SALT LAKE CITY — February 20 was a true Salt Lake City snow day. Definitely not a day you’d want to be touring the city on foot. Luckily, for the participants of a tour on Salt Lake City's Black history, they were on a bus.
Every stop on the tour led by husband-and-wife duo Robert and Alice Burch is significant to the history of the area and the Beehive State.
“We do black history, we preserve it, we share it, we teach it and we exhibit it, and we’re the only Black organization in Utah that does that,” said Robert Burch.
The Burch's mantra is summed up by two words you may have never heard said together. They proudly call their organization Sema Hadithi.
“’Sema’ is Swahili for ‘say’ as in ‘sema’ and ‘hadithi’ is Arabic for ‘story’,” Robert explained. “We created that name specifically because we found that a lot of Black families were collecting their family histories, but they were really not sharing those stories.”
Those stories start at, if not the heart of the city, certainly a main artery.
The University of Utah's at 32 Potter Street was the former home to Black soldiers in the early 1900s.
“Historical Fort Douglas, started off as Camp Douglas,” said Robert. “This is one of the original barracks of Fort Douglas, there, right where we’re standing another barracks. Then next to that barracks was the road right next to the parade grounds. They came through and excavated all the barracks that were here and made this a road.
One of the most significant stories about Fort Douglas that most people don’t know is that the fort housed soldiers that placed the American flag on San Juan Hill, Cuba. That banner is still in the museum with the insignia of the unit or the regiment that placed that banner there, and it is the 24th United States Army Infantry, which was the Buffalo Soldiers.
The soldiers were removed from Fort Douglas shortly after the Spanish-American War.
The next stop on the tour is a building many might recognize on South State Street. It formerly was not only the location of what was a jail, but the site of the first recorded lynching of a Black man in Utah in 1883.
William “Sam Joe” Harvey was accused of shooting the sheriff.
“A group of folks showed up with weapons and dragged him out of that jail and lynched him right outside the jail,” shared Robert.
Nearly three years ago, Sema Hadithi commemorated two lynchings of Black men in the state. Those lynchings are now represented by soil from the sites of their untimely deaths. Jars containing the soil were sent to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. They now sit alongside the soil collected for other lynching victims across the United States.
Other jars remain in Utah.
“This has been excavated so we’re sure this is not the original soil,” added Robert. “It is very symbolic in the sense that we took the soil from the location of the lynching.”
Lynchings of Blacks don’t appear to have been routine, but there’s history behind one of the state’s biggest fixtures that many are surprised to learn.
“The biggest thing, and the one that we like to talk about the most, is that before the Latter-day Saints came, the first Latter-day Saints settlers that came here were four men, and three of the four men were Black,” Robert said. “So that’s a story that many Latter-day Saints themselves don’t know.”
It is no secret that race has been and was a point of contention for the church.
The bus also stopped at Temple Square, where Black people protested the racial policies of the LDS church for three days in March of 1965, right in front of the church leadership building. The group of more than 350 protesters scared and angered church leaders.
Later that same month, the Fair Employment Bill passed the Utah legislature. Ironically, that church protest was a win for rights at the Capitol, but, “It would be another 13 years before the LDS church removed the priesthood and temple ban against black people in the church,” Alice added.
A church, albeit not an LDS church, had always been a beacon for Blacks in Salt Lake.
Right at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. sits Trinity African-Methodist Episcopal Church, Trinity AME for short. It’s Utah’s oldest Black church, founded in 1890 by women, though its congregation existed years before its official founding.
It was not only a spiritual hub, but a social hub for Blacks. Its basement was used for everything from Sunday school to the after-school program to Fourth of July celebrations and still operates as a church thanks to community efforts.
“It had leaks coming in, the foundation was coming apart," Robert said. "Richard Bordeaux and some other folks were successful in finding folks like the Sterling Organization to donate money to come back and rehab this entire basement and tried to leave as much of the outside structure as original as possible."
Other stops on the tour included Edison Street, which was once a cultural center for minorities in Utah and Richmond Park, named after Mignon Barker Richmond, a Black educator and activist.
Sema Hadithi’s work is never done and who knows what other stops will be added to the tour as they continue to uncover some of Utah’s more hidden Black history.
“A lot of times we have a challenge that people are saying we’re trying to rewrite history, we’re not trying to rewrite history,” defended Robert. “What we are trying to do is add this part of it that you may not know of. As we add these different parts to the story of Salt Lake City for instance, the community of Salt Lake City becomes more inclusive and it grows for everybody and we can see what we have shared and how Salt Lake City was shaped.”
