Fifteen years ago, scholar and author Dr. Imani Perry received an ancestral gift when she visited the African Village in America for the first time.
A daughter of Birmingham, Ala., she was technically in a city that was already native to her.
The artistry featured in African Village sprawls across a 1.5 acre property crafted by 81-year-old Joe Minter, a thought-provoking elder in Birmingham’s Titusville neighborhood. She felt a deep connection to her lineage when she wandered her way through the depths of Minter’s creativity. Since 1989, Minter has transformed items others see as junk – bike parts, metal pipes, old door – into insightful sculptures and spiritual messages depicting the trials and triumphs of Black people. While Perry admired the artwork’s West African aesthetics, which she’d learned about in her art history courses, wonder filled the eyes of her two sons who had accompanied her on that first visit.
“I had seen all of these things that I had studied that were part of my tradition and inheritance returned to me in my birthplace,” Perry said. “Something that I knew intellectually, I felt spiritually and emotionally.”
The trip was a deeply emotional one for Perry, who is now the narrative advisor for the “Joe Minter Is Here” art exhibit taking place in Birmingham’s historic Marc Steel Warehouse. From now until Oct. 20, lovers of art and history can honor the work of a man whose messages and passion have been revered worldwide. Minter’s sculptures have been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art. But this is Minter’s first solo show in his hometown.
The immersive, community-based art installation was created by narrative studio 1504, Create Birmingham and Navigate Affordable Housing Partners. Admirers of Minter’s work are collaborating to preserve the legacy of African Village, which is exposed to the elements. During the opening ceremony on Oct. 3, Perry mentioned how important the space is for the city.
“I thought, ‘What an incredible gift to open such a space for the entire community, and to do so even when you’re treated as though what you’re doing is somehow being an interloper or you’re not supposed to do it,’” Perry said. “But he’s being an artist who’s modeling for us what our traditions are.”
Restoring Black people’s connection to their homeland and their lineage was part of Minter’s divinely-led mission to build African Village around his home. It’s a sacred place for such work. Titusville is a community founded by the formerly enslaved. Just beyond Minter’s fence is New Grace Hill Cemetery, a historically Black burial ground. Just a three minute drive from African Village is the city’s oldest Black cemetery, Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens, where the remains of the war veterans, including buffalo soldiers, find rest. It’s here that a breeze is a sign of the ancestors’ presence.
When you look at his art, you see the racially divided Birmingham/Alabama/USA from the perspective of a Black man who has lived it.
— Paula Stanton
And then there’s Minter, who received a vision from God to be a messenger and peacemaker amongst the people. He often greets his visitors with paint-splattered clothes, a necklace made of cowrie shells and an eagerness to show how art can be a preserver of history and heritage. Colorful references to the Zulu people, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, is sprinkled throughout his massive collection. Former South African President Nelson Mandela’s name is painted in bright blue on a wooden shield. A metal sculpture of an African queen overlooking the vastness of the village possesses two spears Minter made out of crutches. The spears are placed throughout the property to protect this space.
“I know we were missing our culture,” Minter said. “What inspired me to do this is I wanted to know how much of my culture I still had in me to be able to awaken those that need to know through a visual way because the eyes see and the eyes take in. So I did this so it will be visual and give the story of history piece by piece with subjects of iron pieces.”
Minter gets the inspiration for his craft from his higher power. Passionate about his faith, Minter said that God gave him the gift to create. This ability allows him to spread agape love, which is the highest form of Christian love characterized by empathy, selflessness and unconditional care for others.
“Ain’t no way I could say I did this right here,” Minter said. “God was in my hands. First, he started off in my heart to be able to construct with my hands and put agape love in both of my feet.”
About 20 to 30 of Minter’s sculptures and paintings are showcased in his exhibit. But before visitors get to see never-before-displayed artwork, they have to make their way down a path of family photos to learn about a man who is a child of the Civil Rights Movement, a Vietnam veteran, a proud union member, a father of two sons who are now deceased and a devoted husband, now widower. Minter details how these moments shaped his life in his self-published book “To You Through Me: The Beginning of a link of a journey of 400 years.”
