Black Savannah: A Self-Guided Walking Tour Through the City's Deeper History At 23 Barnard Street, one building compresses slavery and freedom into a single address. Around 1856, a banker and slave trader named John S. Montmollin commissioned it for his business, and enslaved people were held and sold inside its walls. What those same walls held in the years that followed — a school — is one of the most startling turns in all of Savannah. It is exactly the kind of story this tour delivers, block after block. Savannah is famous for its squares, its live oaks, and architecture preserved since the city's founding in 1733. Black Savannah, a self-guided audio walking tour, moves through a history that runs just as deep and is far less often told: the merchants and teachers, soldiers and organizers who built, sustained, and transformed this city. If you are looking for things to do in Savannah that go beyond the postcard, start here. The Boulevard That Was West Broad Street Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard once carried another name: West Broad Street. For generations it was one of the most important Black commercial corridors in Savannah — a full ecosystem of businesses, institutions, and daily life. A surviving museum building can hint at that world, but it cannot show you the whole street. The tour rebuilds it in your ears while you stand on the pavement where it thrived, storefront by storefront and far beyond storefronts. Two Days in March 1859 On March 2 and 3, 1859, hundreds of enslaved people were brought to auction near Savannah. The sale became known as the Weeping Time, and for generations it was described as the largest recorded slave auction in United States history. More recent scholarship has complicated that superlative — and the evidence behind the revision is a story in itself, one the tour takes on directly rather than reciting the familiar line. The Woman Who Wrote Herself Into the Record Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1848, and sent to Savannah as a child to live with her grandmother. More than a century after her death, she entered the city's official civic landscape — because her own writing made sure she had never entirely disappeared. The route follows what she learned in Savannah as a girl and what she did with it during the Civil War. A Boycott Is Thousands of Decisions On March 16, 1960, Black students challenged segregation at the Azalea Room lunch counter. But a boycott works only if thousands of individual decisions become one coordinated action, and Savannah's civil rights movement cannot be explained by a list of marches. The tour walks you through the infrastructure behind the protest — how it was organized, who sustained it, and how a city's buying power became a lever — a story of logistics as much as courage. W. W. Law's Two Fights Westley Wallace Law was born in Savannah in 1923 and joined the NAACP Youth Council as a young man. He spent much of his life fighting over who could participate fully in Savannah. Later, he fought over who would remain visible in Savannah's history. Those were different versions of the same question, and his answers shaped both the city you will walk through and the very existence of the sites this tour visits. The Coast Around the City Savannah sits within the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a regional world stretching along the southeastern coast through parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Gullah Geechee history asks you to see the coast around the city — language, foodways, faith, and craft carried across generations. The tour connects Savannah's streets to that larger coastal world, so the city stops being an island of squares and becomes part of a living corridor. Where the Records Survive A cemetery can preserve information that a city has lost everywhere else: names, birth and death dates, military service, fraternal affiliations, family ties, occupations. At Laurel Grove South, sometimes a single stone is the last surviving record of a person whose house, workplace, and church records are gone. With the tour's narration, rows of markers become a census of a community — and some of the names you will already know from earlier stops. Take the Tour Black Savannah is a self-guided audio walking tour, so it moves at your pace. Linger where a story catches you, break for lunch, pick it back up an hour later. Along the way you will hear: How one building at 23 Barnard Street went from slave brokerage to schoolWhat recent research changed about the Weeping TimeThe world of West Broad Street before it became a boulevardHow students and shoppers desegregated a city, one decision at a time Download the app to take the tour, put in your headphones, and let Savannah tell the rest of these stories in the places where they happened.
