Hannibal’s Invisibles

October 23, 2025

A new book unearths Black history in America’s hometown.

We find ourselves living in an era where documenting even the most banal moments is as effortless as pulling devices from our pockets and pressing a button; perhaps that is why history as a discipline seems to have turned its gaze to the unremembered and the overlooked in recent years. Alongside the studies of conflicts, heroic figures, and crises, scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, David Graeber, and David Wengrow have produced portraits of much more obscure events with their books Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and The Dawn of Everything. Compared to Napoleon or Queen Elizabeth, the lives depicted in these history books may seem quite humble, but the argument put forward in each of these remarkable texts is that they are not necessarily less influential.

Along the same lines as the aforementioned titles comes another study of an unremembered community: that of Hannibal’s Black population. Hannibal’s Invisibles, which came out recently from Belt Publishing, chronicles in photos and through painstaking research that included oral and textual records, the history of a community that has played a marquee role in shaping the town they called home. Despite being upward of a quarter of the town’s population at certain times throughout its history, the story of Hannibal’s Black community, as the book’s title implies, has gone overlooked.

Luckily, Hannibal resident and author G. Faye Dant has cast a light on this hidden history. The book features photographs from personal family collections, as well as journalistic sources like the Missouri Photo Workshop. As you’d expect from these varied sources, the photographs range from casual portraits to expertly composed works of art. While the visuals help illustrate the community’s history—including moments both joyful and painful, ordinary and extraordinary—the text oscillates between the specific stories of the individuals in the pictures and the more general lives of Black Hannibal residents. All along, the author writes in first person and details not just the stories she uncovered but how she went about uncovering them. The reader becomes a sort of passive observer to her research process, which is illustrative both because of the wealth of information she manages to find, as well as the dearth of formal research channels at her disposal.

G. Faye Dant’s diligent efforts are commendable. It should also be pointed out that her work extends beyond the page to Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center in Hannibal, where she serves as executive director. The center is a museum of African American history and explores the lives of Hannibal’s Black residents (as well as the anti-racist advocacy of the town’s most notable resident, Mark Twain). Missouri is a region of the country that is often overlooked in the cultural imagination. It’s a thrilling prospect to have our state’s hidden histories unearthed and its forgotten stories told at last. Let’s hope that Hannibal’s Invisibles inspires similar projects in every corner of Missouri.

HANNIBAL’S INVISIBLES
By G. Faye Dant, 208 pages, nonfiction, Belt Publishing, hardcover (7 by 9.9 inches), $28.

This book review was originally printed in the October 2024 issue of Missouri Life.