A homesteader's letter. A special penny. A collapsible metal cup. A sheet of music. A commemorative baseball bat. A military uniform. A medal. And photographs — hundreds and hundreds of photographs.
Photographs of proud church congregations in their Sunday finest. Of long-ago jazz bands, women's social clubs, locally run retail shops.
Photographs of high school athletes, from 1940s black-and-white to 1970s faded colors. Photos of ministers and musicians, stalwart servicemen and confident baseball players, smiling children and dedicated women.
Each of these items, no matter how seemingly humble, has a special story. A story to be shared.
Such are among the remarkable gleanings from a special development in north Omaha called the History Harvest project.
Under it, north Omaha residents shared hundreds of items, as well as their stories, last fall with a group of history students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln under the direction of Associate Professor Patrick Jones. The project is in partnership with the Great Plains Black History Museum, Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, NET and Love's Jazz and Arts Center.
By the end of this college semester, a History Harvest website will be created with images and text sharing those stories.
"In a few months, a high school student from across the country would be able to do a school project on one of the collections," says Ali Bousquet, a UNL senior who participated in the project. "They could just pull up the website in a Google search and have all these amazing artifacts just waiting to be utilized."
Today, our national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, is a good time to take note of north Omaha's uplifting stories of achievement and community.
"By preserving and sharing these documents, we have offered a different kind of narrative," says Jones, the UNL professor. "A narrative that shows that achievement and success, community-building and institution-building have a very rich history in north Omaha."
The History Harvest project also shows the links connecting north Omaha to the rest of the city, to Nebraska and to the nation, says Jim Beatty, chairman and president of the Great Plains Black History Museum. "Our histories are very much interrelated and not separated," he says.
The more people talk about that shared past, he says, "the more we understand our connectedness."
* * *
Homesteading, for instance, was also part of the black experience.
Retired school principal Warren Taylor attended the History Harvest and shared homestead documents that belonged to his grandparents in Wyoming. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, his grandfather asked for more time to build a house on his homestead land, as was required by law, because his wife was very ill and he was maintaining a full-time job.
Taylor also showed a collapsible metal drinking cup and a penny, minted in 1841, that had belonged to his great-grandmother during slavery in Mississippi. It may have been just a penny, but for her, its value was far greater because it was something that was forbidden to slaves.
The History Harvest materials shed light on countless aspects of life and heritage. Photos from nearly a century ago showed Omaha-based Dan Desdunes, a pioneering African-American big-band leader who also volunteered at Father Flanagan's Boys Home, where he trained boys for fundraising musical tours.
Such materials, Jones says, help show how north Omaha's storied musical heritage stretches back to include a "community of players and a musical universe over decades."
A 1925 business directory showed vibrant north Omaha enterprises. Photos revealed that north O has a long tradition of motorcycle clubs. There was a soldier's World War I uniform as well as a Congressional Medal of Honor for one of the Tuskegee Airmen.
The sports paraphernalia included a Bob Gibson commemorative bat from the 1976 All-Star Game.
One History Harvest photo showed a female all-black baseball club. The team was sponsored by Robin Hood Beer, the product of two old-time Omaha breweries: first Fontenelle, then Metz.
* * *
Once the website is operating, previous UNL History Harvest projects about the railroad experience in Lincoln, as well as the history of Nebraska City, will be included. The same will be true with the next History Harvest, which will focus on western Nebraska.
This is a tremendous public service by UNL and its Department of History.
Observes Beatty, with the Great Plains Black History Museum: "Sharing history from a personal level can be a powerful and unifying activity for the city and helps point out the many positives of north Omaha that have been overlooked or forgotten."
Now, thanks to the History Harvest, that history will not be forgotten. It will be preserved, honored and shared for the benefit of us all.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
