- Hi, my name is Catherine Hoffm I'm a reporter with Flatland and I'm here to bring you storie of Kansas City's Black History that you might not have heard be I spent the past few years in living rooms, museums, and historical societies digging up often untold stories about Black History in Kansas Ci What I found was a rich history of traumas, triumphs, and a resilience like no other.

And I wanna share some of those stories with you.

(gentle music) You'll hear about the racial his of midwives from a local expert, a lynching that happened in our own backyard, school inte and a team of local historians w to recognize minority veterans from World War I.

First step is a story about the place where I probably spent the most time growing up the Bla Local leaders of some of Kansas oldest Black churches weigh in on the institution's history and how the church has spurred on the African American communit from plantation to present day.

One of my favorite moments from this story is when someone that no matter what's happening what trials you're facing, what people are telling you, you don't matter, you can always be somebody in th And I think that's the perfect way to put it.

Kansas City is no exception.

So, let's hear what some local leaders have to say about how the black church has shaped people in our town.

♪ I don't wanna be by myself ♪ ♪ Don't wanna be by myself ♪ ♪ Don't wanna be by myself ♪ - Can you guys talk to me about why the black church has always been a staple in the black community?

- The collective identity of the black church has a particular story that's to and that story is of perhaps of a liberating God.

♪ Don't wanna be by myself ♪ ♪ No no I don't ♪ - I'd like to just start with the little history of the African Methodist Episcop which is the oldest civil rights organization in the country.

The same year that the framers of the constitution met 1787 in Philadelphia at St. George's Methodist Episcopal church, there was a young man named Richard Allen free slave and Absalom Jones had gone down at the altar and he was escorted out to the balcony because that's where black people were supposed to sit.

And on that day, when they walke they decided that the God that t did not discriminate and that he was determined that we would worship under our own violent victory.

And so in Philadelphia at this blacksmith shop the AME Church was born.

- If you go back to this time of the church was the only place we could all come together and be able to talk to one anoth - During the civil rights moveme and we was marching on Washingto and we was being put in jail and being treated in such an inhumane manner.

It was the church where we went to, to come together and to strategize and organize and to be able to come up with different plans and processes in order for us to have the freedom that we have now.

And even nowadays, we still addressing issues that's going on, even in the 21st century about racism and police brutality, and unfairness, and diversity.

The church is still in the place where we having those conversati - This was the place where the rest of the world was treating us as second class but we could be somebody in the - I don't think anything that we in the past and today could have been done without the - The black church has always be that one place you can go to where it's almost like a safe Ha over everything else is going on in the world.

♪ Take my hand, take my hand ♪ ♪ Praise the Lord, praise the Lo - If you didn't already know, our country is facing a crisis.

Mothers, particularly black mothers are dying at an increasing rate.

Black mothers are facing racism in the healthcare system which has been the inspiration for black birthing centers popping up across the country, including Kansas City.

In the past few years, there's been a noticeable increase in the number of people choosing to give birth with a midwife at a birthing cen as opposed to a hospital.

Keep watching to learn more about the racial history of midw why it's coming back and Kansas City's ties to the practice.

- I want you to meet Mrs. Mary C a midwife who lives in Albany, G she and thousands of other midwives all over the south have dedicated their lives the birthing of healthy babies.

♪ I'm going (indistinct) ♪ - My name is Ginger Breedlove, I'm a nurse midwife who's been in a variety of practices over 40 years that has included clinical practice for 25 years in a birthing center and hospital environment.

About 10 years starting the univ of Kansas Midwifery Education Program and teaching, and then the last few years as a consultant for nurse midwives around the co We are experts in normal, in particular, helping care for women through pregnancy, during labor and birth and postp some midwives based on their educational pathway do family planning, gynecology, and primary care through their l So, the definition can be variab based on somebody's pathway.

The affinity for midwives and doulas is growing.

And part of that is women and their families wanting to be better supported to be more engaged in decision-m to understand what consent means and how to be able to use their in a way that makes this experience that you don't do for very many times in your life One that is as best possible what you want it to be.

Midwives have had a history in o that is rooted in immigration to the country.

So we could start with really the indigenous native Americans who practice traditional midwifery and to this day have many customs that have carried over for decades.

And then when enslaved women and women from Ireland came over as midwives, and key community leaders that were looked up to preserve the community and make sure families had healt were gradually sort of cast asid and demoralized, degraded, and removed from the practice of maternity care by the 20s and - Two days ago, a baby delivered by a midwife died when it ought to have lived.

As your health officer it was my to find out why that baby died.

- It transitioned into birth in the hospital.

And as that transition happened, there definitely was a shift in of where it was safe to give bir and who attended you for the saf The marginalized black and brown enslaved midwives and the Irish midwives gradually became illegal in most communities, in the event and and growth of the public health system began to emerge.

So the first advent of I would say the more modern midwife that evolved in the 40s and 50s were predominantly white nurses.

When we look at midwifery and racial divide I can speak to the profession of from the association lens that that I am a part of and was actually a past presiden of the American College of Nurse ACNM actually formed in Kansas City in 1955 which is an interesting part of Prior to that, midwives were in two different organizations.

