The Untold Stories of Utah's Black Citizens
"People kept telling us that there was no Black history in Utah"
Last November, the Utah Monthly had the chance to sit down with Robert Burch, the president of an organization—Sema Hadithi—devoted to telling the story of Black Utahns. Founded in 2020, Sema Hadithi has quickly become an important institution of public history in Utah, a vehicle for the promotion of research and scholarship that might otherwise languish in university libraries or state historical societies. Our conversation with Burch, which has been edited for length and clarity, touches on the creation of Sema Hadithi, some of its most successful projects, and the impact that the organization has had in its five years of existence.
What is Sema Hadithi and what is its goal?
Put simply, Sema Hadithi’s goal is to “tell the story.” That is the literal English translation of that Swahili phrase. I chose that name because as I was working with different Latter-day Saint families in Utah to help them with their genealogy—that was my calling in the Genesis Group—we were finding Black members of the church who had been in Utah since 1847. At the same time, as we were doing events with FamilySearch and other organizations, people kept telling us that there was no Black history in Utah. We were like, we’re finding stories from Wellington, Ogden—really from all over—about these Black people who live in Utah, but people seem to think there’s no Black history. So that was really the main thing, we realized that we needed to help these families tell the story.
My wife Alice took a couple of years to convince me to do this; I did not want to do this. Through being a part of the Genesis Group and helping people do their genealogy, I was automatically a member of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. Before long I was the chapter secretary and then the chapter president and then a national board member. So I was like “I’m on the board of this national organization, why would I go start some non-profit that nobody knows about?” But the more we got out there and started dealing with the people at RootsTech and FamilySearch it just became too obvious that this has to be done—if not us, then who? So we decided to take up the challenge and try to help tell the story of Utah Territory.
As part of your effort to “tell the story” of Black Utahns, what are some specific projects that you’ve worked on?
Right now, we have some pretty huge projects going on. I think we’ve gotten further in four years than we were really expecting. We have the Buffalo Soldier Heritage Trail that we’ve been working on alongside the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, Utah Cultural Site Stewardship Program, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other stakeholders. Together, we are creating a heritage trail of all the places Buffalo Soldiers served in Utah. These are not walking trails. They are heritage trails that have different sites throughout the state where you can learn about the service of soldiers out in Utah Territory after the Civil War.
We also have a program that we hope to continue called Civic Museums, working with Salt Lake County to put historical exhibits in different government buildings around the county. This will include narratives about the Buffalo Soldiers from Fort Douglas as well as Black baseball in Utah. Utah had thirteen Black baseball teams and the Salt Lake Occidentals were the West Coast champions. It’s a huge story that people don’t know about. Once you’re west of the Mississippi, you’re no longer in the Negro Leagues, you’re in the Black Baseball League. So everything west of the Mississippi to California is in the Black Baseball League. Salt Lake City had as many as three baseball teams, Ogden had two, Fort Duchesne had two, Fort Douglas had one—there were thirteen Utah teams in total. Also a part of that black sports consortium was football, boxing, and rodeo, but we’re going to be focusing on the baseball side of it this year.
What exactly is the Buffalo Soldier Heritage Trail?
The Buffalo Soldier regiments were created in 1866, because the United States Army wanted to organize the Black soldiers who had fought in the Civil War into peacetime units. The Ninth Cavalry was the first group of Buffalo Soldiers to enter Utah, and they were stationed at Fort Duchesne. Later, the Twenty-Fourth Infantry was located at Fort Douglas, and between those two units, about twenty to twenty-five percent of all United States Buffalo Soldiers were stationed in Utah. And they would patrol Utah communities. They served in Salt Lake City, but they also patrolled Nine Mile Canyon, Gate Canyon, the roads in between the canyons to Price and Helper.
