Where Black heritage tours are

"Babe Connors' mansion here in St. Louis was sooooooo big, the post "office gave it two addresses!" exclaims the owner of the National Black Tourism Network, Angela daSilva. It sounds like a joke, but Connors was a black woman who, in 1898, opened the popular "Palace" of sexual pleasures in St. Louis. "Babe Connors was the most notorious madam in U.S. history," says daSilva, and those two addresses were 2310 and 2312 Chestnut Street.

daSilva has been a travel agent for 24 years and in the black heritage tour business for 5. In 1993, with the guidance of Caletha Powell, former executive director of the Greater New Orleans Black Tourism Network, daSilva opened the National Black Tourism Network (NBTN), a destination management company that handles family reunions, conventions, Upward Bound programs and black heritage tours in St. Louis and Detroit. (Black heritage tours of Birmingham, Ala., are scheduled to begin in April.) NBTN also puts together travel packages to black cultural events the world over and promotes them in its brochure Destinations in Black. Last year, the company took more than 100 people to the Cancun jazz Festival in Mexico.

daSilva isn't driven solely by a desire to fill a void in the tourism market; she also feels that too many black heritage tours are run by the majority culture: "They see how they can capitalize on something that they didn't even deem important enough to put into the history books." So this 43-year-old single mother of one has combined scholarship with a sense of drama to create lively, interactive three-hour tours that are part lecture, part living history and part question-and-answer session. At four or five stops on each tour, actors in period costume perform scenes from the past.

daSilva wants her customers to nave fun, but she also wants them to confront aspects of black history that have long been neglected. NBTN tours are friendly and enthusiastic, but daSilva and her tour guides take scholarship seriously and leave lots of room for questions from the group. "No one is allowed to say `I don't know' to answer a question," she says of her staff. "If they don't know the answer, then their response is, `Can I get back to you with that answer?'"

"St. Louis: From Fur Trappers to Ragtime Millionaires" was NBTN's first tour, and it focuses on a black community that prospered in the 19th century, when St. Louis was a vibrant port on the Mississippi River. It took daSilva seven years to complete her research, and she's a stickler about her facts. "We're talking black history, not black maybe," she says. "Here in St. Louis, you actually see Frankie shoot Johnny 25 feet from where it happened, based on the transcripts of the coroner's inquest. Every word of it is exactly as it came out of her mouth at the inquest. Wasn't nothin' coming out of his mouth," she adds, mocking the fate of the star-crossed lovers of legend. "He wasn't talkin'!

"I can rock you, girl. I can keep you entertained," she continues, and it's easy to see that she would have been a popular history professor, had she chosen that route. This is not a standard tour, such as those run by the National Park Service. "The NPS has to be politically correct," daSilva explains. "I don't. I can say exactly what it was. I can use the n-word if it's apropos. Another difference is that a historic site like the NPS is just trained in the site. When you take my tour, I'm weaving an entire story together."

Two years ago, NBTN added "Detroit: Freedom's Legacy" to its repertoire, intent on showing off the city and explaining the reasons--both social and judicial--for black migration to Detroit in the 1800s and into the 1900s. The history of the Underground Railroad is a significant part of that tour. "What we talk about in Detroit is the conflicting laws [about slavery] that led Canada and the northern United States, especially the black Michigan territories of the Northwest Ordinance, to become the mecca for slaves," says daSilva.

"The name of that tour is `Freedom's Legacy' because Detroit was the shining star of freedom. That did not end until the 1960s. Detroit still was considered the beacon of freedom--Come work in the factories of the North!--until the '60s. The city never lost that aura."

What comes after the launch of the Birmingham tour? "People keep saying, 'When are you going to go to Washington, D.C.?'" says daSilva. "I'm not. I don't plan to go to Chicago or Los Angeles, either. I will probably go to Houston. Where there's heavy traffic, and where the big boys are, we'll leave 'em alone. I'm going to build an empire on the fringes, just like Southwest Airlines." For now, visitors to St. Louis, and Birmingham can supplement their itineraries with a lesson in history from NBTN.

RELATED ARTICLE: Alaska Ebony Tours

A black woman was a member of the party that founded Eagle City, Alaska, in 1897, and a black man was one of the first inhabitants of Valdez. Blacks were living in Alaska as early as the mid-1800s, but it was the military and the gold rushes of the late 1800s and the early 1900s that brought the largest numbers. When the gold rushes ended, there were about 209 black people living in Alaska. Then the construction of the Alaskan Highway in 1942 brought in a large number of black families, mainly due to the fact that black infantry units played a big role in the development of the highway. By 1960 the black population was at 6,711. In the '70s the oil boom and the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline increased the state's population among all races, including blacks. The 1990 census recorded more than 22,451 blacks in Alaska.