Meet artist, prophet, peacemaker Joe Minter Sr. 

One of the places we were anxious to visit in Birmingham was the African Village in America.  The creativity of the self taught artist is fascinating.  Self taught art is also referred to as outsider art and sometimes as primitive or folk art.  The beauty of the art lies in the vision of its creators and their obsessive need to create on and with found objects.  Their art tells a story or has a message. The catch is you have to be open  to see, hear, and appreciate their creations through their non traditional lenses.  Joe had, what he explained, was a vision for creating an African Village.  The extensive collection of his art environment has different themes, slavery, civil rights, segregation, freedom riders, Travon Martin and more.  The following is a selection from Joe Minter's book "To You Through Me:  The Beginning of a Link of a Journey of 400 years." 
     "When I heard that Birmingham was going to build a Civil Rights Museum, I found my stepping stone.  After research however, I found that the main characters were left out of the history.  Characters in the freedom struggle (name some here), the foot soldiers.  We needed the leaders, but without the foot soldiers, the struggle could not have been won. .....Then I thought about the 400- year journey African Americans have survived.
     God gave me the vision of art, to link that 400-year journey to the Africans in America, link that truth to the children who are turning away from us, and I decided to name what I create The African Village in America. ....
     The whole idea handed down to me by God is to use that which has been discarded, just as we as a people have been discarded, and make it visible.  All that was invisible, or thrown away, could be made into something everyone could understand. ...what gets thrown away, has a spirit and could survive and continue to grow. "

more about Joe Minter in the New York Times