They were put here in Utah to police the Native American population, but they ended up policing bank robbers and just patrolling the roads. They also tended to the telegraph wires, to make sure that communications stayed open. They set up little stations along the roads to help people in bad weather, they built some of the roads through the canyon—these 250 guys in Duchesne spent a lot of their time outdoors, making sure that the territory between Price, Helper, and Nine Mile Canyon stayed open. So the Buffalo Soldier Heritage Trail highlights those things, from the soldiers at Fort Douglas who end up being the soldiers to capture San Juan Hill, Cuba, to the Strawberry Valley, where the United States Army for the first time put infantry, artillery, and cavalry on the field together for dynamic training. The heritage trail also goes into Fort Duchesne, as well as into different parts of Helper and Nine Mile Canyon and Gate Canyon. So the Buffalo Soldier Heritage Trail is just this huge effort to spotlight and tell the story and interactions of these Black soldiers and how they served throughout Utah.
I know you’re still a relatively young organization, but what has the impact of your organization been so far?
It was very discouraging when we first started. We talked with the city of West Valley and that conversation ended up being more insulting than anything. We told them we were looking for space to create a Black history museum, and they offered us the little space at the end of the hall. So we started trying to rethink—the first thing we realized was that we couldn’t just say that we wanted to tell Black history, we needed to be far more focused. So we chose to focus on the history of Black women, the Black church, Black politicians, and historical preservation. Then we took these ideas and created research groups around each one. And we gave these groups free range to address that topic however they saw fit.
We’ve been very successful with the Black women working group because they were able to work with what was called Better Days 2020 at the time. Better Days wanted to do a mural at Richmond Park, which was a park that Salt Lake City helped create for the Black community. And it was named after Mignon Barker Richmond, the first Black graduate of a Utah college. So they designed that mural and that mural turned into a lot of different things, including a traveling exhibit on Black Utah women and an ongoing conversation with the city of Salt Lake that resulted in a decision to encase the murals we helped create so that they last longer. The city is also going to retell the story of the park to emphasize the fact that Richmond Park was central to Central City, which was once a Black community.
The other big successful thing, which we kind of stumbled into, was that we said we wanted to talk about Utah veterans so that people could see what the Black veterans from Utah looked like. We happened to be at a Juneteenth organization meeting in 2021, and the National Juneteenth Committee decided that they wanted the national theme to be Fathers of Freedom, the Black soldiers of America. So I talked with Betty Sawyer, the director of Project Success, who leads the annual meeting on Juneteenth, and told her that we should create an exhibit. And that ended up being something that everybody loved. We mounted the exhibit for the first time at a Juneteenth town hall meeting in Ogden, but after that the exhibit went to the University of Utah (where it has been at least three times), the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley, the Hyrum City museum, the Uinta Library down in Vernal.
Just to make sure I understood, that really successful exhibit was about Black veterans?
Yes. What we were doing was we were sending out a form to Black veterans saying “fill out this form, we want to get a picture of you as a civilian, in uniform, as a child—any pictures you want to send us—because we want to do a brief profile of you.” Then we put these profiles together, each of them on 11 x 14 inch panels, so that people could see who are the military people who serve America now. But we also wanted to do some historical profiles, so we went to Hill Air Force Base and Fort Douglas and also talked to families to get profiles of deceased veterans all the way back to World War I. So in this collection of veteran profiles, we have entries from as far back as 1886 all the way up to the present day.
Anything else you’d like to add before we close?
We’re continuing to expand and we’re continuing to look for folks who want to help us tell these important stories. Whether you want to help out on the research side or organize an event or even just donate, however folks want to participate, we’re happy to have them onboard. I am also a member of the Utah Board of State History, so I don’t want anyone to think that this is limited to the Black community—we’re a resource for all communities. We have the country’s 250th anniversary coming up in 2026, and the Utah Historical Society is working very hard to collect stories from all the Utah communities, so that we can share them and celebrate them during that anniversary year. So don’t think of Sema Hadithi as just wanting to tell Black stories; we want to tell the stories of all of Utah.