Two lineages. One foundation.
A grandfather who built schools across Mobile, Alabama. A grandmother whose roots run through Africatown, the community founded by the survivors of the Clotilda.
Dr. Benjamin F. Baker
Born in Mobile in 1901 and educated through a doctorate at Paine College, Dr. Baker served as principal of Mobile County Training School from 1926 to 1948, the cradle of Black education in the Africatown and Plateau community. In 1948 he became the first principal of Central High School, which under his leadership grew into the second-largest public school in Mobile and the only school in Alabama teaching Russian at the time.
He co-founded the annual Thanksgiving Day Football Classic and negotiated to make Mobile County Training School and Central the first all-Black high schools to play in Ladd Stadium. He was a founding faculty member of Bishop State Community College.
The Baker-Gaines Central Campus at Bishop State and the Benjamin F. Baker Auditorium at Dunbar Magnet School both carry his name today.
Autherine M. Wise
Autherine M. Wise was a schoolteacher of the Africatown community in Mobile, Alabama, the community founded by the Africans of the Clotilda, the last documented slave ship to land in America in 1860. She rests today at Old Plateau Cemetery, the Africatown Graveyard, in the same ground where confirmed Clotilda survivors are buried.
She lived 41 years. Her stone reads, simply: Mother, Wife & Sister.
Old Plateau Cemetery dates to 1876, sixteen years after the Clotilda landed. The remains of Clotilda survivors have been confirmed in its northern section through a preservation project directed by the College of William and Mary. The history of Africatown is chiseled into the stones around her.
The foundation's youth programs and scholarships are built so that her descendants, and the descendants of every Africatown family, inherit doors she did not get to walk through.
One line built schools so a community could read its own future. The other line lived through a ship and built a town. The foundation is the meeting place of those two inheritances.
Dr. Vic Baker, Founder