Tag: African Americans

Recovering the history of free Black settlements in Illinois

When Kimberly France, a descendant of free African-American pioneers, first approached Toni Craig to help piece together her family’s history in a southern Illinois community called Africa, Craig wasn’t sure she was up for it. Craig already had spent years assembling and telling the stories of the community of Africa, which is located 120 miles…

Unique KC Star, Post-Dispatch, News-Leader project on epidemic of Missouri gun deaths

It started with a maddening statistic. Missouri has ranked first or second for 11 years as the state with the nation’s highest rate of African Americans who die in homicides. The Washington, D.C.-based Violence Policy Center says that 57 Missouri Blacks per 100,000 people were killed in 2017, nearly triple the national average. Typically, news…