LECTURE RECALLS THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE OF CITY

When 83-year-old Elner Miller was a young woman, she and her friends often went out to a Water Street restaurant they called Mary Ben, which also had dancing upstairs, or to George Bollinger's restaurant on Good Hope Street, which specialized in fish.

Mary Ben and Bollinger's were two of many African American-owned businesses that thrived on Water and Good Hope streets during the first half of the century, when segregation created two separate societies and parallel economies.

Those businesses are gone now. Ironically, it was integration that did them in, says Michael Sterling, president of the Cape Girardeau branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"Black people started deciding, `We'll go to white businesses to spend our money,'" he said. "Black businesses lost business."

Tonight, Bernice Coar-Cobb, an associate professor in the College of Education at Southeast Missouri State University, will lead Miller, Sterling and others in a discussion of Cape Girardeau's African American heritage. The Bicentennial Lecture Series event will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Crisp Hall on the university campus.

Much of the early experience of blacks in Cape Girardeau is largely an oral history kept alive by the community's elders. "We could not find that many recorded pieces of information," Coar-Cobb said.

That is one reason she has tape-recorded the recollections of the participants in tonight's discussion. "We want to begin (to assemble) pictures and text ... and have them become part of the archives," she said.

Miller, who did domestic work before she retired, remembers the city's first black mail carrier, whose name was Will Lowan. And she recalls shopping at Simon's Grocery Store on Good Hope Street. Other memories:

George Williams was an auxiliary policeman who cooked at St. Vincent's college and made ice cream cakes for the I. Ben Miller ice cream shop on Broadway.

There were two African American physicians, a Dr. Laurie who dates back to about 1919 in Miller's memory, and a Dr. Fingal who came later.

Miller's surname marks her a member of one of Cape Girardeau's oldest African American families, along with the Abernathys, Joneses, Sherwoods, Lees and Rosses.

Some are names, Sterling says, that slaves adopted from their owners when they were set free. Tonight, he will talk about the history of slavery in Cape Girardeau County, which in 1820 had the state's third-largest slave population 1,082.

"Cape Girardeau County was a safe haven for slave owners," Sterling says.

The mayors who served Cape Girardeau from its incorporation in 1843 until the Civil War all were slaveholders, Sterling says.

His own ancestors were slaves in Cape Girardeau County, Sterling says.

The legacy of slavery remains, Sterling contends, in a passivity that still can be found within the city's black community. "A lot of older people passed that down from generation to generation," he said.