SHSMO workshops, lectures, and virtual programs are freely available to worldwide audiences to watch anytime.
Alberta Northcutt Ellis was a Springfield, Missouri, entrepreneur who owned and operated several businesses along Route 66 including Alberta’s Hotel. Her businesses were noted locations listed in the Green Book. Open to locals and travelers, the hospitality and community sanctuary found at Alberta’s has become an enduring legacy for future generations.
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.
Gary R. Kremer, executive director emeritus of the State Historical Society of Missouri, was the featured speaker at the Society's annual My Missouri lecture on Nov. 22, 2025, at the Center for Missouri Studies, SHSMO's headquarters in Columbia. Kremer served as executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri for over 21 years. He became the "unofficial state historian" to many Missourians during his half century career teaching, preserving, and publishing the state's history.
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?
Step into the creative world of St. Louis artist Spencer T. Banks, a popular African American graphic designer and comic strip artist of the 1930s-1960s whose important legacy has been overlooked. The State Historical Society of Missouri Art Curator Joan Stack explores Banks’s early struggles and career as a freelance artist in St. Louis, Missouri, and his groundbreaking 1939 comic strip "Pokenia," an adventure cartoon featuring a stylish professional Black Woman as its hero.
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.
Dr. Joan Stack, curator of art collections at the State Historical Society of Missouri, gives a talk and shares artwork of Black artists in Missouri. Dr. Stack focuses on ten artists of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on artists whose artwork is in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri.
David Steward was the featured speaker in the State Historical Society of Missouri’s annual My Missouri Lecture on Oct. 28, 1 p.m. at the Center for Missouri Studies in Columbia, Mo. Steward is the founder and chairman of World Wide Technology, the largest Black-owned company in the United States. The civic and business leader will be in conversation with Gary Kremer, executive director of the State Historical Society, about how Steward’s upbringing in Clinton, Mo. and his Missouri experiences contributed to his success in building a technology company in St. Louis.
John Brenner, managing editor of Missouri Historical Review hosts author and historian Kelly Schmidt for a discussion of her research on people enslaved by the early Catholic Church in Missouri and the communities they formed to help each other through their hardships, challenge the terms of their bondage, and ultimately seek their freedom. A postdoctoral research associate for the Washington University and Slavery Project, Schmidt is the author of the April 2022 Missouri Historical Review article “Slavery and the Shaping of Catholic Missouri, 1810–1850.”
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.
Priscilla Dowden-White explores the life and legacy of St. Louis attorney and NAACP leader Margaret Bush Wilson. In her lifelong struggle to advance freedom and equality for African Americans, women, and all those who were excluded from the mainstream of society, Wilson blazed a courageous trail marked by landmark legal decisions and major civil rights advances that opened doors to equal opportunity for all. Dowden-White examines the philosophical viewpoints and experiences that shaped Wilson’s definition of justice and fairness for all.
Patrick Huber, professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology, presents his work on the Ste. Genevieve Race Riot of 1930. The riot was a four day disturbance, long shrouded in secrecy, during which vigilantes drove away most of the town’s black residents, many of whom were recent arrivals recruited to work in local lime kilns and stone quarries.
Delia C. Gillis, professor of history and director of the Center of Africana Studies at the University of Central Missouri, presents a visual history of Kansas City’s black professional class, exploring how local businesses, culture, and power dynamics shaped the present-day city.
Sowande’ Mustakeem, assistant professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis discusses the role of race and gender in a late nineteenth-century murder case. Mustakeem's presentation covers the death of Effie Jackson, a Kansas City woman killed by a rival for the affections of a man; Jackson’s case will serve as a basis to explore laws and institutions designed to police working-class African Americans.
Clarence Lang shares how current events in Black America, such as the recent protests in Ferguson, Missouri that propelled “Black Lives Matter” to national and international attention, continuously change the meanings of past struggles for Black freedom. Lang also showcases how St. Louis is representative of the broader US patterns of race relations, racial oppression, and resistance and share ways that contemporary historical framing can inform (or misinform) present-day, post-1960s movements for black lives.
