Additionally, although the tourism industry took a hit last year, outdoor activities continued to draw visitors, making outdoor tours like Ms. Bangura’s and Ms. Fisher’s of Beyond the Bell popular. Ms. Bangura said the style of her offerings makes them accessible for all travelers, especially those without access to smartphones for scanning QR codes or those unable to take part in headphone-aided tours.
Among the several kinds of tours and experiences Ms. Bangura has created is Black Monument Avenue, a three-block interactive experience in Richmond’s majority-Black Highland Park neighborhood. Visitors can drive through and call a designated phone line with unique access codes to hear songs, poems and messages about each installation. Every August, she runs Gabriel Week, honoring Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved man who led a rebellion in the Richmond area in 1800.
“I call him brother General Gabriel,” Ms. Bangura said, adding that in her work, she encourages “people to decolonize their history by making sure that history is being told from the language of the oppressed, not the language of the oppressor.”
Walking tours, for those who go on them, also provide a visceral sense of history that differs from the experience of a museum. Even as the National Museum of African American History and Culture has attracted record numbers of visitors to Washington, D.C., tours like Ms. Bangura’s can provide a more local perspective and show visitors exactly where something significant happened.
“We can find community in walking together, we can find community in exploring a neighborhood together, and we can find a sense of where we are, we can find a sense of where folks have been and we can find common ground,” said Kalela Williams, the founder of Black History Maven, a Philadelphia company that primarily offers walking tours of the city that focus on Black history.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/travel/black-travelers-diversity-inclusion.html
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