'Use it. Share it. Hash-tag it': KC's African American Heritage Trail launches quest to reach new audiences
Most of the people who celebrated the official launch of Kansas City’s African American Heritage Trail Tuesday night were champions of the two-year project.
And while they cheered the collective community effort that is now delivering a growing wealth of local black history at our interactive finger tips on our phones, their eye was on the greater audience they hope to reach.
They want to reach young people. And their teachers.
They want to reach those who are unaware — like filmmaker Megan Voepel who told Tuesday’s audience it wasn’t until she was 36 that she began to see the powerful impact and complexity of the history when her work on the crime television show “The First 48” took her into area neighborhoods and homes she hadn’t known.
“I was just then learning,” she said. But here now is an interactive site “that hopefully can give children and adults, like me, an opportunity to learn African American history before they’re 36.”
More than 160 people from the community and several partnering organizations collaborated to create the site, said Jeffrey Williams, the director of Kansas City’s Department of Planning and Development, which led the effort.
The contributors identified 241 sites and people to be considered for the site, and 64 histories have been written and posted — so far.
The site intends to keep evolving, be dynamic and is offering links for anyone who knows a piece of history to help the site grow.
Dr. Dennis Madison Miller and the housing rights struggle in the historic Santa Fe Place Neighborhood, is one of the histories featured both on the African American Heritage Trail and in Nico WIggins’s film, “Land of Opportunity.”
“Take the site,” Williams urged the audience. “Please use it. Please share it. ‘Like’ it. Hash-tag it.”
Send everyone to www.aahtkc.org, he said. Tag it: #AAHTKC.
To emphasize the ever-changing, evolving understanding of history, the city’s launch party brought in two young filmmakers — Voepel and Nico Wiggins — to share new explorations of the impacts of Kansas City’s past on our experience today.
Voepel is premiering her documentary series, “Tribe,” that explores tribalism and its impact on urban development.
Wiggins recently released his documentary, “Land of Opportunity,” that told of black Kansas City’s struggle through the fight for housing rights in the historic Santa Fe Place Neighborhood.
“It’s a privilege,” Wiggins said, “to tell these stories in a compelling way to attract new audiences for change.”
It took a lot of collaboration to get the African American Heritage Trail to this day, Williams said.
The many partners were people who said, “Let’s mean it,” he said, “and take it on together and take it farther than anyone expected.”
LINC was one of the many collaborators, especially through the work it has done with the Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America to produce a decade’s worth of stories of important figures in Kansas City’s black history that were shared with the new virtual trail.
The history of Kansas City’s General Hospital No. 2, with a locator map, is one of the many sites detailed on the African American Heritage Trail website.