There were the granny midwives and grand midwives and traditional midwives and indigenous midwives still practicing around the country, many underground, many illegal, some legal, it depended on the states.

But if you look at nurse midwife there was a distinction made as the Civil Rights Movement really emerged about the black nurse midwife and the disenfranchisement of those black midwives, nurse midwives, in the national organization of white midwives was definitely contentious.

We find that in our history, I think it's really important that we acknowledge that those racial divides were present in our profession and a need to talk about that.

America is facing a maternal hea that probably was not recognized or growing recognition until abo - Doctors and nurses have worked hard and successfully to reduce the US infant mortality rate in recent decades what's less known and less under is the rise in maternal mortalit Mothers dying after pregnancy or from childbirth related cause - Finally, there's been a wake u where the public and the policy are openly talking about this maternal health crisis.

And what is the crisis?

It's a disparity and inequity in healthcare based on that black and brown maternal mortality, dying mothers, has been rising dramatically for the last 20 years.

Black and brown women are more likely to die in childbirth than their counterparts.

I think there are systems that are taking a serious look a and I know there are others who are taking no responsibility It has to come from the federal level with funding, states don't have a lot of money in their budgets, but part of that funding needs to go to communities, communities of color, where programs can be funded ade and designed and led by those black female leaders.

(humming music) - Baby Adam, come on over here and put your name on your baby's (indistinct).

What you gonna call him Adam Jr. - To say tensions were high in this summer of 2020 would be a gross understatement.

Brianna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery were all unwilling martyrs in the Black Lives Matter moveme Just before that Kansas City had its own police killing a Cameron Lamb to reckon During that summer someone defaced a Memorial dedicated to a lynching in Kansa and they didn't just vandalize i They cut it off of its base and threw it over a cliff trying to get rid of it all toge This next story is about that lynching in Kansas City, the efforts to remember it, and the people that wanna forget it ever happened.

It's not easy to watch, and I wanna give a warning about an image in the video that shows a white mob posing under the legs of their lynching victim.

When making this video I really debated including that and I fell back on my motto when I tell these types of stori "If it happened, we should know But you should know that the focus of the video isn't just acts of violence.

It's about how to tell the truth about history and how we can own up to our collective past in order to move forward as a ci (gentle music) - We're standing in the Communit Remembrance Project Exhibition, we have partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative who opened the lynching museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

We are the only site outside of and what we are doing here is honoring those people who were victims of racial lynch - Not only do they memorialize and do true telling, is they make the connection between past racial terror and the modern day mass incarceration system.

- You know, lynching is an arbit People did it because they wanted to no other reason, none of these people were guilty of any real crime.

And when I look at Levi Harringt who was also innocent of any cri the idea that because somebody i and they're accessible you can g and you can kill them so you do, that's horrifying to me.

(gentle music) - Just recently, we collected the second jar of soil for Levi Harrington.

So that is what is at the black archives now.

So a small group of us went to the actual coordinates, where the lynching happened.

I just think that the soil is such an important connector 'cause it's where life comes fro So, you have this tragedy, this tragic incident and then you're preserving where life can grow from it.

- These aren't the people's ashe This is the dirt where are under as closely as we can tell their bodies hang.

So that would be where their blo their sweat, their tears, drained into that ground.

And I think that makes it sacred to a certain extent because that's what they left us that embodies the end of their l And most of them we know were innocent of the crimes.

In fact, all of these people were innocent of the crimes, we know their biographies.

- The Memorial was cut down last directly at the time of the George Floyd protest, and so I definitely see that as to the empowerment of the voices gathering in Kansas City.

This is not an isolated incident They just collected the jar of s for James Scott in Columbia, Mis not even a week after that jar was collected, a marker commemorating James Scott was also cut down in Columbia, Missouri.

- But we're not gonna let that d so if EJI is making another one, and we're gonna put it back in t and we will protect it better because those kinds of people will not stop this road to justice.

- I think that being proud of ou involves truth telling and doing that in public spaces.

In Missouri there's like 30 civil war markers, 27 of them are sympathetic to the Confederacy in Kansas Cit there's only five African-Americ experienced markers.

And so we're trying to uplift the truth about our history because it is something that we need to confront in a way to integrate that into something that's healing for our nation to be fully what and to move forward.

- These are our stories and we need to tell our stories.

- Before there was brown versus board of education, there was Corinthian Nutter and Esther Brown.

Corinthian Nutter was a black te in a rundown two room school, and Esther Brown was a Jewish ho They were by all accounts ordinary women who decided enough was enough and did something extraordinary.

They fought the state of Kansas to integrate South Park Elementary School in the 1940s.

Despite threats, alienation, even across burning in Brown's f they fought for equal education for black children.

Something I love about this stor is a quote from Corinthian Nutter at the time.

She said, "Schools shouldn't be "they should be for the children Nutter lived to be 97 years old and was recognized as a civil rights champion not just by Kansas City, but across the nation.

