New coffee shop hopes to make, preserve history on West 15th Street
Apr. 15—General Jackson, 70, likes to tell people that Anniston's 15th Street was once like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, bursting with activity. That it had a movie theater. That every lot was filled with a building and every building was filled with a business. Every year, it's harder to convince people those things are true.
"You tell people, but it just doesn't register," said Jackson, a longtime Anniston resident who cut hair in barbershops on the city's west side for decades.
Jackson is working on a project that may help correct the record. The nonprofit he runs, Community Development Corporation, is preparing to open a coffeehouse in the 500 block of West 15th Street.
Walk inside the History Making Coffee Shop and you'll smell fresh-cut wood and see neat rows of tables and a newly built counter. Look out the window and you'll see West 15th as it is today, a place more hopeful than prosperous, with a few well-loved local businesses surviving among empty lots and unused storefronts.
On the walls of the shop, though, visitors can see 15th Street as it was.
"You have to believe me when I say this was the Black business district," Jackson said. "It was truly a city within a city."
No one looks back fondly on the years of West 15th Street's heyday. In the segregated Anniston of the 1950s, Jackson said, it wasn't wise for a Black consumer to venture east of the railroad tracks — the same tracks that now make up a walking trail through the Model City.
But 15th Street, Jackson said, was something special. Black-owned businesses thrived here. The city itself, Black and white, was more populous, with a military base and more than a dozen pipe shops providing work for thousands. At the History Making Coffee Shop, Jackson has photographic evidence to prove it.
"There were barber shops, shoe shops, beauty shops, a motel," he said, pointing to a photo of a 15th Street lined with cars, with people coming up and down the sidewalk.
Also on the wall, or in a stack waiting to be put up: photos of cars lined up at Afro Cab, a Black-owned cab company; an outside shot of Jeff Barbecue; a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. visiting in an Anniston home.
Proceeds from the coffeehouse will go back into Community Development Corporation, a group that in recent years has been helping local people with home repairs. But another goal is to keep alive the stories behind the photos, to explain to visitors the history of the community, from mundane to the momentous.
"People know a little about the Freedom Riders," Jackson said. "There's a lot of civil rights history in Anniston that people don't know."
Jackson wants to tell people about Art Bacon, who took a beating for challenging segregation at Anniston's train station months before the Freedom Riders came. About Rev. N.Q. Reynolds, who was physically attacked for integrating the local library. About Willie Brewster, killed by nightriders in 1965.
But the coffeehouse isn't just a museum of the civil rights past — it's a bet on Anniston's near future. With a federal courthouse nearing completion downtown and the Freedom Riders National Monument slowly ramping up its educational efforts, Jackson sees a need for a gathering place for a new wave of visitors to the city.
It's a project shaped by the pandemic. Jackson himself has survived COVID-19, an illness that put his work behind schedule. He doesn't have a date for the coffee shop's grand opening, though he says it will be soon.
The real-estate boom of the past year — likely caused by low interest rates during the pandemic — also played a role. Jackson's nonprofit can't afford to do home repairs at the pace it used to. "Supplies cost too much right now," he said.
Capitol & statewide reporter Tim Lockette: 256-294-4193. On Twitter @TLockette_Star.
