The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast · Dean Klinkenberg

Beyond Mark Twain: Faye Dant on Hannibal's African American Stories

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

Hannibal used redlining and sundown neighborhoods to control where Black residents could go.

1. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast episode “Beyond Mark Twain: Faye Dant on Hannibal's African American Stories” centers on Black history in Hannibal, Missouri. 2. Dean Klinkenberg hosts the conversation, and Faye Dent is the founder and director of Jim’s Journey, the Huck Finn Freedom Center, and the author of Hannibal’s Invisibles. 3. The episode asks what Hannibal looks like when Black residents, enslaved people, and their descendants are placed at the center of the town’s history. 4. Dent says she felt driven to tell the story because “stakeholders and the community powers” were not doing it, and local visitors bureaus had no meaningful mention of enslavement. 5. She says Hannibal had about 2,000 enslaved people and that Moses Bates, the founder, arrived with them, yet their contributions were left out of public history. 6. Dent points to a Black newspaper in Hannibal from 1914, published weekly by a minister, as an early attempt to provide “uplifting” coverage instead of crime reporting. 7. She traces her family history to Missouri over five generations, including a great-grandfather enslaved in Virginia and grandparents who moved to Hannibal in 1920. 8. Dent says family albums, photographs, scrapbooks, and her mother’s decades of clippings gave her a base for research into local Black lives. 9. She names Jacob Lowe as one of the formerly enslaved people who came to Hannibal with Moses Bates and later left a published narrative. 10. Lowe’s account includes being sold at age 14, working to clear land, and helping build the first log cabins in Hannibal. 11. Dent says her work is partly about naming people whom history made invisible, including people remembered only as Jemima, Robert, or unnamed others. 12. She says she does not have descendants identified for Jacob Lowe, but she believes he stayed and died in Hannibal. 13. Dent discusses Old Baptist cemetery, where enslaved people and United States colored troops are buried, and she suggests Daniel Quarles may also have been buried there. 14. She describes neighborhood geography in Hannibal, including Douglasville, the West Side, and the bottoms, and says the bottoms were flood-prone and rebuilt repeatedly after rising water. 15. Dent says redlining operated in Hannibal and that sundown neighborhoods taught Black residents where it was safe to go and where it was unsafe after dark. 16. She says a white friend’s deed included a warning that any Black worker had to be gone by sundown. 17. Dent details limited work opportunities for Black residents, citing a 1927 color directory with 72 cooks and 25 chauffeurs in a city of about 20,000 people. 18. She also says Hannibal had Black-run institutions such as a fire department, mailman, policemen called watchmen, and stores, because Black residents had to build their own community inside the town. 19. The conversation has an interview style with detailed local history, direct answers, and specific family memories, and Dent’s tone is matter-of-fact even when the subject is painful. 20. Listeners interested in Hannibal, Missouri, Black history, school segregation, and river-town community life will get the most from it, while people looking only for Mark Twain tourism may skip it.

As heard by us

A steady correction to Hannibal history, built from places the usual story leaves out.

It turns Hannibal toward the African American history that the town's visitor materials left mostly unspoken. The discussion stays with the scale of enslavement in Hannibal, the people absent from the usual public story, and the places that help bring that history back into…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Hannibal's hidden history, told one place and one family story at a time.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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