Keep watching from more of her s In the late 1940s a cross burned in the front yard of Esther Brow a Jewish housewife in Merriam, K Why, because she dared to want equal education for black children.

(bright upbeat music) Merriam, Kansas was established as an integrated community with black and white children attending the same schools.

Over time, the school segregated and the black children attended the Walker School.

- That school had lots of issues It was built as a one room schoolhouse in the 1800s, the roof leaked there, there was no electricity, the plumbing was outside.

- In the mid 1940s, the town held a bond election and raised $90,000 to build a new school South Park Elementary School.

It opened in 1947 and boasted a room for more than 200 students, a new playground, indoor plumbing and higher paid staff.

Everyone in the town paid for the construction of the school, but the white residents of Merriam decided it would only be for white children.

(bright upbeat music) - When they continued to refuse the families banded together, and so did the teachers, and about 39 or 40 of the students walked out with the two teachers.

- In 1948, all but two children from the Walker School boycotted the inadequate facilit Corinthian Nutter was a teacher at the Walker School and was instrumental in the year long school walkout.

Nutter and fellow teacher Hazel McCray Weddington, held classes in living rooms and church basements.

During the boycott, the families decided to take their fight to court.

And Brown was one of the driving behind filing the case as well as orchestrating the walkout.

She worked tirelessly to organize the families, raise money for teacher salaries during the boycott and start a local NAACP chapter.

(bright upbeat music) And that's the story of how two women fought to integrate South Park Elementa (bright upbeat music) When my grandfather was a soldier in the Vietnam war his job like a lot of other blac was to walk first through the ju in case there were any undetected landmines.

His captain told him that he was going to be recognized publicly for his bravery but he His story is just one of countle of minority service members who went unrecognized because of discrimination against their race or religion.

But a group of historians at Park University are trying to They're conducting the world's first systematic review of World War I to find minority service members who should have received a Medal but didn't because of discrimina against their race or religion, keep watching for more.

- Obviously we knew that there was some kind of racism or antisemitism, what we really didn't know was the scope.

- These men, these heroes, have done actions that even today we see in combat that have been awarded the Medal yet just because they were black or native American, or Asian American, or Jewish Ame simply based on something so sup they didn't receive the honor that they deserve.

(gentle music) - The Valor Medals Review Projec deals with African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Ameri and native Americans from World that may have been overlooked for the highest valor that this country can give, which is the Medal of Honor due and/or religious discrimination.

- Although there's been systemat of every other war, World War I has been left untouched.

- We ended up meeting with the W Centennial commission, and a number of other organizations in the country, and decided we were going to per one of the largest systematic re that the world has ever seen.

- Which is profound, it's never been done before.

We have to meet modern day Medal of Honors standards which is difficult for a war that happened 1002 years ago.

I have to find the longitude, the latitude, the weather, enemy provisions, various different things, such as maps, geography, and individual moveme typically hour by hour, if possi and so in order to acquire that information I have to dig through different whether it's from the military i or historical accounts, journals letters, correspondence, military orders, so on and so fo And I just kind of put together for each person were they crawli through the mud in the rain, through barbed wire while being and artillery blowing up around them, gas in the air, for each individual so that they understand that it wasn't a small action, but it was significant.

And that's why we're doing this.

- Most of my job is monitoring and finding individuals who qualify in the first place, tracking them down, getting a biographical sketch as who they are so that we can get some information about unit and attachment info, and then tracking them through t So, the biggest part of my job is just finding people where they went, where they ended up, and then seeing if there's anybody that's still alive that knew them.

And if they're is, we're lucky, and Dr. Wescot and I have the immense pleasure of speaking to them what they recall about the indiv if they never knew them, what the family recalls about the individual, if they don't know anything at a it's us informing them.

"Hey, here's who your great-grandfather or great-uncle "We are so proud to be working with him and his service.

"And we wanna tell you about him - I remember the first one I did was to a young lady in Pennsylva so I called her and told her who what we were doing, and then asked her if she was related to this particular person, there was dead silence.

And pretty soon all I heard was And I said to her, I said, "Ma'am, are you okay?"

And she said, "We've waited 100 years for this phone call."

- This is some important because these are some individua that are some of the most wonder we have ever read about and have ever done any work on.

And yet their name does not remain in the history books along with other individuals.

Nobody ever knew what they did and why they deserve more credit than they actually got.

- Valor never expires.

And our support for veterans should never expire.

- For that last story, I had the privilege of talking to one of those soldiers grandda She took told me about her grand captain Thomas Jones, and his ac of the night of September 27th, That evening, heavy machine gunf was shredding the Argon forest in the final weeks of World War Jones who was a first Lieutenant at the time, ran through flying bullets, not once but twice to render aid to fellow allied s His story, and really all the stories today was such an inspiration for me.

And I hope it can be one for you I'm passionate about telling these kinds of stories because I think we need to know where we come from in order to move forward.

These were just five of the countless stories from Kansas City of folks who ha and continue to do amazing things in our community.

For more black history stories like these ones visit flatlandkc.org year round.

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