Paula Stanton, chairman of the Titusville Marker Committee, believes starting the art installation with Minter’s story was fitting.
“When you look at his art, you see the racially divided Birmingham/Alabama/USA from the perspective of a Black man who has lived it,” Stanton said. “You see the pain, the disappointment, the anger, the determination. You see the strength of structures that served as buffers to the polarization – religion, the military and, top of all, family — the devolution of those structures, the results of which we are seeing today.”
Raised on agape love

Minter didn’t discover the power of agape love while sitting in a church pew. It was modeled for him by his parents who created sanctuaries of warmth, kindness and protection out of scarcity for their eight children. Born on March 28, 1943, Minter’s first childhood home was a farm pump house. It didn’t have a bathroom. They used a bucket that was dumped out the next morning. Hand-me-downs were a wardrobe staple. When food was sparse, his parents went hungry to make sure the children were fed.
But the hardships they faced didn’t cause his parents to argue. The family’s abundance came from skills and compassion. His father, Lawrence Dunbar Minter, and his older brother were masters with tools. Joe Minter inherited this ability during a childhood milestone.
“I came to learn the technique of using your hands to do what you got to do by tying up my shoes. When you put a knot in a shoe, you’re using your hands and the skill of maneuvering and seeing what the fingers do,” Joe Minter said. “That led me to tools. I got interested in what the hand could do, the heart could do and the feet at the same time when combined with agape love. Thank God my father and brother had enough patience for me to let me tear their tools up.”
Joe Minter described his mother, Rosie McAlpin Minter, as a saintly woman whose smile rivaled a smile from an angel. She exuded love that flowed throughout the home, he said. Rosie Minter and her husband made sure their children knew that the poverty they were experiencing didn’t define their lives.
“My mama said, ‘As long as you can put one foot before the earth, never give up.’ My daddy said, ‘Do the best you can.’ My saying is, ‘Use what you got,’” Joe Minter said. “Somehow they took care of enough to keep the belly well up, go back and forth to school and the golden rule: do unto others as you have them to do unto you.”
Then there is the fondness he holds for his wife, Hilda Jo Patrick Minter. During their 50 years of marriage, her words and actions became synonymous with heaven itself. Her presence healed the world through love.
“I would have to go to the Bible to describe her,” Minter said. “I say my wife – my companion, my helpmate – had two hearts connected to each other that never failed. She had enough love to give humanity a percent of her love, and she did because she loved everybody, tried to help everybody. Don’t think she wasn’t hurting at times herself, but she was a golden angel – an angel that had no fear of giving rather than taking.”
Before they met, Minter said his wife grew up picking cotton alongside her grandparents in Lamar County, Ala. She moved to Birmingham when she found a job in the city and Minter was on the way to work one day when he met her. A love story began and they married February 25, 1969.
“It was like everything had been set for me to meet her,” Minter said. “People say, ‘Love at first sight.’ But it was spirit at first sight and we felt it click. Both of us had the heart to understand each other, and it was the best ride I ever had.”
Their memories together forged a monument of Black love that withstood the toll of racism. Generosity and compassion were the love languages Hilda Minter spoke to the world. She became the hope that kept her husband going under the heaviness of racial injustice.
“She taught me how to shake it off and don’t get angry,” he laughed. “She was inspired by that thing called ‘Put love first.’ Don’t think about hate. Then you got to try to take love to eliminate all the racism on ya.”
Even after her passing in September 2021, Minter’s artwork and message still carries her essence. During the first year of African Village’s existence, the couple’s unwavering love for each other inspired Minter to create a sculptor: two heads sharing the same body forged out of scrap metal. He titled the art piece “Helpmate: ‘Til Death Do Us Part.” In his messages to the world, Minter refers to his wife as a queen. On his truck he painted the words: Joe loves Ms.Hilda.
