The Blacks Who Built America’s Hometown: An Introduction to “Hannibal’s Invisibles”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Earlier this week, Belt Publishing released Hannibal’s Invisibles, a Black history of Hannibal, Missouri, told with words and images by G. Faye Dant, the founder and executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center. We are very proud to re-publish the introduction to Dant’s book, by renowned Twain scholar, Shelley Fisher Fishkin.
For many years, Faye Dant tells us, the only official reference to African Americans in Hannibal was a racist sign that greeted visitors from all over the country. It read “Here Huckleberry Finn and Niggar Jim [sic] stopped for a few days on their way down the Mississippi.”
Dant knew that Hannibal’s Black history – from Slavery to the present – was complicated and rich, and deserved to be documented. After spending years collecting materials that bore witness to this history, in 2013 she opened Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center – “to reclaim our story.” For the last decade, Jim’s Journey, the only Black history museum in northeast Missouri, has been an illuminating stop for visitors. Hannibal’s Invisibles now makes that history accessible to a broader public.
In the early 1900s, the offices of the only Black newspaper ever published in Hannibal – a weekly called The Home Protective Record – burned in a fire, ending its short run less than a year after it began publication. There has been no written record of the world in which Hannibal’s Black residents struggled to raise their families and build their lives in a community that was glad to have them launder their clothes, cook their dinners and mop the floors of their municipal buildings, but didn’t expect them to ever do anything much beyond these circumscribed tasks. Until now.
The story of Hannibal’s Black residents was not a story that “America’s Hometown” had much of an interest in preserving. “America’s Hometown” celebrated Tom Sawyer and whitewashed fences, but ignored the Mark Twain who was a critic of racism – including the racism of his hometown – and erased most physical traces that remained of the Black community that had lived in Hannibal continuously from the time of Slavery to the present, a community that shaped Mark Twain’s work in indelible ways.
Hannibal’s economy revolves around a writer who created one of the first fully-drawn Black fathers in American fiction, a character based in part on enslaved people he knew during his childhood, such as Daniel Quarles, a father himself, and a gifted storyteller whose history features prominently in Jim’s Journey and in this book. Mark Twain learned much of his art by listening appreciatively to Quarles’ stories, as well as to the satirical sermons preached daily by an enslaved man named Jerry, whom he viewed as “the greatest man in the country.” Although Twain’s earliest writings against racism focused on the hostility and discrimination that the Chinese faced in the American West, he would soon come to view the slaveholding world of Hannibal in which he had grown as morally bankrupt. He would recognize the community’s largely unquestioning acceptance of a shockingly unjust status quo as a prime example of what he would call “the lie of silent assertion.” “It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery,” he wrote. Yet opponents of slavery “could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society – the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion – the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.”
Twain would make the racism he encountered here central to one of the greatest works of American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as many other works. For the rest of his life, Twain continued to bear witness to the ways in which racism undermined many nations’ claims to being “civilized.” “There are many humorous things in the world,” he wrote, in Following the Equator; “among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”
Hannibal’s Invisibles offers a moving record of individuals who lived their lives under the long shadow of Slavery and Jim Crow, who were constrained but not crushed by the racism they had to negotiate on a daily basis; of people who, in the face of daunting odds, established a supportive community that helped its members survive and, in many cases, thrive. The many photographs that Dant collected from various local sources help bring the stories of this community alive.
Enslaved Black people brought here from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, or the Carolinas cleared the land and built Hannibal’s houses and roads. They were also skilled tailors, seamstresses, horsemen, barbers, cooks, carpenters, brick masons, nurses, cooks, maids, and butlers who made it possible for the town to grow and prosper. “Even though enslaved people had built Hannibal from the ground up,” Faye Dant tells us, “as a community, they were kept from reaping the benefits of their labor. So, their descendants built a second Hannibal, and with it, they provided us with a future.” This book tells the story of that “second Hannibal.”
It’s the story of a child named Emma Knight who saw her father put up on the auction block because her Hannibal master wanted to buy something for the house – and it’s the story of children who went to work, after Slavery ended, on the very farms where their parents and grandparents had been enslaved.
It’s the story of dozens of runaways who served in Black regiments in the Union Army. And it’s the story of two brothers who served in the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during World War II, only to find that the GI bill’s promise of educational training turned out to be for “whites only” in their hometown: Only after Hannibal schools integrated in 1955 would these Black veterans be admitted to a vocational training school for automotive repair training run by the Hannibal public school system that had rejected them earlier.
It’s the story of close-knit families and supportive friends – of neighbors helping neighbors in “the Bottoms” when Bear Creek periodically flooded, depositing knee-high mud over everything in sight. “The Bottoms,” in Hannibal’s Fifth Ward, was some of the least desirable land in town, but one of the few areas where black residents were allowed to build or purchase homes. Families like that of Valerie Hawkins Shaw recall the vibrant community that residents built in this soggy flood plain, knowing instinctively to open the front and back doors of their houses to let the water flow through, leaving everything covered with mud but the house still standing. Everyone pitched in when it was time for the “horrendous cleanup process” that followed.
