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Dn August 2017, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a travel advisory for Missouri, recommending "African American travelers, visitors, and Missourians to pay special attention and exercise extreme caution when traveling throughout the state given the series of questionable, race-based incidents occurring statewide recently." The travel advisory referenced statistics compiled by the Missouri Attorney General in 2017 that documented that African Americans in the state were "75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than Caucasians" ("Vehicle Stops"). Moreover, the Missouri Senate passed a bill in 2017 that requires people demonstrate their race, gender, or religion is the "motivating" factor, rather than a "contributing factor," in any discrimination they experience (Missouri SB 43). The NAACP viewed this critical change as legalizing "individual discrimination and harassment within the State ofMissouri" and "preventing] individuals from protecting themselves from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation" (NAACP). Noting that the bill "hearkens back to the Jim Crow-era," the NAACP expressed "alarm and concern that Black individuals enjoying the highways, roads, and points of interest there may not be safe."
A slave state prior to the Civil War, Missouri embraced Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century. Segregation, economic inequality, and statesponsored violence are still day-to-day realities for Black people in large cities, like St. Louis and Kansas City, as well as in small towns and rural communities. The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 and the 2017 death of Tory Sanders in a jail cell in southeast Missouri exemplify the pervasiveness of police violence against Black people. The circumstances that gave rise to the travel advisory have deep, disturbing roots.
How might a college course that engages undergraduate students in the study of rhetoric even begin to address such a dark history and its dangerous manifestations in the present moment? This essay describes a local pedagogical response to the NAACP travel advisory and Missouri's history. Rhetorics of Public Memory, an upper-level, English course at an urban research university in the state, served as a site to engage with Kansas City's past in order to understand the current moment and to work toward a better future. Over the course of a semester, members of the class worked with...