Glenn North, Director of the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center & Poet Laureate of the 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District, performs "I Sing Their Names". The poem was written as part of Kansas City Black History 2021, a 44 page book about African American history in the Kansas City area.
“Cornerstone laying, Y.M.C.A., Kansas City.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1914.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.
Bruce R. Watkins leads students and others in a march down I-70 towards the Kansas City, Missouri, City Hall as part of protests following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. Photo: LaBudde Special Collections, UMKC University Libraries.
Principal Anna Jones (standing, left) leads a class at Douglass School in Kansas City, Missouri. Circa 1911. Photo: The Black Archives of Mid-America