It started with a conversation over lunch one Sunday.

Ayanna Shivers, the mayor of Mexico, and Ed Williams were batting around ideas for Black History Month. They wanted something with depth, presentations that would have impact, be engaging and – this is where things become tricky – of a scale that a small board of volunteers could actually pull off.

“I Too Sing America: Celebrating Blacks in History” fulfills every goal set by Shivers, Williams, the board of Rebuilding the Village and Anointed Lifesaving Ministries, the groups sponsoring the events.

The celebration is a three-part program, each very different, yet each one also looking both back to the past and forward to what is possible. The first, which took place last Saturday, focused on slavery. On Feb. 20 there is a panel discussion via Zoom that looks into the good, bad and ugly of the 13th Amendment.

A final program on Feb. 27 is a photo gallery of Mexico from a black perspective, with recollections from the past.

“There’s so much history, it’s very exciting,” Shivers said.

History can be inspiring. There’s the former slave Tom Bass, who took up the horse trade in Audrain County and went on to become one of the world’s finest trainers. There’s the Garfield School, which educated the area’s black students starting in 1910.

But history can be stubborn, refusing to let us shake free of past realities once we become aware of them. And this is part of what such programs hope to achieve.

“Black history wasn’t taught,” Williams observed. “That’s what made me interested. The more I got a hold of, the more I wanted to learn.”

As the series took shape, Shivers began to hear stories from people that put some perspective on the heart of the area once known as Little Dixie. According to the 1860 U.S. Census, slaves made up 10 percent of Missouri’s population. In Audrain, Callaway, Boone and the other counties of Little Dixie, however, that figure was up to 50 percent.

The event held on Feb. 6 featured artifacts from the slavery era from Williams’ personal collection, as well as music, books and information.

Two items attracted the most attention. The first was a tattered jacket worn by a Missouri slave in the 1840s. The second was a book, “Without Sanctuary,” which is filled with photographs from lynchings.

“It’s a very graphic book, a hard book,” Williams said.

Flipping through it guests were staggered, raising questions such as “that actually happened in this country?”

“It brought life to the past,” Williams added.

He points out that many of the images were originally postcards. People sent cheery messages to friends and family through the mail on cards featuring brutal death. They gathered to watch lynchings.

“He set the stage,” Shivers said. “It went well – we had someone from as far away as Fulton.”

One of the items in Williams’ presentation that also caught the attention of guests was a list, remarkable not only for it’s content — patents and inventions by slaves and former slaves — but also for its length, 11 full pages.

The stories that resonated with Shivers were those illustrating the long reach of that era. She heard of the “Colored Only” drinking fountain at the Audrain County Courthouse. She learned that well into the 20th Century, black mothers gave birth in the hospital basement, near where garbage was stored.

And there were the conversations stirred by “Without Sanctuary.”

“Lynching – that was harder to hear,” Shivers said. “But it’s instrumental in examining the views of people as events unfold, even today. How did we get to this point?”

I Too Sing America hopes to shed some light on that question, as well as bring the past to life.