They say you can think about the history. You can think about the money. Calvin Riley was left a decision to sell thousands of artifacts or to start a museum, but they weren’t just any artifacts. It was thousands of collectibles featuring George B. Vashon and his family. Vashon
Was an African American lawyer denied the right to practice because of his race, didn’t really know what they were. And we took them over to the Missouri his museum and was told that it was the greatest thing ever to have an Africa American family
Artifacts intact. In 2015, he opened the doors of the George B. Vashon Museum today. He estimates there’s nearly 100,000 artifacts dedicated to African American history between these four walls the last three years. He’s worked on becoming a first time author, digitizing the museum’s history in his new book, Black Saint Louis.
It contains a lot of early Saint Louis history from the 1700 when Saint Louis were founded uh as a first uh trading city director, Calvin Riley says he collected his first ever artifact in graduate school. He uses every day as an opportunity to collect more knowing if he doesn’t, that’s history lost
The good, bad and the ugly, what goes through your mind when you have families and people come in and, and donate these things. Well, because they, they let me know they care about history. They didn’t just want to destroy it and, and, uh,
Distorting the trash because they wanna want people to know what went on upstairs. The history continues and a lot of people come here and they see his collection and they say I watched him as a little kid. He not only was a, a newscaster, he wrote books,
He went around the community and talked to people for Riley. The story is unwritten. He has plans to open a permanent exhibit this spring dedicated to the Divine Nine that includes Black Sororities and fraternities. The information is there, you just dig for it, it’s there, it’s documented
And so nothing has to be made up. You don’t have to fabricate it. Just tell the truth reporting in Saint Louis Diamond Palmer five on your side.
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