You know the history: Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks sparked the bus boycott, riding vehicles that had replaced America’s first city-wide electrified rail line.

Martin Luther King, Jr. came to preach and work on Dexter Avenue. Harry Belafonte brought his famous friends to entertain and galvanize the Selma-Montgomery marchers at the City of St. Jude, Montgomery’s West Side Catholic parish that housed the Southeast’s first integrated hospital. Fred Gray, John Lewis, E.D. Nixon, and countless unnamed citizens pushed the cause of justice forward from unassuming homes and small brick church houses.

Since then, the city’s history has been preserved in amber. The nation’s burgeoning interest in reckoning with its racial history has sparked a new wave of downtown development.

Tourists now flock by the thousands to be moved by memorials and museums, stopping over for a few days to catch a brief glimpse of our collective memory. Apartment and hotel enterprises are sprouting up rapidly to accommodate this increased traffic. But as the story of Montgomery extended beyond 1968, many of the strategies put in place by the powers that be have since undermined the promise of systemic equity.

Let’s take the history of Oak Park, for example. Located at the dividing line between the West, North, and East sides of town, Oak Park housed the original Montgomery Zoo, as well as a huge community pool. When desegregation opened the facility to all residents, the city pulled funding, closed the Zoo for a decade, and filled the pool in with dirt and concrete, citing “racial violence” as the reason for the closure. As a matter of fact, all public parks were closed during this period. When the Zoo reopened in the 1970s, it had relocated to its current home in the then-burgeoning suburbs on the North side of town, close to the Garrett Coliseum and the Alabama Agricultural Center, home of the city’s fairgrounds and farmer’s market. Oak Park, on the other hand, has become a place that parents tell their children not to visit after dark, where there have been fatal accidents as recently as a couple years ago as of this writing.

This is just one example of a story that resonates across the nation: federally subsidized communities with covenants preventing sale to non-white families; highways plotted through the growing black neighborhoods instead of vacant land; the flow of power and resources from the city’s core eastward; the urban core ransacked and vacated by it’s historic residents; and the reverberation of redevelopment and gentrification ebbing back to its source, primarily to the benefit of tourism and service sectors.

Inevitably, the residents of urban spaces are left with fewer and fewer spaces to interact outside of work and their home lives.

This is not to say that there have not been bright spots.

Jubilee City Fest boasted a lineup of big and small acts that appealed to the diverse population of Montgomery. Skate culture developed in a diminished downtown, eventually transforming into a proper park. Alabama State University’s music program descended from the first university jazz band in the country. And, if you know where to look, you’ll be rewarded with tales of bands playing house parties, multi-talented artists living next door, and community theaters running full-fledged radio plays, complete with live foley work.

In an era when the clouds of recession, austerity, and wage suppression hang heavy and humid, these efforts lose steam from lack of finances or notoriety. As our reckoning with hundreds of years of history continues, so do the lives of common folk. We need to remember the events that shaped our civic and cultural identity–the ones that made it into the history books and tourism guides, along with the ones that didn’t. A failure to uncover the weird, the grassroots, belies the resourcefulness and collective energy of our forebears both prominent and obscure. If we as a creative community are to prosper sustainably, we have to examine the culture that has been nurtured in Montgomery since 1968. At the same time, we need to support the living artists, writers, creatives of all stripes with big dreams. 

These are our commitments here at close third: We intend to build spaces where people can come together, not as relatives or coworkers, but as individuals in a creative community.

In doing so, we look to organize welcoming, engaging experiences that honor the past and enrich our shared vision of the future. By identifying and strengthening these ties, we will reinforce our city’s cultural infrastructure against the eroding tides of ahistorical thinking. Recognizing the abundance of our shared experiences is our path to our rightful legacy as changemakers and table shakers.

Keep it close.