2000: Monument to a People's Rural Past

This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2000 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.

As founder and curator of the African American River Road Museum, Kathe Hambrick embarked on a quest five and half years ago to collect and reassemble the shards of rural River Road African-Americans’ past. With no public funding, Hambrick created the only African-American museum in the country that focuses on rural communities. 

“So many of our people have moved away,” she said. “After the second world war, you see a big migration from the rural areas. We are just trying to preserve what’s left of our rural culture and educate our children and people around the world. So much has already been lost." 

[Read more about the River Road African American Museum today in this story from 2021, here.]

A museum has spawned an eclectic mix of housed artifacts and relics–art work, letters and documents, photographs–bits of unearthed history and remnants of a large African-American population of the past and today. 

The museum’s repository is so extensive that only one-fifth of it is now displayed in the lone building at Texaco Plantation. During these last two years, Hambrick’s board of directors has acquired (through purchase or donation) four important buildings, which will multiply the museum’s locations and collections. 

The Africa Plantation of Modeste (circa 1830s), the Romeville Schoolhouse (circa 1930s), the True Friends Benevolent Society Hall of Donaldsonville (latter nineteenth century) and the Do Right Benevolent Society Hall of Dutchtown are all being relocated to new sites. 

The Do Right building has been moved to a four-acer site in Darrow, where a sculpture garden and park will be established and where art and history workshops for children will be held. 

Donaldsonville will be the primary location of the other three buildings, each on adjacent lots. 

“We think Donaldsonville is an excellent location for our main facility. Donaldsonville is being revitalized, plus, it is a city that is already sixty-five percent black. It was even the first city in the country to elect a black mayor,” Hambrick said. 

The True Friends Benevolent Society Hall in the heart of Donaldsonville’s historic district is the oldest extant Benevolent Society building in the state. It was used as a hall for receptions, dances and political congregation. A protest rally was organized there when Martin Luther King was assassinated. 

[Read about RRAAM Founder Kathe Hambrick's oral history project "The Rural Roots of Jazz," here.]

“It was also a meeting place for Garveyites,” Hambrick noted, referring to the followers of Martin Garvey, a turn-of-last-century civil rights activist, originally from Jamaica, who wanted to lead blacks back to Africa. Louisiana was one of his most supportive states. 

The Donaldsonville project is being planned to revive cultural events as well as to provide another site for exhibits. 

“We will feature musical performances, along with exhibits on rural musicians, at the True Friends Hall. We are hoping to bring back the memory of musicians who played out here and at this hall,” she said. 

That list of former patrons includes Worthia “Showboy” Thomas, whose grand-nephew donated all of Thomas’s instruments, photographs carved in a stoic yet stately pose. The artist, Linda Vauters, is not sculpting a fourth woman–a sugar cane slave–who will be the centerpiece of the Darrow sculpture garden. 

“There is so much dignity in the faces of these women. This is the one (washer woman) I want to be the size of the Statue of Liberty, on the river road, “Hambrick said with a grin, then added: “Well, I would at least like to have her life-sized.”

This year, Hambrick’s quest for an authentic cotton sack climaxed in the small town of Waterproof, Louisiana, where a cotton farmer gave her a nine-foot sack that holds one hundred pounds of cotton–the average weight picked by a female slave each day. 

“I went everywhere looking for a cotton sack. I even had people from Texas come in here and say, “I’m gonna send you a cotton sack,” Hambrick said with a laugh. “Well, that day it was declared that black people didn’t have to pick cotton anymore, we must have burned every cotton sack in the state because you cannot find one today, I guarantee you.” 

Art exhibits will be moved to Romeville Schoolhouse in Donaldsonville. Those exhibits will include the work of Malaika Favorite, a native of Geismar now living in Atlanta who contributed murals painted on pieces of tin roofing. Favorite was the first black woman to attend integrated schools in Ascension Parish. 

The acrylic mural, the museum’s latest addition, renders tropically colored scene of family life. Favorite also painted the portrait of the legendary River Preacher (formally named George West,) whose peripatetic baptisms and gentle preaching up and down the Mississippi River led some people to believe he was homeless (he actually had a house in Prairieville). But his essence is as nomadic as his life was. 

“He dies out on the river road from old age. They found him there,” Hambrick said. The River Preacher’s life remains cryptic in spite of memories and pictures, and that is a blessing; African Americans are graced with yet another story to tell.