Show Me the Best: Editor’s Choice
Missourian of the Year
Gary Kremer details how he came to love Missouri history.
Missouri Life’s Missourian of the Year, Gary Kremer, is deeply rooted in Missouri and its history. A fifth generation Missourian, Gary retired as the executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri in 2025, was a professor of women’s studies at Lincoln University and William Woods University, and was the state archivist from 1987 to 1991. Gary, from Frankenstein, has also cowritten 12 books, including Dictionary of Missouri Biography and Race and Meaning: The African-American Experience in Missouri. Let’s discover how this Missouri historian came to love his profession.
Q | WHAT STARTED YOUR HISTORY JOURNEY?
A | I always hated history. I didn’t understand why people should know what dead people did, had no interest in memorizing names, dates, and places. I’m a sociology major, but I wanted to understand why Vietnam was happening and why the riots were occurring, and so I started to read history. I took a couple of history classes. I got hooked on history.
Missouri is my home. These are my roots. There’s very much to be said about understanding the place where you live, and I think that understanding leads to appreciation.
Q | WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PIECE OF MISSOURI HISTORY?
A | I’ve written about all aspects of Missouri history. One of the periods that I’m most interested in is what historians call the Great Migration. That’s the period between the world wars, when African Americans came up out of the South because they could get jobs in the industrial cities of the Midwest and North. And because of my interest in that, I spent a lot of time interviewing hundreds and hundreds of African Americans who were part of that great movement out of the South and out of rural Missouri. I have been deeply moved by those stories of resilience and creativity and determination of people who fought so hard against Jim Crow and endured so much deprivation and disadvantage, if not always overcoming it, at least figuring out a way to deal with it, with integrity and bravery and courage.
Q | WHY DID YOU START WRITING ABOUT MISSOURI HISTORY?
A | I just got used to writing in college, and it seemed to me that there was such a shortage of material about African Americans and women in Missouri that I wanted to try to fill that gap. I’m still not sure I’m a writer.
I do a lot of writing, but I’m not a Faulkner. I’m not a great writer. But I’d like to think that what I have written has contributed to the understanding of the complexity of race and Missouri history.
Q | WHY DO YOU HAVE AN INTEREST IN BLACK AND WOMEN’S HISTORY?
A | I think my original desire to be a social worker was driven by my desire to help marginalized people. One of the first nonfiction books I remember that wasn’t about sports—because I was a sports nut—was Michael Harrington’s The Other America. It became the book that laid out the war on poverty.
I was a child of the ’60s. As a historian, I can recognize many of John Kennedy’s inadequacies, but I still think one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard in my life was his inaugural address in January 1961, when he asked Americans to, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’
As hokey as it might sound, I was inspired by that and really believed in that. Then I transferred my interest in helping marginalized people to studying the history of those marginalized people.
This article was orginally published in the January 2026 issue of Missouri Life.
