'We're all learning together': 10 years of black history materials inspire community

Kennedy holds up a completed worksheet on black history subject Charles Wilber “Bullet” Rogan at J.C. Harmon High School.

Here’s what’s happened so far for J.C. Harmon High School’s special education class since an Internet search more than three years ago guided teacher Debbie Davidson to the annual trove of black history materials from LINC.

Kansas City police officers came visiting a year ago to join the class to learn together about Rosie Mason, the first black female officer and detective in Kansas City.

Hot 103 Jamz gave the class a cheer on the air two years ago after the teachers and students sought out the pioneering radio history of Andrew and Mildred Carter, who created the first black-owned radio station west of the Mississippi River.

Now they’re preparing for a visit from historian and author Phil Dixon as the class has gotten help from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum to explore the life of Charles Wilber “Bullet” Rogan.

Every year the class has picked out one of the great men and women featured in the latest set of local black history figures, and an educational adventure has sprung.

“It’s been an open door to connect with the community,” said teacher Meredith Marlier, who leads the special education class at Harmon.

Briana works on a black history door mural at J.C. Harmon High School in Kansas City, Kan., with the help of paraprofessional Debbie Davidson. The Life Skills special education class at Harmon has been using local black history materials sent from LINC as the starting point for community-involved lesson plans for three years.

“We’ve been able to celebrate that local hero, and they (Harmon’s community visitors) have been able to celebrate with us.”

This is the energy the Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America imagined when they teamed up to create the pieces of local history that LINC supports and distributes.

When the subjects are famous black men and women with ties to Kansas City, the history reaches beyond the marbleized stories of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and becomes a living, growing experience.

It sent the Harmon class in search of local people who either knew the subjects or worked in the institutions where they gained their fame — and they found people as thrilled as they were by the journey.

This goes beyond the black history “we all learned in the second grade,” Marlier said. “The community is learning. We’re learning. We’re all learning together.”

Special education teacher Meredith Marlier and Kennedy work on the door mural at J.C. Harmon High School.

Hello Michigan, we’re nationwide

Since 2010, the Kansas City Public Library, the Black Archives and LINC have gathered stories and photos of more than 70 famous and influential men and women with ties to the Kansas City area.

This year alone, LINC distributed 2,800 sets of posters of the latest six honorees, plus 10,000 booklets and 2,500 calendars.

The materials circulate deep into Kansas City-area classrooms, churches, community centers and public spaces, but the reach goes farther. They’ve gone nationwide — even international.

LINC has sent orders as far as Nova Scotia, Canada.

You don’t have to be from Kansas City to appreciate the accomplishments of the honorees, like Cathay Williams, who became the first black woman to enlist in the U.S. Army and history’s only female Buffalo Soldier, by posing as a man.

Anyone can appreciate stories like that of Dr. Thomas Unthank, the son of former slaves, who became known as “the father of Kansas City’s Negro hospitals.”

Wilma Brown, with Kansas City’s black history posters in Ferndale, Michigan

Just ask Wilma Brown in Ferndale, Michigan.

She is a resident of the Devon Square apartments for seniors in Ferndale, a black woman, 74, who grew up in segregated Little Rock, Ark.

When she went in search of some history to decorate public spaces in the apartment building, an Internet search hit on Kansas City Public Library’s display of the materials — and they hooked her up with LINC.

“There is so much history we don’t know,” Brown said. “We weren’t taught this in school.”

The history is important to her, she said, as she thinks of her father, George Todd, who lived to be 100 and told of the family’s history in slavery.

But the posters she has shared get reactions from many of her neighbors, whatever their race or ethnicity. They’re happy to get the black history calendars as well.

“Black, white — everybody likes them,” she said. “They’re telling me, or they’re leaving notes under my door, saying, ‘Keep it up.’ They’re learning history they didn’t know and I’m educating myself.”

A 2018 photo gathered the students of West Hants Middle School in Falmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. An 8th grade teacher at the school has been using LINC’s black history materials annually to motivate his students’ learning and research.

O Canada

Colin MacKenzie can’t recall now how he first came across LINC’s black history posters all the way up in Falmouth, Nova Scotia, but the 8th Grade teacher remembers that “quite frankly, I loved them.”

He’s been ordering the collections annually for several years now to help inspire the educational explorations of students at West Hants Middle School.

The pictures and paintings get their attention, he said, and then the biographies are just the right size to intrigue the students and prod their curiosity.

This year MacKenzie and his students are taking the experience in a new direction. They are using the Kansas City posters as inspiration to go out into Falmouth to seek out local figures in Canada’s black history and create companion materials.

“They (the KC materials) will be a model that the students can look at and learn from,” MacKenzie said. “And then we can create our own posters of heroes in our neighborhoods.”

‘You can be whatever you want to be’

LINC’s site coordinators and staff have been using the materials in their programs all along — but to look back and accumulate the decade’s worth of work takes a wide-angle lens.

The LINC team at Hale Cook Elementary School in the Kansas City Public Schools built a display with all of the more than 70 posters.

Hale Cook Elementary’s LINC staff put the entire catalogue of black history posters on a school wall.

“I felt it would be far more impactful for all to see the totality of LINC’s efforts to raise awareness,” LINC’s site coordinator at Hale Cook, Qiana McGee, said.

As soon as the full mural was completed, children were stopping to take it all in, she said.

It’s been a launching pad for lessons, both scripted in the classroom and on the spot in the hallway — as McGee discovered with her own 9-year-old daughter.

She attended Holliday Montessori School in Kansas City, and her great-grandmother — McGee’s grandmother — often talked about her years attending R.T. Coles vocational/junior high school. So McGee directed her daughter to the project’s pictures of Harold Holliday and R.T. Coles.

“The way her wheels turned with enthusiasm” to read about these people who were connected to her own life “was the payoff to my labor,” McGee said.

Briana and classroom aide Sherri Kimbrough use stamps to fill out a worksheet on “Bullet” Rogan at J.C. Harmon.

Davidson knows the same joy at J.C. Harmon.

Her mother was an avid historian, delighting especially in the rich stories in our backyards, like the Quindaro Ruins in Kansas City, Kan., and the former town’s role as a stop on the Underground Railroad during the era of slavery.

Davidson carries that enthusiasm onward as she goes in search of connections in the community to enliven the class projects.

The students in the special education class can’t always verbalize what this local black history means to them, but the display of famous Kansas City people and their nationally renown achievements can light sparks, Davidson said.

“Kids need to know about people like this,” Davidson said, surveying several years of posters on the walls of J.C. Harmon.

“Civil rights activists, radiologists, professors, bankers, entertainers from Kansas City, journalists from Kansas City . . .”

Classroom aide Sherri Kimbrough picked up the same message.

“What they did (the honorees on the posters), our children today see they can also become profitable,” Kimbrough said. “It helps inspire them to become whatever they want to grow up to be in life.”

By Joe Robertson, LINC writer