Black history mission guided work of pioneering teacher, from classroom to TV show to trivia game
At a time when the teaching of Black history was just getting a foothold in academic settings, Edward Beasley Jr. was one of its most ardent and innovative practitioners.
The lifelong educator, who died in 2019 at age 87, established a Black studies program at Kansas City's Penn Valley Community College not long after the first of those programs launched in 1968, and also found creative ways to take the message far beyond classroom walls.
His commitment eventually led him to the presidency of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization that sets the national Black History Month theme each year.
Over the years, the Omaha, Nebraska, native, who spent his career as a high school and college teacher in the Kansas City area, shared Black history with the wider community via TV and radio programs, a job training and readiness program and a Black trivia card game. Any place could be a classroom for Beasley, who also taught inmates at Leavenworth and Lansing penitentiaries in Kansas.
Beasley embodied a main purpose of the Black studies mission: “To take knowledge to the community,” said Stefan Bradley, professor of Black studies and history at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Black History Month: In the crucible of historic change, I grew up Black and proud
Beasley’s establishment of the Black studies program at the Kansas City community college, now known as MCC-Penn Valley, puts him “amongst the progenitors” of the movement to establish Black studies programs, which started at San Francisco State College in 1968 before gaining traction at Ivy League universities, community colleges and high schools across the nation, Amherst's Bradley said.
As a youth, Beasley was "a voracious reader" who understood the importance of education, his daughter Dolores Beasley said. The son of a Pullman porter and a maid whose formal education didn't extend beyond the primary grades, he became the first in his family to graduate from college, Lincoln University, a historically Black college and university in Missouri.
Beasley's commitment to Black history had a simple yet profound basis, said Alice Yates Banks, one of his American history students at Sumner High School in Kansas City, Kansas, in the early 1960s.
"It was left out of the standard curriculum in schools and he thought not only Black people, but everybody, needed to know the contributions of Black people," she said.
Black history was central to all of Beasley's endeavors, academic and otherwise, said Banks, who later became director of the Black Motivation Training Center, a Kansas City vocational training program he established.
At the training center, amid practical classes about job skills and preparedness programs, there were historical lessons, too. "Anytime you talked to Dr. Beasley, he always intertwined some Black history in there to encourage people to realize their potential," she said.
Actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, whose film credits include “Fences” and “Lincoln,” experienced the teacher’s commitment and talent firsthand in the late 1960s, after graduating from Sumner High School, where he was in Beasley’s history class.
“He knew American history, but he wanted to dedicate a workshop to African American history,” said Henderson, who read relevant poems and monologues from plays along with narratives of enslaved people during workshops conducted throughout Kansas City. “I started out reading the (selections) and then, as time went on, I memorized it and we did pretty good.”
Those workshops, a blend of academics and art, revealed Beasley’s savvy understanding of how to maintain an audience’s interest, especially beyond the formal classroom, Henderson said.
“He was a great lecturer and he knew just when to break it up, with (people’s) attention spans, where he’d just say, ‘OK, now Stephen will do a poem from Margaret Walker called for 'For My People.' ' I remember that one particularly,” said Henderson, who gained both acting experience and tuition money for Lincoln University and New York's Juilliard School.
By the early 1970s, a few years after establishing the Penn Valley Black studies program, Beasley was writing, narrating and hosting “Black History,” a series of short programming segments on 65 television stations and dozens of radio stations that covered everything "from ancient Egypt to Stokley Carmichael." He also was overseeing Kansas City’s Black Motivation Training Center, an organization he had established that offered job readiness as well as academic classes, and serving as Black studies director at Leavenworth.
Kenneth Hamilton, professor and director of ethnic studies history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said Beasley found innovative ways to share Black history, a core part of the American story that so many had not been taught.
“He was a public historian before the term became popular,” said Hamilton, who knew Beasley through the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
A public historian “takes history out to ordinary people in various communities in the tradition of Carter G. Woodson,” who founded the association in 1915, Hamilton said.
