Theatre founded by Macon’s first Black millionaire Charles Douglass.
That’s only a sampling of the wealth of Macon’s Black history included in the hour-long tour.
The African American Heritage Van Tour was created as part of Black History Month, with tours at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday during the month of February. The cost is $8. The tour can be booked through the Visit Macon website at maconga.org/groups/group-toursor by calling the Visitors Center at (478) 743-1074 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays.
Also, the tour is expected to be offered in the future from time to time. Other Visit Macon van tours include “Soul Sights” and the Cherry Blossom Riding Trail.
Self-guided tour
Additionally, Visit Macon recently released its newest self-guided tour, the Black Heritage Trail of Macon, on the Tour Macon app.
The tour includes 37 historic and cultural sites “that made up the very fabric of the Black community of Macon in the 19th & 20th centuries.”
The Tour Macon app includes GPS locations, stories and multimedia.
For more information, go to the Visit Macon website at visitmacon.org.
This story was originally published February 21, 2023 at 12:00 AM.