A stop on the trail is St. Paul Cathedral, home of a legendary youth choir. America’s frst Black concert artist, Harry T. Burleigh, was known to sing songs of his youth here.
Among the highlights on the trail is a baseball team, the Pontiacs, whose story
is honored at Bayview Park.
Public history students celebrate region’s rich African American heritage
By Deborah W. Morton
As the national reckoning with racism continues to unfold, a public history project long in the making at Mercyhurst University has cast a light on the rich heritage of African Americans in Erie, Pennsylvania. “African Americans in Erie: A Trail of Shared Heritage” publicly commemorates the culturally rich, historically courageous, and socially dynamic history of African Americans in Erie County — “a history deeply entwined with this region’s overall development,” said Mercyhurst University History Professor Dr. Chris Magoc, whose collaboration with community partners brought the project to fruition. “These are stories of daring heroism, pioneering innovation, of generational perseverance in the face of impossibly difcult odds — in short, great American stories.” The centerpiece of A Shared Heritage is a walking and driving tour of 29 signifcant sites of African American history encompassing the entire county. Visitors to the project’s website, sharedheritage.org , will fnd an illustrated guide to the sites. A Shared Heritage is the culmination of a project that began in 2012, when the Edinboro Area Historical Society received a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to develop an exhibit honoring the legacy of local civil rights champions Leroy and Beatrice Smith, and to begin development of a countywide tour of African American history. Drawing on the extensive research of community historians Johnny Johnson and Sarah Thompson, Mercyhurst public history major Adriana Houseman ’12 drafted the original tour of 22 sites as her senior project. “It was outstanding work by an undergraduate student,” noted Magoc, her advisor at the time, “but it was intended essentially as a draft.”
With no funds to further develop and publish the work, the tour languished until 2017, when Magoc and community colleagues secured a $3,000 grant from Erie Arts & Culture. Two Mercyhurst seniors in 2019-20 “really helped get this project across the fnish line,” Magoc said. Public history major Hannah Pfeifer ’20 conducted additional research, helped curate oral history interviews conducted at WQLN studios, and edited copy for the tour map. Pfeifer earned the Bishop’s Award for Academic Excellence in Mercyhurst’s Class of 2020 and was the frst student to earn a Roy and Rosanna Strausbaugh Fellowship, which supports student research and production of public history projects. The Fellowship also supported the work of graphic design major Samantha Sherwood ’20, who developed the project website, making the tour and its supplemental educational resources digitally accessible. The long journey to complete the project may have been fortuitous, Magoc noted. “What a moment to be bringing this history more fully into our region’s public consciousness, with interest heightened in historic racial injustice and the struggle for full citizenship for all Americans,” he said. “We’re confdent A Shared Heritage will not only help raise public consciousness and appreciation of a rich and important history, but also foster interracial understanding and enliven the regional conversation about how to achieve a more just and equitable future.” How right he was. The tour was so well received when it debuted in August of 2020 that it spurred a partnership with tourism promotion agency VisitErie, which went on to expand the tour even further. Today, there is a self-guided, audio- narrated tour, which is available through VisitErie’s “Hello Erie” mobile app,
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