The Beck Cultural Exchange Center is developing an app to accompany its corridor of important Black history sites in downtown and East Knoxville, which will make a trove of stories downloadable with the click of a button.
Using geographical and historical data, the app will provide a virtual tour of Knoxville’s Black history through an interactive map on which sites are tagged with educational material.
Standing at historical sites, users will be able to scan into the app to find more information than a traditional historical marker can hold.
For instance, a visitor to the Alex Haley statue in Morningside Park will scan a QR code to open the app, where they will gain access to videos of the author speaking, excerpts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning writing and insight from historians.
Haley Heritage Square and the statue are the gateway to the Beck Cultural Corridor, the center’s tour of important Black history sites in the area most affected by urban renewal, also called urban removal. This destructive era from 1959 to 1974 was when the city of Knoxville displaced many Black neighborhoods and demolished the history of those communities.
By reclaiming that history through an app, the Beck Center hopes to bring its identity as Knoxville’s storehouse of Black history into the digital age.
“We really believe that we will become the model community for what it looks like to celebrate your rich history and culture and learn from it,” Renee Kesler, president of the Beck Center, told Knox News. “Beck has been a model for so many different institutions and organizations and cultural centers and museums throughout the country.”
Kesler hopes the app will be available to the public by either Juneteenth or the Eighth of August, also called Emancipation Day in Tennessee.
The Beck Center partnered with the department of geography and sustainability at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to create an interactive online map that shows the impact of urban removal and tags important historical sites. Students coded addresses into the map, which Kesler said will be available in the app.
The app is one of several projects the center is working on ahead of its 50th anniversary in 2025, including the neighboring Delaney Museum at Beck, set to be an international destination for admirers of generational artist Beauford Delaney.
The app project, developed through a contract with an IT company, is supported in part by a $250,000 grant for the Beck Center from the state of Tennessee last year.
Beck does critical maintenance on its East Knoxville facility
Some of the grant went toward critical maintenance to the Beck’s facility at 1927 Dandridge Ave. Built as a private residence in 1912, the Tudor-style home contains exhibits on the slave trade in Knoxville, the legacy of urban removal, and the resilience, imagination and artistry of the city’s Black community.
The museum is free and open to the public, with self-guided and guided tours.
State funds helped pay for an overdue exterior wash, removal of several invasive trees, and other maintenance. Kesler compared the work to getting new tires for your car; it makes a huge difference, but it costs a lot and you can’t necessarily see the change.
Once maintenance wraps up this spring, the museum will move to funding visionary projects that include the Black history app and a special book relaunch for the center’s 50th anniversary next year.
“There is no museum like the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, and we want to not only be able to say that, we want to show that – that when you come here, you see a showpiece,” Kesler said. “These funds are helping us to do that.”
State elected officials say funding for the center is no sure thing this year as Tennessee’s budget tightens in response to lower revenues. The center also gets funding from private and individual donors.
Beck Center prepares for 50th anniversary
The Delaney Museum at Beck, set to open in May 2025 at the artist’s last family home in Knoxville, is one of several projects to celebrate the anniversary of the center’s opening in 1975.
Next year carries another important anniversary: 150 years since the founding of Knoxville College, the city’s historically Black college at the center of the community’s local history.
A book on the history of Knoxville College by Robert J. Booker, a Knoxville civil rights leader and Black historian who served three stints as Beck president, will return to print next year.
The book, called “And There Was Light!: The 120-Year History of Knoxville College,” will be reprinted with two additional chapters that stretch back to 1863 and up to the present day, Kesler said. Previously, the book spanned from 1875 to 1995.
Booker received an honorary doctorate from UT on Feb. 10. He is also the author of “Two Hundred Years of Black Culture in Knoxville, Tennessee 1791-1991,” the seminal work on the city’s Black history. The book vaulted Booker and the Beck Center to a position of greater prominence.
Booker has been a columnist for the Knoxville News Sentinel since 2003.
Funds doubtful as state budget tightens
The Beck Center’s $250,000 grant from the state came after years of asking for public financial support. It may well have been a one-time grant, said state Sen. Becky Duncan Massey of Knoxville, who helped secure last year’s grant.
“There will be less money this year for a lot of these initiatives and I know we’ve got quite a few coming from Knoxville in various different areas,” Massey said. “Having run a nonprofit in Knoxville, I know how precious dollars are to our nonprofit community.”
Gov. Bill Lee presented a $52.6 billion budget proposal for 2024 on Feb. 5, which was $9.9 billion less than last year in response to lower tax revenues and dried-up federal pandemic funding.
Funding for the Beck Center came from a separate legislative request from Massey and state Rep. Sam McKenzie after the budget was finalized last year. It was split between the Beck Center and the Bessie Smith Cultural Center in Chattanooga.
McKenzie remembers the Beck Center opening when he was only 10 years old. He said he would continue pushing to renew state funding for the museum this year.
“It’s the linchpin of the African American community in terms of the housing of materials and archives,” McKenzie said. “It’s a resource that is really second to none, but they struggle sometimes financially, so it made me feel good I was able to do a small part to help this legacy.”
Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email [email protected].
Support strong local journalism by subscribing at knoxnews.com/subscribe.
