Our Story
The Montevallo Legacy Project is a community action group that seeks to find, preserve, and share undertold stories of our town’s past. It was established Fall 2022 by two members of the Montevallo Historical Preservation Commission, Kathy King and Anitka Stewart Sims, after city council voted to approve funding for the Montevallo African American Heritage Trail. They were soon joined by co-founder Reggie Holifield and communications specialist Harrison Neville. They wanted to support the effort to recognize African American contributions to the city and to create additional opportunities to give voice and visibility to the Black community in and around Montevallo.
Our First Year
We published a collection of the first sixteen installments of the Untold Stories of Black Montevallo, which had been appearing monthly in Montevallo's Chamber Chatter since October 2021. We co-sponsored a viewing of the documentary 54 Miles from Home followed by a Q&A with producer Phillip Howard and descendants of the campsite families who shared their land with the Selma to Montgomery marchers. We organized an immersive social justice experience for nearly 100 students and teachers from Los Angeles at the site of the EJI marker on Main Street. We led an effort to locate and commemorate burial sites in a neglected church graveyard that may contain remains of persons of African descent from the 1830s onward..
Current Projects
We are now working to develop new stories for two historic sites. One is King House on the University of Montevallo campus, a restored structure built by slave labor in the early 1820s. For this project we have partnered with UM's Peace and Justice Studies program. The other is the "little school" on Island Street. From at least 1924 until 1939 this two-room schoolhouse brought public education to Black youngsters in the Montevallo area and served as the hub of activities of the now vanished Jacksonville community.