“My wife probably had more on her because the African woman is carrying the burden of being the first one to give their blood to everything walking the face of the Earth,” Minter said. “She can bear so much. And the reason I know she can bear so much is because she can look at her children and can’t do anything to help them, but she knows how to pray in a closet. And where we’re at today, I give respect to my queen who will always be a queen within my heart.”
It’s devotion that should be celebrated. As the son of a praying woman, the brother of five sisters and a husband, he’s seen the plight of Black women. His father and brother taught him about hard work through their tools and the women in his life taught him about heartwork: how to heal through love.
“I done had some of the best genuine love given to me that I can ever have on this earth through the hearts of the people that God has sent to me to touch me and I touch them,” Minter said. “I done took a whole lot, now. But the thing about taking is that it just makes you stronger to fight another battle.”

‘With liberty and justice for all – except the African’
The struggle for racial equality in America is a story that can’t be told without the Black folks of Alabama. A postbellum city, enslavement was abolished once Birmingham was founded in 1971. But a racial caste system was kept alive through Jim Crow laws and anti-Black violence. When racial tension began boiling, Birmingham became a cauldron of Black resistance. From the church pews to the streets, men, women and even school children organized to dismantle discrimination within the city.
But in order to not fall victim to the heaviness of racism, Black Birminghamians had to develop a strong sense of who they were as people. Minter attended segregated schools where students were forced to use textbooks passed down from the white schools. According to his memoir, the books were tattered, pages were missing and information was marked out. But educators made sure they didn’t absorb that harm.
“They taught us that we were important human beings,” Minter wrote. “With all of this, the African teachers still put out a well-educated student that knew who they were and where they were headed.”
During Minter’s senior year of high school, police officers busted through the door of his family’s home at 2 a.m. They dragged him and his older brother, McAlpin, out of the house in front of his mom, dad and other siblings on false theft allegations. The brothers were thrown into separate police cars – but they weren’t taken to the Birmingham City Jail just yet.
Instead they were driven to different areas at Memorial Park, which Minter described as “the beating ground of Bull Connor’s men.” Terrified, Minter made a plea. He asked the officers if they had children who were just like him — just a child who was going to school and about to graduate. Would they do what they were about to do to him to their own children?
Minter arrived at the jail untouched, but his brother was badly beaten. The boys spent only a night in jail, but the experience scarred Minter. He decided not to participate in the Civil Rights demonstrations happening at the time. But racism continued to scorn Minter throughout his adulthood, just as it did the generation before him.
Both Joe Minter and his father served in the United States Army and toiled through the war zones of white supremacy in America. A gifted mechanic, Lawrence Minter served in the segregated 366th Infantry Regiment, which was sent to France during World War I. He named one of his daughters after the RMS Aquitania, the ocean liner that transported the Black troops back home to America – where white supremacy refused to honor the worth of a Black man’s skills.
Unlike his father, Joe Minter didn’t serve overseas when he was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War, America’s first war with integrated troops. His time in the military was an answered prayer by his mother who asked God to spare her son from the battlefield. Instead, Joe Minter was trained in a Virgina tech school and operated generators in South Carolina, Missouri and Texas until his discharge in 1967.
Lawrence and Joe Minter’s honorable discharge from the military marked the beginning of another battle. Racism ran like barbed wire around job opportunities for Black veterans across the United States. Instead of being honored for their service, veterans were targeted of racial terrorism. Some of them were lynched in uniform during the summer and fall of 1919, when white mobs instigated race riots in 26 cities in the country. Black service members had to also settle for low wage jobs to provide for themselves and their families.
Lawrence Minter was forced to take a job as caretaker in Elmwood Cemetery. He endured all types of weather while tending to the white-only burial ground for thirty years until his passing in November 1959 – 11 years before the family of Black Vietnam veteran Bill Terry Jr. integrated Elmwood Cemetery following a lawsuit. When Jim Crow is the law of the land, even the graves are segregated.