It’s the story of students who learned to read at the segregated Douglass school. There was Fannie Griffin, who later trained at the respected Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis only to find that “Black nurses were not welcome in Hannibal hospitals.” There was Donald L. Scott, who went on to become CEO of the Library of Congress. And there was John Roland Redd, who donned a turban, took the name Korla Pandit, passed as South Asian, and became a nationally-known musician. Other Douglass school graduates became attorneys, doctors, entrepreneurs, authors, scientists and ministers. Douglass students had to make do with hand-me-down textbooks from the white school—but a revered history teacher, Marion Powers, taught them Black history “out of his hip pocket.”
It’s the story of a student named Joel Dant (Faye Dant’s husband) and his brother, the first Black students in a rural one-room schoolhouse near their Hannibal family farm. Joel and his brother, great grandsons of an enslaved man named Henry Dant, who was born the same year Sam Clemens was born, arrived at school one day “to find a rifle placed across their teacher’s desk. On the blackboard were the crudely written words, ‘KILL ALL NIGGERS.’” After he told his father about the incident, his father took to carrying a gun to all school gatherings.
It’s the story of Joel Dant’s aunt, Lydia Doolin, who had to wait to start cooking the elaborate Christmas feasts she prepared for her family (the menu – included in the book – is mouth-watering) until she had finished cooking and serving Christmas dinner to her white employers. “It’s easy to get angry,” Dant writes, “when thinking about how exhausted our women must have been on the days they should have been enjoying their families. But they still took the time to feed us an unforgettable spread. That’s love, and that makes the memories of those sweet potato pies just a little bit sweeter.”
It’s the story of people who had to endure endless small and large humiliations and insults—like the father who, when asked by his child why he allowed white people to call him “son and boy,” responded “I do this so we can eat.” But it is also the story of people who lived, learned, worked and played in spite of those humiliations and insults, who created self-contained neighborhoods to which they could retreat with dignity and without fear.
It’s the story of children who sang in choruses and choirs, put on plays, and played in the best band in the state. Children who put on talent shows, played sports, and were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The story of children who earned pocket money by babysitting, shoveling snow, cutting grass, collecting soda pop bottles, selling homemade potholders, and hawking earthworms to local fishermen. Children who would go to one of the local Black lodges for donated school supplies or to secure a reference letter for a job.
It’s the story of parents employed by the town’s white families as domestics, laundresses, yardmen, janitors, and chauffeurs who managed to care for their own children with devotion and determination, advocate for them, and help guide them, against all odds, to careers in medicine, law, education, business, and other fields.
The blend of vintage photographs, first-hand accounts, and historical research brings these stories alive, celebrating what individuals in that community achieved while never losing sight of the obstacles they had to overcome in the process. Much as Black newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries had to strike a careful balance between positive stories celebrating what Black Americans were achieving and negative stories reminding readers of the discrimination, violence and injustice against which they continually had to fight, Hannibal’s Invisibles manages to convey the vibrance and the joy Black residents experienced in this caring, close community while reminding us (through not only personal reminiscences but also the insertion of references to broader historical contexts and captions that speak worlds) how their white fellow-citizens tried to make the canvas on which they could paint their lives as small as possible.
For example, there is a snapshot from the 60s of Louis and Margaret Dixon standing proudly in front of the restaurant they owned, a place where Black teenagers liked to hang out. “The Café” was especially appreciated since Black residents were not welcome at other local eateries. It was a place where they did not have to experience second-class status – unlike the skating rink, where they could skate only on “Negro Skate Nite,” and where they couldn’t rent skates as white teenagers could: they had to bring their own.
There’s a 1955 photo of Hannibal High’s first integrated basketball team, which included three Black players. One of them, Joe Miller, was on the starting line-up. He recalled that “the coach told us that he would have started all three Blacks if he was not afraid of community backlash.” Miller would later serve as the only Black member of the Hannibal Board of Education.
There are photos of a 1968 protest against segregationist George Wallace, who was invited by the KKK to speak in Hannibal as part of his Presidential campaign. Black students – including one who grew up to write this book – clergy, residents, and community leaders ran him out of town that day. The parade that had been scheduled for the next day had to be canceled.
There are images of ordinary life frozen in time – a 1955 photo of the last graduating class from the segregated Douglass School; a 1957 photo of a little child unhappy about getting his first haircut at a local barbershop and others from that same year of some adolescent boys running a foot race and of a handsome local doctor paying a house call. There’s a 1950s photo of adorable children in their Sunday best, and another of two local schoolteachers on vacation at Pikes Peak.
There’s a 1993 photo of an election ad urging readers to reelect Hiawatha M. Crow the 3rd Ward City Council: “She wants Hannibal to be Prosperous and Progressive” it read. When she won her first election, becoming the first Black woman elected to local office in Hannibal, the event was so noteworthy it was featured in Jet Magazine.
Hannibal’s Invisibles offers glimpses into the lives of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the enslaved people who built the town, kept it running, and inspired the world-famous writer who grew up here. It documents the racism they endured and the resilience and strength with which they countered forces arrayed to limit what they could do and what they could dream. It is a story that Americans need to hear.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of 48 books, and over 150 articles, essays and reviews, much of it focused on issues of race and racism, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America’s past. In 2017, she won the John Tuckey Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mark Twain Studies from the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for Scholarly Creativity & Innovation from the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2023, she received the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.