Missouri’s Black Heritage, Third Edition

Originally written in 1980 by the Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland and revised and updated in 1993 by Kremer and Holland, Missouri's Black Heritage, now in a greatly expanded third edition, remains the only book-length account of the rich and inspiring history of the Show-Me State's African American population. With more than one hundred photographs, most of them new to this third edition, Kremer and Holland incorporate the latest scholarship as they describe in detail the struggles many Black Missourians continue to face in the aftermath of their ancestors’ arduous and courageous struggles since Emancipation to achieve their full civil and political rights as U.S. citizens. Documenting the African American experience from the horrors of slavery through the great victories over many generations, the book touches on the lives of people such as John Berry Meachum, a St. Louis slave who purchased his own freedom and then helped countless other slaves gain emancipation; Hiram Young, a Jackson County free black whose manufacturing of wagons for Sante Fe Trail travelers made him a legendary figure; James Milton Turner, who, after rising from slavery to become one of the best-educated blacks in Missouri worked with the Freedmen's Bureau and the State Department of Education to establish schools for blacks all over the state after the Civil War; and Annie Turnbo Malone, a St. Louis entrepreneur whose business skills made her one of the state's wealthiest African Americans in the early twentieth century. A personal reminiscence by the late Lorenzo J. Greene, a distinguished African American historian whom many regard as one of the fathers of Black history, offers a unique view of Missouri's racial history and heritage, as do Kremer and Holland, in their new preface and introduction to the third edition.