Joe Minter had multiple years of mechanical experience under his toolbelt when he entered the workforce. But eight years after his father’s death, Joe Minter struggled with employment. A 1972 Florida State University study revealed how Black Vietnam veterans were twice as likely than white veterans to be unemployed. In 2022, Joe Minter told Studio 1504 Black veterans were spat on after the war. Job applications were ripped to shreds.
Joe Minter often talks about the collective pain Black veterans feel across generations.
“We did all we could on our part to honor,” he said. “I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty – Get that? — and justice for all – except the African.”
During the 60s and 70s, Joe Minter worked a job turning rolls of steel into school furniture, exercise equipment and other products at a North Birmingham plant called Southeastern Metals. The paycheck didn’t come without danger. The city’s decades-long legacy in steel and iron production left behind a landscape rife with environmental racism. North Birmingham is considered one of the most polluted areas in the country, leaving communities of color to suffer from multiple health problems.
Asbestos dust severely damaged Joe Minter’s eyes during his 11 years at Southeastern Metals. When the plant shut down 1979, he wandered through the workforce struggling to find long-term employment. He got by with a job here and a job there, but nothing was certain, he said. In 1988, he wrote a letter to Birmingham’s first Black mayor Richard Arrington explaining the dire situation concerning Black men who were law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, but couldn’t find jobs.
“I pray to God that you and the wonderful council can open some of the doors in this beautiful Magic City to me and all of my fellow African American male[s] and make us part of the American Dream and put us to work,” he wrote.
Joe Minter received his most important work assignment the following year. He was noticing how Black people were drifting from one another and their legacy. The city had just announced the creation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Joe Minter was concerned about the absence of some movement workers.
“After research, I found that the main characters were left out of the history. Characters in the freedom struggle – the foot soldiers, ” Joe Minter wrote in his book. “We need leaders, but without the foot soldiers, the struggle could not have been won.”
This is when Minter tapped into his faith. He asked God a question: What could he do to remedy the emotional harm he was seeing around him. And the vision of African Village came to his mind: To take items man has discarded – just as America has discarded Black people – put God’s word on the objects and to make that work visible. Joe Minter explained how this was going to be and how he was going to grow.
“All that was invisible, or thrown away, could be made into something everyone could understand,” Joe Minter wrote. “I wanted the African Village in America to demonstrate that even what gets thrown away has a spirit and could survive and continue to grow.”
A cry in the wilderness

Joe Minter’s creativity gives him the ability to find meaning in everything he finds at flea markets, thrift stores or sometimes the side of the road. Chains become symbols of bondage. Sharp tools invoke the cruelty of forced labor. Religious items, such as crosses or angels either represent the love he has for his faith or the hypocrisy of the church depending on the meaning behind the sculptor.
“You’re going to tell me that God ain’t angry with folks walking around here when the most segregated hour is on a Sunday at 11 o’clock and got wrote everywhere ‘In God We Trust’?” Minter asked.
When it comes to working with metal, that’s a gift that runs through his bloodline.
“I found out there were two blacksmiths in my family. So I’m attached to iron and iron I can work with and each piece of iron was produced by us,” Minter said. “‘Cause I’m a union man, when they say ‘Made in the USA,’ it means something to my gut and my heart and my brain to show that we as a people have given our souls and our hearts and the compassionate part of us that give you everything, America.”
As he constructed the African Village, Minter would take his mission beyond his home. He would pack his Chevrolet truck with his colorful collection of painted signs and create makeshift installations along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, a street that runs near his residence. With a wooden staff embellished with bells, wire and other trinkets in hand, Joe Minter would go to public spaces to speak about God’s love, make pleas for peace on the streets and point out the injustices of the world. Those who pass by him will often hear him say this message: I’m just a cry in the wilderness. Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Let my people go and leave my children alone.
