Manumission Tour Co.
John Chapman
In more normal times in Alexandria, spring is the kickoff of tour season. It’s common to see groups of up to 30 people crowding local sidewalks as a tour guide points out one of our many historic sites.
For most tour companies — including Alexandria's black history tour company Manumission Tours — spring is a very busy time.
Tourists, local history buffs and students from as far away as Milwaukee make the trek to Alexandria every year to take tours with Manumission Tours, founded by fourth-generation Alexandrian and city councilmember John Taylor Chapman.
But this spring, when a novel coronavirus decided to write its own chapter of Alexandria's history, Chapman had to get creative.
Manumission Tours began developing new virtual ways to educate and keep people engaged while they were stuck at home. (The company is resuming in-person tours this Friday.)
Manumission, which means the state of being freed from slavery, provides curated walking and bus tours, giving a voice to the stories of Africans and African Americans living in Alexandria from the days of slavery through the civil rights movement. The company has also hosted events around the release of movies related to African American history, like the 2019 film “Harriett.”
Chapman founded Manumission Tour Co. in 2016 to fill a gap in Alexandria's history tours. Despite a wide variety of Alexandria historic tours, ghost tours and architectural tours, a central part of Alexandria’s story had been overlooked for too long. African Americans have made up 20 to 25 percent of Alexandria’s population and were essential to the early development of the city, yet their stories had gone untold.
This spring, Chapman’s company posted black history quizzes on social media and shared links to e-books and storytime videos. They encouraged people to take a black history scavenger hunt featuring important African American history locations around Alexandria. All sites and clues are located outside and allow for safe social distancing. The company also put together a reading list on African American history in Alexandria. Most significantly, Manumission Tours began offering virtual tours.
In addition, Chapman spent the spring researching and developing content for future tours as well as creating a new marketing campaign for when they come through this crisis.
“For tourism, it is going to be a much longer runway to get back to normal just because it’s about people’s comfort,” Chapman explained. “You can force somebody to go back to work, you can force somebody to go back to school, but you can’t force somebody to take a tour.”
Manumission Tours is prepared for the “new normal.” They will limit the number of people on tours and are looking into providing hand sanitizer and branded masks for tour guides. Depending on the success of virtual tours, they may continue to offer them for schools, which Chapman believes will likely be some of the last places to fully reopen.
For Manumission Tours, the priority will be on providing as safe an experience as possible for their customers and tour guides, until this coronavirus pandemic is relegated to the history books.
