Joy’s Gold Award Project: Supporting Transgender Youth
Alexia A. creates a digital map and walking tour of historical sites
Girl Scout Alexia A.’s advice for finding a Gold Award project? Follow your passion.
Her follow-up advice? Recognize that your passion may come from an expected place. That’s how Alexia landed on creating a walking tour of the history of enslaved people in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Initially, Alexia—who was a member of Girl Scouts Hornets’ Nest Council and wants to become a veterinarian—followed her passion for animals to the local shelter, but her project ideas lacked the big impact she knew she wanted to make. A simple conversation with a retired librarian, who ended up becoming her advisor, changed everything.
“My advisor asked what I had a passion for,” said Alexia. “I told her I had taken a class in African American history my junior year. In the class, we talked about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Their stories were inspiring, and they made me want to know about the people in my own backyard. My family has done some genealogy [research], and we know we have ancestors in the area who go back to the 1840s. In all probability, they were enslaved. I wanted to know about them and the other enslaved people in Charlotte.”
But how could she turn that into a Gold Award project? Alexia started by finding a map of Charlotte from 1877, enlarging it, laminating it, and marking sites around the city that had historical significance to enslaved people.
“I began by marking a couple of sites on it that I already knew about,” she said. “I soon figured out that while this map might be interesting to me, I had to figure out how I wanted to share it with others.”
While working on her map, Alexia went on a walking tour of a part of Charlotte that was home to many African Americans in the 1960s but has since been demolished. While the houses and churches are no longer there, the tour guides shared images of what the neighborhoods looked like 60 years ago. This tour proved to be the key to determining what Alexia’s project would become.
Partnering with a local cartographer and her advisor allowed Alexia to quickly find a wealth of sites she could include on the walking tour she wanted to create.
“There were so many [locations], that I had to limit the number of places I identified on the map,” she said. “I also tried to keep the tour in a fairly straight line down the main street in Charlotte.”
Alexia knew that she wanted to tell the stories of those who were enslaved in Charlotte and include as many names as she could find, so the next step was researching stories to pair with the sites. This was the part of her project that proved to be the most challenging.
The research took months and was done on top of Alexia’s schedule as a high school senior, which included applying to colleges, working a part-time job, and playing sports—all while maintaining a GPA that allowed her to graduate with honors in June of 2022.
But each chance to spend time with her subjects’ stories brought about revelations and made Alexia feel more connected to them. In one instance, thanks to a newspaper article she unearthed, she was able to identify four children buried in a local cemetery whose wooden markers had long ago deteriorated.
“Another name I discovered was Bonaparte the Barber, who was hired out to work as a barber at a local hotel,” she said. “After he became free, he moved to Alabama and had a son. I was able to track the son up to the 1950s when he died.”
Alexia’s research culminated in the creation of a digital map with 18 points of interest. She has widely shared with local businesses, church congregations, the media, and even with the Charlotte Museum of History the link and a handout about her project that includes a QR code to the map.
By using the map, individuals can complete a self-guided tour through the Uptown Charlotte area and learn the stories of individuals who were enslaved there. And anyone outside Charlotte can access the map online for a digital tour. As of June 2022, more than 2,400 people have viewed the map.
The Gold Award is designed to teach Girl Scouts how to research an issue, put together a plan to address it, and make a sustainable change in their world. Alexia says all that was true of her experience and encourages other Girl Scouts considering the project to do something unique.
“I started out thinking of the Gold Award as a project to help others in the community,” she said. “At first, I wondered how a map about slave sites was helpful to people. It was my mom, who has also been with me from my beginning when I started as a Daisy, who said giving people a sense of pride about their town is a service to the community. Knowing that Charlotte was built by both White individuals and African Americans should give a sense of pride to all people.”
