The dollar value in black tourism
By Bill Beene
Of the St. Louis American
“Call any Convention and Visitors Center and ask them where the black clubs and soul food restaurants are,” challenges Angela Da Silva, founder and CEO of the National Black Tourism Network.
“Do it,” she insists.
Her point: “Most CVCs don’t tell you that.”
And many state tourism centers don’t adequately market black history, according Da Silva, who realized the niche and started her own company.
Her National Black Tourism Network specializes in tours of the African Diaspora (wherever blacks were taken as slaves) and serves as both tour operator and tour developer.
Da Silva said black people need to understand the dollar value in tourism.
“Historically we never saw a value in our own history, and we never fought to preserve it. When integration came, we were so glad to get out of there, we never looked back.”
That isn’t necessarily true of Da Silva’s immediate ancestors who survived brutally southern-like slavery in Central Missouri. Da Silva’s grandfather – before he died – and other family members still worked for the white slave owner who enslaved his family.
There was an entire generation of Da Silva’s family who after emancipation didn’t get more than 10 miles off the plantation before returning, her mother included.
Da Silva heard these stories as a child and takes pride in that slave history.
“What do I have to be ashamed of?” “I didn’t enslave anyone,” she said, explaining that “the pride comes in that we survived. We were an industrious people who survived and are surviving now, especially with the odds during the 100 years after slavery.”
That sort of slave history in Central Missouri is how Da Silva’s latest tour, “Forgotten Missouri, What the Books Don’t Tell You” came about.
Today, Da Silva said there are only a few people left to tell those stories and no one is doing it, except Da Silva, who also gives Missouri Tourism credit for their interest.
“Black history in Missouri was never marketed, never told, it wasn’t a product,” Da Silva said. “So I created the product, something to market, which is my tour.”
Doing the research herself, making calls and knocking on doors, Da Silva mapped out the five-day tour.
The “Forgotten Missouri, What the Books Don’t Tell” tour from Kansas City to St. Louis includes such stops as the Negro League Baseball Museum in the historically black 18th and Vine area of K.C., the Buffalo Soldier Monument in Leavenworth, Lexington’s Civil War battle, Central Missouri’s first all-black town (Pennytown) and its remaining church, the area first all-black school that Jessie James supported monetarily (in Parkville), and the country’s only fully intact slave-breeding plantation in Cooper (in Lafayette).
In St. Louis, the tour includes Laclede’s Landing, the Ville, and Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing. Da Silva is serving as event planner and reenactment writer for an event commemorating this underground-railroad site near the Mississippi River.
The river was very important to black culture and dissemination of it in the Midwest and throughout the nation, especially after freedom, Da Silva said. She added that blacks sought freedom by way of the railroad tracks and the rivers to head north. So slaves coming out of Mississippi and Arkansas came upriver.
“Our black culture, our songs, our food, all came up the river,” DaSilva said.
“This is one reason the Mary Meachum event is so important. We venerate the westward expansion of the country and Lewis and Clark, but we have not really focused on the migratory pattern of blacks using the river to come north. We are taking that black culture back to the river.”
Da Silva’s company hosts two other tours: “The Civil Rights Triangle” and “Freedom’s Legacy, Following the North Star,” a six-day tour beginning in Kentucky and ending in Canada.
The three tours fly congressional logos, as they are sanctioned and marketed by the U.S. Government and part of the American Pathways Program, making them national tour products.
And what a consummate steward in Da Silva, who talks profusely and is given to spontaneously changing her course, both of which sometimes make her late on press trips.
“We start out early, but the writers ask questions. We pay money and invite them, so I can’t take them somewhere and rush them through,” Da Silva said. Any questions they have, I will let them keep asking, so that’s why by the end of day we’ve fallen so far behind.”
And what a joy to listen to Da Silva spill her wealth of knowledge on the various locations and their histories.
A historian, a storyteller, a savvy businessperson, Da Silva’s passion and knowledge of her product are uncanny.
She has committed her life to preserving African-American cultural heritage in greater St. Louis and is one of the cities true cultural preservationists.
She has received several awards, accolades, appointments and achievements since stumbling upon travel and tourism.
Da Silva earned her undergraduate and graduate degree in 1978 and 1983, respectively, after bypassing a less-lucrative career in education.
While attending a job fair after college, a travel director’s job fell on her lap. She stayed in the industry 22 years before she decided to open her own company.
“I realized that, wherever I was, the numbers for attracting black people were sky-high. I thought, instead of making money for these companies, I need to be making money for myself.”
The rest is history.
For a complete lists of tours, national and international, contact the National Black Tourism Network at www.tourism-network.net, (314) 865-0708 or (888) 872-3773 or info@tourism-network.net.
