Nakia Hope-Paul remembers going to visit the Old Quindaro Cemetery ever since she was a little girl.
Her grandmother was buried there, alongside her ancestors who escaped enslavement across the river in Missouri.
Whenever she pays her respects, she admires the Signal Tree, which has stood watch over the cemetery since Quindaro was founded in 1854 in what is now northeast Kansas City, Kansas. Years ago, abolitionists would hang flags on the tree’s branches to warn people at the bottom of the bluffs about slave catchers patrolling the hillside…