African American Experience in Missouri Lecture Series

During the Civil War, Black men who gathered to enlist at Benton Barracks in St. Louis listed birthplaces in Canada, Jamaica, and England. While more than 600 Black Canadians did serve, those men enlisting in St. Louis were not in fact coming from abroad. They were Black Missourians, seeking to join the Union cause and hide from their family or their enslavers—especially when their enslavers actually supported the Union. As part of the African American Experience in Missouri Lecture, Dr.

Maria Esther Hammack, PhD, Assistant Professor of African American History at The Ohio State University delivered the African American Experience in Missouri lecture at the State Historical Society of Missouri. Dr. Hammack explored the story of Roda, a 19-year-old Black woman who fled her enslaver in Missouri in 1855. Roda made her way to the southern border of Mexico, rather than taking the Underground Railroad to the northern free states. Would her freedom in the north be in jeopardy by the Fugitive Slave law?

2024 marks fifty years since Gary Kremer, executive director of SHSMO, published his first essay on the African American experience in Missouri. Over the course of the past five decades, he has written dozens of articles and five books on the topic of race in Missouri, a publishing record unrivalled by any other scholar of the subject.

Larry Gragg, author and Professor Emeritus of History at Missouri University of Science and Technology, presented a program on Nov. 2, 2022, at the State Historical Society of Missouri Center for Missouri Studies that examines the impacts of desegregation in Missouri higher education.

Chuck Haddix shares new information on Charlie Parker’s time in Kansas City, giving fresh insight into his formative years as a man and musician and will feature previously unknown photos, newspaper coverage, manuscripts and recordings that illustrate the emerging genius of Charlie “Bird” Parker.

Civic leader Bill Thompson invites longtime resident Sehon Williams to look back on growing up in Columbia during the era of segregation, and the legacy of the Sharp End district that was home to black-owned businesses in the central part of Columbia. Sharp End was destroyed with the urban renewal movement of the 1960s.

The predominantly black residents of North City St. Louis live in neighborhoods where green spaces have been shaped by two legacies: formal green spaces associated with parks, cemeteries, and private streets that reflect the goals of pre-World War II city leaders, business people, planners, and residents; and informal green spaces created by urban renewal, population declines, and home abandonment since the 1950s.

The African American Press has a long history of agency and activism. Dating its founding from 1827 with the publication of Freedom’s Journal in New York, the press has a legacy of protest and a history of the struggle for survival. Between 1875 and 1970, Missouri was home to more than 60 black-owned newspapers. Debra Foster Greene looks at the lives and works of several African American newspaper publishers and editors in the Show-Me State.

Gary R. Kremer explores the history of Lincoln University from its founding by former Missouri slaves in 1866 through its emergence as a state-funded normal and vocational school to its establishment as the state’s only public institution of higher education for African Americans in 1921. Special attention is given to Lincoln University’s “golden years,” from 1921 through the mid-1950s, when it was often referred to as the “Black Harvard of the Midwest.”

In his path-breaking book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, Colin Gordon combined GIS digital mapping techniques with extensive archival research to reach new perspectives on St. Louis’s decades-long struggles with depopulation, segregation, economic disparity, and urban decay. Gordon's current research continues to probe for deeper understanding of the underlying issues and failed policies behind urban crises such as the turmoil in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot and killed by local police on August 9, 2014.