Alabama has a long and complicated history in regards to race. State leaders fought to preserve slavery, Jim Crow laws, and more. Recently, lawmakers voted to ban "critical race theory" and "divisive concepts" from public school classrooms. However, Black leaders from the state have always emerged to oppose racist and bigoted policies. There are passionate people who are dedicated to contributing to the living memory of Black folks in Alabama. William Hampton is one of them.
The oft-quoted proverb "it takes a village to raise a child" rings especially true for William Hampton. Before he became the founder and curator of the Huntsville Revisited Museum, he was just a child who loved listening to family stories. His grandparents and great-grandparents shared his family's oral tradition with him and his parents. He recounts memories of them sitting on the front porch and talking about the significant stories of their everyday family members.
"When my mom would get evicted, when us children were growing up, we would spend anywhere from two to three months at either one of those homes, great grandparents or grandparents, until my mom could get back on her feet," said Hampton. "And so during that time, Papa and Big Mama would share stories about their childhood, and [the] same with my grandparents, George and Lucille, so that just lit a fuse and started a fire in me to learn more about my family history. And they were so colorful in sharing stories that it just made me want to dig deeper."
Hampton went to the Huntsville-Madison County Library archives to research his history and was shocked to see that it was incomplete. Beyond the absence of his own family's history, he didn't see anyone who looked like him in the archives, he just saw white changemakers. He soon discovered that Huntsville's rich Black history was not adequately preserved in Alabama's libraries, archives, or newspapers, but was instead passed down intergenerationally through oral histories and personal belongings.
"I was not included," said Hampton. "My family was not included. People who look like me were not included when we go down to our archives. I'm talking about this time period, '60s and '70s, no stories about our families. So where were we? Did we exist? Did we have a part to play in the building of this community?"
However, this setback did not stop Hampton's journey; it only made him more fascinated with history. Through continued research, he gained a deeper understanding of the gatekeepers at play, which inspired him to create a space that would allow for a more complete telling of Alabama history. He decided he wanted to run a history museum in Huntsville.
Hampton moved a lot as a child and began his journey toward being museum curator by first becoming an amateur traveling archivist.
"I've had a lifetime of collecting," he said. "Whenever I would go to the home of family members who were getting up in age, and the older ones would call me William Henry, W-I-M, Wim Henry. So if there was a family heirloom, or, you know, some old pictures or sewing machine or just some item. And the older family members realized that they were coming to the end of their days. And family members [would say] 'I want this, and I want that. Wim, what do you want?' For me, it was usually just the pictures."
There might have been a dresser, or this, that or the other, but not a whole lot. So I just started collecting, knowing that one day I would have a brick and mortar and I could place these items and have the community come and see."
In 2008, Hampton was finally able to start a platform dedicated to sharing this history. He made an account on the brand new social media site, Facebook, called "Huntsville Revisited" where he posted archival photographs and stories that accompanied them.
The initial page quickly maxed out its followers limit.
As the platform grew, so did Hampton's following. His account's loyal followers eagerly engaged with the unique pieces of Huntsville's history that centered stories of the everyday person. Rare photos and archival relics were interspersed with posts from Hampton about his dream to one day display this vast collection in his museum.
The oft-quoted proverb "it takes a village to raise a child" rings especially true for William Hampton.
In 2020, the historic moment of racial reckoning catalyzed by the George Floyd police killing and solidarity uprisings pushed several institutions, including the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), to reckon with their racist pasts. The institution issued an apology for promoting a view of history that favored glorifying the Confederacy while it failed to document the contributions of Black Alabamians. In the statement, the ADAH vowed to, "recommit itself to the mission of illuminating the path that brought us here, and thereby equipping all of us, together, to build a future characterized by justice, human dignity, and a commitment to the wellbeing of all people."
In Huntsville, William Hampton was getting closer to making his dream of a brick-and-mortar museum a reality with the help of one of his loyal followers, James Batson. Batson had recently purchased a strip mall along the main highway in Huntsville and wanted Hampton's museum to be a part of the redevelopment.
Hampton jumped at the opportunity and eagerly brought his collection, passion, and vision. The Huntsville Revisited Museum opened its doors on June 19, 2020. Hampton, who calls his museum a "Front Porch Experience," curated the space to make its visitors feel like they're sitting with family and neighbors, listening to elders share their stories. In lieu of the classic Southern front porch's wooden chairs, plants, and warm Southern air, museum patrons are surrounded by photos of under-appreciated Black changemakers like Dr. William Hooper Councill.
Those who are most familiar with his name are connected to the HBCU Alabama A&M University in Huntsville which Council, a Civil Rights movement pioneer, founded in 1875. "Dr. Council, in 1887, had purchased a first-class ticket to ride on a passenger train here in Huntsville and was told he couldn't sit there, and he refused to give up his seat," Hampton explained. "Three guys beat him up, drug him back to the Negro car, but he sued the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and won."
This was decades before Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery in 1955.
Another exhibit showcases the story of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenage boys who were falsely accused of assaulting two white women on a train in Huntsville in 1931. Eight of nine of the boys were convicted and sentenced to death, sparking protests and a movement for their freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions in the landmark Powell v. State of Alabama decision. It demanded a retrial because they did not have adequate legal representation. Several retrials and reconvictions followed the decision and the Scottsboro Boys collectively served more than 100 years in prison.
Hampton worked with activist Sheila Washington to posthumously exonerate all of the teenagers in 2013.
Though only recently opened, the Huntsville Revisited Museum has garnered several honors. It is also an extension of the National Memorial of Peace and Justice in Montgomery which documents America's sordid history of lynchings, and honors the nearly 6,500 known victims of racial terrorism.
As a part of the extended exhibition, Hampton's museum houses jars of soil of the ground where people were lynched in Madison County.
Plus, the museum has some of the only photographs of Martin Luther King's visit to Huntsville in 1962, which Hampton collected from the attendees of King's historic speech at Oakwood College (now Oakwood University). Though a prominent address in the Civil Rights Movement leader's archive, the Oakwood speech went largely uncovered by the local press.
"I have associates who worked for the news agencies, The Huntsville Times, the television stations who say that they were told to not cover it," he said. "Don't even go out there, ignore them, and they'll go away. That's why you don't see from our three network television stations from that time period or The Huntsville Times. You see a little snippet then of the next day, a little covering of it, but not Huntsville Times photographers who captured it, local news video footage of Dr. King. You see [a] private video collection and private photos of Dr. King's visit here."
People from across the world have visited the museum, from local high school classes to visitors from around the world.
Hampton feels like he's fulfilling his purpose of showing a full history of Alabama and making people proud to be from Huntsville.