Hunt is on for local black history

CHRISTINA M. WOODS, Wichita Eagle

- Documenting the city’s African-American community from 1945 to 1958 will send Wichitan Galyn Vesey on a historical treasure hunt that could span the next three years.

Vesey, an instructor at Bethel College, said he’s passionate about the project because there’s little documentation of the city’s black residents during the segregation era.

Vesey said he’ll comb through documents in library archives, cemeteries and possibly the salt mines in Hutchinson, where municipal records are kept, to resurrect life around North Water and Main streets to Ninth and Cleveland, where most black businesses and organizations thrived.

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