Wandering souls find Kansas City roots with help of Black History Project

Memphis native Tracie Russell, who said she’s battled homelessness since she was 14, looks at the book and other materials from the Kansas City Black History Project shared at Linwood Gardens community of apartments.

When you’re living in a car with your child, Black history echoes somewhere outside of the pressing needs for food and shelter and hope.

Those were the Memphis years for Tracie Russell, who said she’d been chronically homeless since she was 14.

She knew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed there. And because one of her elementary schools was named for Ida B. Wells, she knew something of the crusading journalist and that her work began there.

But here she is now, in Kansas City, looking through the pages of the Kansas City Black History book that sat with a display of local heroes and historical events set out in the common room at the Linwood Gardens community of apartments.

Here, the book tells in its more than 80 biographies, was the home of Lucile Bluford, Buck O’Neil, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, Tom Bass, Josephine Silone Yates . . .

Kansas City has been good for Russell. She came some five years ago from Memphis because she heard that good people and good services here gave her hope of reordering her life.

Case managers Brandie Schmidt, left, and DeAngela Mims of reStart, Inc., pose by the Kansas City Black History display and books at Linwood Gardens.

She’s in school now at Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley, finishing an associate’s degree, prepping for a career in social media management or social work — or both. She’s become a leader in the KC Tenants advocacy group and was appointed to the city’s Housing Trust Fund board.

Somewhere along the way — perhaps when she was actively part of making new Kansas City history, chaining herself with other KC Tenant advocates to the Jackson County courthouse doors to block eviction hearings, exhorting the crowd through a bullhorn — Kansas City truly began to feel like home, she said.

As she looked over the Kansas City Black History display and the book, she said she was eager make this history part of how she feels about her new town.

That’s the kind of experience Brandie Schmidt had in mind when she created the display and community event at Linwood Gardens.

As a housing stability coordinator with reStart, Inc., Schmidt supports many of the residents in these apartments who are rising up from chronic homelessness or sheltering from domestic violence situations.

The Kansas City Black History books that are a joint project by LINC, the Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America, and when Schmidt saw the project, she wanted to pass the experience on to residents who have spent so much of their lives unmoored.

Learning the local history, she said, can help set deeper, lasting roots in being part of a community.

Left to right, Brandie Schmidt, Julie Jarczyk and Tracie Russell visit during a community event at Linwood Gardens in Kansas City that featured the KC Black History project.

Some of the Linwood Gardens residents came in with children, enjoying the pizza and cookies, and then pausing to look over the pictures and portraits that spanned two centuries.

Linwood Gardens resident Julie Jarczyk, who, unlike Russell, has lived around Kansas City all her life, also appreciated Schmidt’s project to share the local history.

Jarczyk said she knew some of the stories out of 18th and Vine.

But here now, as Russell paged through the book, they could learn new names and new stories.

Learn more about the project and how to download a digital copy of the book at kcblackhistory.org.

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer