A Conversation With the Smokies’ History Sleuth

Antoine Fletcher is an anthropologist by training, but since beginning his career with the National Park Service nearly 16 years ago, the 34-year-old has worked in places ranging from the Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas to the Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina. 

In summer 2020, he was hired as the new science communicator for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tasked with getting the word out about scientific research in the park—and with heading up an ongoing effort to uncover long-ignored African American history in the Smokies. 

You’re coming into this African American history project three years after it first began. What work has been done toward the goal of telling this story, and what work still remains? 

There has been some very exceptional oral history done with people that lived in the area. Also what they’ve done very well is starting to look into African American cemeteries throughout not only the park but adjacent communities. Moving forward, one thing that we will be doing is definitely more oral histories for people that worked in the park, that stayed in the park, that visited the park. What I would like to see is where people can actually take their own journey through African American history on their own, so they can visit a certain location in the park and learn about this experience and share that with people. I’m hoping to do more research on Appalachian music and how African Americans were a part of it. One thing we’re really interested in finding out is was there an Underground Railroad that went through some site of the park. 

What have you found most surprising or interesting about the research thus far? 

One thing that really took me back was I was reading a memorandum dated back in November of 1941, and it was from the superintendent of the park to the regional office, which was Region 1 at the time in Richmond, Virginia. It just talks about how there’s a need to have designated camping spots in different places in the park for Negros at the time, and we’re talking about pre-Civil Rights. We’re still in segregation and the National Park Service is not only experimenting with integrated campsites in places like Shenandoah National Park at the time, but they’re looking at numbers of African Americans coming into the Smokies and they’re saying right there that there’s a need. 

The African American story has been unfolding for a long time prior to this project launching. Why is it just now being investigated in any kind of a focused way?

You have to have the right timing, and I think it’s time for it. There’s a point where history changes throughout your life, so even now some of the history that we learned years ago, there’s been additions to it. It’s really good to see this new perspective of the Great Smoky Mountains. I don’t think it’s always, say for instance, been put on the backburner. I think the stars aligned and the time is now. It doesn’t matter White, Black, Latino visitors, whatever it may be. There’s an array of people interested in these stories. 

How do you hope to see the results of this research impact the experiences of park visitors in the years to come? 

I hope this research will not only impact visitors to dig a little deeper about the African American experience in the Smokies but also dig a little deeper with African American history in general in the National Park Service. There are so many pieces of history that haven’t been told and so many pieces of history that can be retold in a different way. When you’re thinking about this history in this park, its not always going to be easy to consume. Because it’s life. And so that’s something that I hope that people come away with from this project is that this is the raw history of the park. There’s no sugarcoating. This is just how life was and sometimes it was great for some people and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was hard and sometimes it wasn’t. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.