Our history is not taught. Through a griot like Mr. Joe Minter, we can learn more about ourselves and draw some reverence to our existence.
— Cassandra Griffen
Curiosity lured photojournalist Cassandra Griffen to meet Minter for the first time in 2005. She had spotted Minter in different parts of the city, including the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute where Griffen was volunteering at the time. She noticed how people were avoiding Minter, but she felt compelled to do differently and decided to get to know the messenger.
Minter’s knowledge of history and strong belief in his faith captivated Griffen. He had a way of weaving the atrocities Black people endured – which were many and heavy – with reminders to Black people of the higher power they have on their side. The two became friends at that very moment, and Griffen made a habit to talk to Minter almost every time she saw him to see what new wisdom he wanted to sow into her.
“Our history is not taught. Through a griot like Mr. Joe Minter, we can learn more about ourselves and draw some reverence to our existence,” Griffen said. “I think his primary premise is for the underserved and the underrepresented to begin to see themselves as deserving entities of the United States of America and the world.”
Minter wasn’t home the first time she visited African Village. Although she couldn’t she the sculptures up close that day, she was still in awe at the scriptures painted on the doors. How Minter reads and speaks about the word of God, helped Griffen understand scripture in a way that empowers her world.
Griffen is a frequent visitor of African Village. She’s bought his memoir. During one of her visits, Minter gifted Griffen a piece of his artwork which now sits on her porch. Griffen would often spend a few hours in the village talking to Minter and learning about his new art projects. She appreciates how he documents the current times through art and the lessons his creativity can teach others.
“We’re all made from God’s image, and since we’re made from God’s image, you’re not better than me and I’m not better than you,” Griffen said. “So the more people listen to Mr. Minter, I believe there would be less discrimination and violence because everything that happened within the next three or four days he is erecting a monument to it so that we can be reminded of what we’re doing to ourselves and to others. He’s like the Eighth wonder of the world.”
During a tour of the village in mid-September, Minter called out the political landscape in the country today. He mentioned former president Donald Trump and how he should stop wrestling with God and give up in politics.
“Yield yourself to humanity. Give humanity a chance to work in love,” Minter said with the vitality of a preacher. “Give humanity time to make these folks lay all these assault weapons down. Give God a chance to work it out so our children won’t be shot up in these schools, their history won’t be taken and the women can manipulate their own body. Because you ain’t a woman, you weren’t born to bear.”
On the way to Freedomland
On the back porch of Minter’s home, a ritual between the living and the afterlife takes place. He brings out his snare drum and speaks into it as if it is a microphone before he creates a rhythm to communicate with the ancestors in the cemeteries.
“I’m asking for permission to be able to use you as the beat of the heart to communicate to that part of you that can join hearts to become one in harmony in agape love,” Minter said.
It doesn’t take long for Minter to visit the resting spaces of his actual ancestor. The graves of his father, wife and two sons are just a short stroll from his backyard fence. Right beside his wife is his own tombstone. Crosses encircle his name. The date of his death left blank.
“I can feel the hands of my ancestors all around me and they lookin’ down and saying, ‘You’ve done the best you can. Come on with us,’” Minter said. “God said, ‘No, I’mma leave you here just a little bit. You got a path you got to finish because now I’m gonna take it over and let the angels that I have in line for it break loose.’”
Those angels are the scholars, archivists and community members who are making sure Minter’s space is protected and in good care when he passes. Researchers at the University of Alabama digitally mapped African Village in 2023. The “Joe Minter is Here” exhibit was born out of a workshop with 1504 and Auburn University that discussed a future home for his art.
For now, Minter wishes to make African Village one with the cemetery when he joins the ancestors who have been whispering to him. He’ll keep marching and spreading the good word until the time comes for him to sing:
I’m on my way to freedom land
I’m on my way to freedom land
I’m on my way, praise God, I’m on my way