The Black History Legacy Trail system allows locals to walk through history
Two trails tell stories of resilience, community, activism and compassion 🎨🖌️
Along the pedestrian greenway in North Town Square, 10 utility boxes lining the streets of downtown Baton Rouge have been decorated with murals that depict standout moments in our city’s history.
The project that is the impetus for these murals is the newly unveiled East Baton Rouge Black History Legacy Trail System. Two trails, one in downtown Baton Rouge and one in BREC’s Mary J. Lands Park, tell stories of resilience, community, activism and compassion.
This project began in 2023 when the Downtown Development District approached local organization the Walls Project. The goals at the center of the work were preserving lost information and staking Baton Rouge’s claim as a trailblazer in the nation’s Civil Rights Movement.
Morgan Udoh is the Public Arts Associate Director at the Walls Project and coordinator of this project. For her, it was imperative to accurately represent these stories.
“You have one chance to get it right,” Udoh says. “And we’re doing this narrative change. Louisiana has had these moments in history, even pre-Reconstruction, where it was really at the forefront of social progress. And that has been largely lost.”
Work started with intensive research. Historians, elders and descendants of Civil Rights legends helped the team piece together the information provided on the trail. Udoh says finding accurate information, digging up lost stories and verifying records took more than a year.
Although Baton Rouge was home to several impactful protests, leaders, movements and policies, the city’s progress has been largely lost in the national narrative. The trail markers all have QR codes that link to videos, articles, and audio recordings that add context to known stories and shed light on stories often erased from our history.
“You hear a lot every Black History Month, rightfully so, about Rosa Parks and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but you don’t hear enough about who inspired him. This was T.J. Jemison and Martha White, because we held the first successful bus boycott in 1953, two years before the Montgomery bus boycott,” Udoh says.
As of Friday, Feb. 27, the day of the Black History Legacy Trail’s official unveiling, both the Greenway Civil Rights Trail and the EnvisionBR Legacy Trail are open.
EnvisioNBR is the quarterback organization handling the redevelopment of Eden Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Bogan Walk, Easy Town and Greenville Extension. The team saw an opportunity to collaborate with the Walls Project to connect the neighborhood’s residents with its history. They wanted to connect this new trail to the downtown portion, but focus more closely on the legacy of that neighborhood.
When Udoh’s team was approached by EnvisioNBR, they knew they had found the perfect opportunity for growth.
“The downtown portion hits on Civil Rights leaders and moments and places that were important to the entire Capital Region, and then it connects as well to the Legacy Trail in Eden Park. You get the opportunity to learn more about those people who came from that neighborhood, and how they not only affected the national history, but also how they affected their neighborhood,” she says.
Udoh says the system has plans to expand in the future. She hopes that the next two segments will be in Scotlandville and Old South Baton Rouge. She also hopes to connect with the BREC Freedom Heritage Trail, a 6-mile, under-construction path that will connect Scotlandville Parkway Park to Memorial Stadium.
“That provides us the opportunity to literally move people from North Baton Rouge to downtown and back, and allow them the opportunity to walk through and learn about history while literally being in those spaces where the history happened,” Udoh says.
At the Greenway Civil Rights Trail’s unveiling ceremony on Feb. 27, local leaders from the Downtown Development District, the Walls Project, EnvisioNBR and Mayor-President Sid Edwards spoke about what this project means for Baton Rouge.
Udoh’s speech emphasized the impact that Baton Rouge had on the Civil Rights Movement.
“While this trail does center Black American history, let us be clear: This is American history. It is a story of organized current, discipline, and innovation, and democratic progress,” she said. “And that is something that we can all be proud of and inspired by. May this trail remind us that Baton Rouge did not just witness change. It innovated, tested and perfected it.”
