Buried Truth

They talked on the phone every day. Johnson says he and Gordon were as much like family as any two unrelated people could be.

"We were supposed to collaborate on a book until he cut grass one afternoon, sat to rest under the shade of a tree and never got up." Miller died of a heart attack.

In 1998, KCI officials gave Johnson permission to dig on the Miller plantation. The Missouri Department of Natu­ral Resources' Historic Preservation Program supplied funding for the project. Johnson dedicated the work to the memory of his friend. A handful of Boy Scouts helped him unearth artifacts. Among the items recovered from the Miller root cellar was a handmade iron bolt that could have been used to tie up horses — or slaves.

According to Johnson's report, after Washington escaped, Jesse Miller chained his remaining slaves in the cellar at night in order to avoid losing any more. After the war, Miller tried through the federal courts to recover $500 compensation for his runaway; it's not known whether he collected.

Now, nearly 10 years after Johnson's work at the Miller plantation, he has returned to excavate the area that Kimsey is sure is the slave cemetery. She says she knows because old-timers who were raised in the area told her about it.

Kimsey recalls one elderly man whom people called "Red." She once argued with him over a Platte City proposal to move the courthouse. One day he came to her shop and said, "Shirley, I know we're not always in agreement, but there's one thing I know we will be in agreement on, and that is, down by where I live and where I was raised, there is a slave cemetery, and I don't ever want to see it destroyed." She says he showed her the place on her cemetery map and marked it with a pin.

"There is something about that slave cemetery," Kimsey says. "People who lived in that area have a protective feeling about it. And I don't know why. Maybe they felt guilty about it. Not being proper headstones and such as that."

Another person felt protective of the slave cemetery: Gordon Miller's son, Olin Miller, who took over the family insurance business on Main. Miller helps care for the Miller-Rixey Cemetery, one of the four cemeteries at the airport, and he learned how to dowse for graves from Kimsey.

In May 2006, the Aviation Department notified descendents, including Olin Miller, of the city's intention to move four cemeteries. When Kimsey suggested that the racetrack might also threaten an unmarked slave cemetery, Miller pulled together a search party.

Last February, Miller and his crew visited the Brightwell Cemetery, a tiny, fenced pioneer graveyard on airport property where several tall obelisks date back more than 100 years. "We went out and walked the fence line where they said the cemetery was located. We walked that fence line 400 yards ... at the bottom of the hill, we started finding red granite rocks. Three of us pulled out witching irons and walked the area, grave-dowsing, and began locating graves, and many of them had red-granite rocks at the head of the grave. We had what appeared to be three rows of graves, but the area was so overgrown with small trees and shrubs, even though it was the dead of winter, we had to walk deer paths and cattle paths to get through it."

They thought they'd found about 80 graves. That got Olin Miller thinking. "How many descendents are there, of slaves in the area, who have no idea that they're related?" he says. "Back then, slaves were not schooled. They marked their names with an X if they had to sign. So other than having a few records of a slave owned as collateral or property, recorded in the 1840, 1850 or 1860 census, there's no clue, no church records, nothing to fall back on. Anything prior has to come from what grandparents told parents."

He wanted to somehow notify African-Americans all over Kansas City, in case their families' oral traditions hinted at relatives buried in Platte County.

Miller called the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center in Kansas City, a museum dedicated to the African-American experience and named for Warren Watkins' late uncle Bruce, who in the 1960s was the first black politician to serve on the City Council. A secretary connected Miller with Warren Watkins, who started looking for other descendents.

One other thing was bothering Miller.

"Not until the city filed their lawsuit did we really, formally learn exactly what they wanted to do," he says. "They never would specifically state why they wanted to move the cemeteries, except for the general welfare of the city of Kansas City. When we found out it was for a racetrack — we don't have a Porsche 560 we can go out here and race. We have a car we're content to buy gas for and wondering how to buy the next round of gas. Now these folks want to put a gentlemen's racetrack out here, which most of us will never have the opportunity to set foot on."

Mark VanLoh, the director of the Aviation Department, says the racetrack is good for the city. "They're [FastTrack Group LLC] paying us rent," he tells The Pitch. "They took the land as is. It's a lot of rent, too — if I recall, it's approaching $300,000 a year. It's a pretty brilliant plan, I think, for raw land."