After “Trivial Pursuit” became a hot-selling game in the 1980s, Beasley went to work compiling thousands of questions and answers to create “Black Trivia,” which highlighted achievement with such categories as "Accomplishments" and "Black Culture" and could be played on the “Trivial Pursuit” game board.
Even in formal classroom settings, Beasley, who earned his master's degree from Kansas State Teacher's College and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, knew the value of alternative approaches. He supplemented textbooks with Golden Legacy comics, a series that told the stories of such historical Black figures as Frederick Douglass, Crispus Attucks, Joseph Cinqué and Martin Luther King Jr.
Beasley’s four children are proud of their father’s work, which gave them a rich knowledge of Black history and culture, along with a full supply of Golden Legacy comics.
“His whole mission in life was to educate people about Black history. And that’s what he did,” said Donna Beasley Brown, his youngest child.
At home, his intellectual pursuits became learning experiences for his children, who quickly picked up his academic commitment to primary information sources, said Debra Brown, his eldest child. She remembers a group effort in compiling questions and answers for “Black Trivia,” with her father's library full of books flush with yellow Post-it notes. "It was like, 'Go get me that book’ or ‘Debra, look this up and tell me about it.’ I remember it being a family project, as far as gathering information for him.”
Larry Lester, a founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, remembers Beasley’s commitment from his own youth. He “knew something about every subject with regard to Black history. Back then, he had a station wagon and the back was filled with books. It was like a library on wheels,” said Lester, who later enlisted Beasley in the effort to create the Black baseball museum. Beasley served as vice president.
Beasley's Penn Valley students included members of the Black Panthers, Dolores Beasley said. "I remember he came back saying they were pleased he taught them some things they weren't aware of."
Beasley’s son, Edward Beasley III, recalls his father's trips to teach at Leavenworth.
“Dad always believed that knowledge is something that doesn't have boundaries and, therefore, it can't be separated from anybody. Even though you're incarcerated, it doesn't mean you're going to be ignorant. You're going to learn about certain things that will make you be proud of the fact that you are part of something but also make you recognize that ‘I can be much more than what I am,’ ” Edward Beasley III said.
Banks, who assisted Beasley in many of his projects, saw him teach at Leavenworth and Lansing, where he showed respect for the inmates but also had high expectations, as he did for all his students.
"It was interesting to witness how he just mesmerized them with his knowledge and how it seemed to inspire them to study and be prepared for discussions," said Banks, whose husband, the Rev. Jimmie Banks, delivered eulogies for Beasley and his wife, Bessie Chandler Beasley, who died a few months before him in 2019.
Even late in life when the Beasleys were residing at an assisted-living facility, he was still giving lectures, teaching fellow residents about Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman, his daughter Dolores Beasley said.
"I got a kick out of watching him do it," she said. "He always had this thirst for knowledge."
The legacy of Edward Beasley Jr. and his contemporaries can be seen in institutions, such as modern prison education programs, and in the people who continue their educational mission, Bradley said.
“I am the legacy of people like Dr. Beasley. We had an opportunity to study a Black experience in college and university that wouldn’t have been possible had he not, along with so many others, pushed for it on campus and made it available in the community,” Bradley said. “That allowed us to explore a certain kind of knowledge that wasn’t being presented before, at least not in higher education.”
These days, Henderson literally passes along his mentor’s legacy, remembering his first assignment in Beasley's American history class: memorizing the names of all the presidents.
Students didn't understand the purpose of the assignment until Beasley explained the serious underlying reason: Before the Voting Rights Act, which had just been passed, quizzes of that kind were meant to block Black people from voting.
Now, before a vocal recording, “when I do a soundcheck, just saying a few words into the mic, I usually go, ‘Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, …’ " Henderson said. That often leads to questions from younger colleagues and an explanation of the recitation’s historical connection to voting rights, an ever-relevant topic. “I like to spread that.”
Reporter Bill Keveney first learned of the work of Edward Beasley Jr. from his daughter, Dolores Beasley, a friend and former journalism colleague.