diverse conversations
Traveling Through History for a More Diverse Future Mobile Trail Illuminates African American Contributions by Meredith Montgomery Twenty years ago, when Dora Franklin Finley approached the historians at local historic preservation societies about her plans to create an African American heritage trail in her hometown, they asked, “What have Black people done in Mobile?” “That just fueled her fire,” says Dora’s brother Karlos Finley, President of the Dora Franklin Finley African American Heritage Trail. “She was very focused on ensuring that African Americans were recognized for the significant contributions that they’ve made to the city of Mobile because unfortunately, that part of our history was not being told.” The idea for a trail was born when City Councilman William Carroll experienced Boston’s Black heritage trail. Recognizing that individuals in Mobile had accomplished things as great if not greater than what he was seeing along the Massachusetts trail, Carroll returned home on a mission to find someone to bring his idea to life. Dora was a natural fit. Raised by Civil Rights activists (and jailed with her
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mother for protesting at the age of 15), she wrote that her parents instilled in her “a conviction to contribute to the physical and spiritual health of my community” and her grandfather “endowed me with a humanitarian legacy of service to community”. Her professional career included positions in accounting, business development and teaching before working in managerial logistics for Kimberly-Clark Corporation for 25 years. She considered her community contributions during retirement to be her second career, as she spent hundreds of hours researching Mobile’s history.
FROM THE DINNER TABLE TO THE ARCHIVES
Karlos and Dora’s mother, Joycelyn Franklin Finley, was the first person to teach Black history in the Mobile County school system. “History was always a topic of conversation for us at the dinner table and when Dora was working on the trail, she started with the stories that had been shared with us and she researched to quantify and substantiate all of them
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at places like the Mobile Archives, Alabama Historical Commission, Emory University, University of South Alabama and the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Karlos says. Dora’s first focus was the city’s founders, French Canadian brothers Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. As a lady medalist—an honor bestowed upon her by the Pope—Dora had access to all the records of the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. Established in 1703, a year after Mobile’s founding, it was the first Catholic parish on the Gulf Coast, housing some of the oldest records in the region, including the earliest documentation of a person of African descent in Mobile. In a notation by the Cathedral’s pastor dated June 11, 1707, he acknowledges the baptism of Jean Baptiste, “a negro belonging to [the city’s founder] Mr. Bienville of about five years of age.” This boy of African and French descent was also the first known child— Black or white—to be baptized in the city.