Portrait by Lois Ingrum, 2023
Angela da Silva is a St. Louis-based cultural preservationist, independent historian, educator, playwright, performer, and pioneer of Black history tourism, launching the National Black Tourism Network in 1998. Born in Missouri in 1954, she grew up in a semi-rural area in St. Charles County. Descended from slaves on both sides of her family, she credits her interest in Black history to her elders’ stories about their lives that held her attention. Ms. da Silva’s mother’s ancestors were enslaved in the central part of Missouri, and her father’s in the greater St. Louis region.
Ms. da Silva’s paternal grandmother was raised by her grandmother who had been a slave in Missouri. “When I was 10 or 11 years old, we were hanging up sheets one day, and she told me the story of her grandmother getting a beating from her Mistress for not getting the sheets white enough. Upon my questioning, she told me white people used to own us.” This was the first time Ms. da Silva had ever heard of slavery. But she became hooked and, once in college, it became her passion to learn the truth about Black history and to educate others. She reminds people that though many consider Missouri to be the Midwest, it is in fact the upper South and slavery continued here throughout the Civil War and even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Ms. da Silva earned a B.A. in Business Management at Webster University in 1978 and an M.A. in Education at Lindenwood University in 2010, with an emphasis on historic interpretation. She went on to teach at Lindenwood as an adjunct professor in two departments, American Studies (2010-2014) and Recreation, Sport and Tourism Administration (2015-2022). Now retired from Lindenwood, she continues her work as a playwright and performer, and as a longtime educator in the Grace Hill Federal AmeriCorps Program.
Ms. da Silva’s public preservation work began in 1979 when she co-founded the Deep Morgan Neighborhood Arts Council in St. Louis. Its initial purpose was to bring to light lesser-known aspects of Black culture and history, and its first project was to save a historic home down the street from where Scott Joplin lived. The Council was the first to bring Juneteenth to St. Louis in the 1980s. Since then, as a consultant on numerous statewide and national projects, Ms. da Silva has conducted archival research and written cultural inventories that uncover forgotten or little-known Black histories.
Known for her innovations in live performance as a form of historical interpretation, Ms. da Silva staged a re-enactment of a mid-19th century slave auction on the steps of the Old St. Louis Court House in 2011, a performance Ta-nehisi Coates wrote about in The Atlantic. Over 100 re-enactors participated in the mock-auction, the first event of Missouri’s Civil War Sesquicentennial commemorations. In contrast to other events across the South that year, which emphasized “states’ rights” as the cause of the conflict, da Silva created this re-enactment as an educational event foregrounding slavery as the central issue of the war.
Ms. da Silva founded the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing Celebration in 2002, an annual commemorative reenactment of significant figures and episodes in Missouri’s history that is staged at the Mary Meachum Underground Railroad Historic Site located along the Mississippi Riverfront. She is the longtime Tourism/Interpreting Director for this federally designated site that is part of the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom.
Since 2001, Ms. da Silva has given hundreds of presentations of “Lila: The Life of a Missouri Slave,” performing the stories of an enslaved woman named Lila, a composite character she developed based on slave narratives and other sources. She created this performance as a way to teach slavery history to children in schools, as well as to audiences of all ages in libraries, churches, and at historic sites. Each performance is followed by a question-and-answer session that is also performed in character. Since 2007, Ms. da Silva has been a living history interpreter at the Historic Boone Home in Defiance, Missouri, where she performs as “Lila.”
In 1991 Ms. da Silva wrote and produced a stage production titled “The St. Louis Attitude.” It captures the history of St. Louis in the 1890s through the stories of two real-life female legends, in a part of St. Louis that would set the stage for how America would spend its leisure time. It showcases music composed by itinerant Black musicians that was uniquely America’s music, although they never received the credit they were due.
For the Central Missouri African American Initiative, since 2012 Ms. da Silva has collected oral histories of rural African Americans to document their culture. In 2003 she conducted a Cultural Inventory of Black History in 60 counties in Illinois. At the national level, in 2001, she worked with the White House/Department of Commerce Millennium Trails Project to create cultural tourism experiences marketed internationally, and was invited to the White House to participate in the Business Roundtable on Africa Trade Policy to share her tourism development work on both continents. Also in 2001, she conducted research for the Federal Highways Scenic Byways Program leading to the federal designation for Highway 79 “Little Dixie Highway of the Great River Road.” She is a past president of the Missouri Organization for the Recognition and Recording of Ethnic Heritage (2000-2005). Since 2016 she has served on the LinkSTL, Inc., Development Board.
Ms. da Silva’s contributions to the community were honored by the Mayor of St. Louis with an “Angela da Silva Day” proclamation, on February 7, 1992, that cited her “commitment to the growth of the arts in the St. Louis community,” including as a playwright.
For her contributions to the development and marketing of Missouri’s Black heritage and for championing emerging interest in ethnic travel, she received the 2012 APEX Lifetime Achievement Award from Black Meetings and Tourism magazine. In 2015, she received one of the State of Missouri’s top honors, the Governor’s Pathfinder Award from the Missouri Division of Tourism, recognizing her instrumental role in laying the groundwork for Black Heritage Tourism in the state.