Marie-Antoinette Sintim

To North Omaha, A Reclamation

The history of Black people is etched everywhere in Omaha; you feel it before anything else, much
like the feeling of walking into a room and knowing you have been the topic of conversation, that
your presence was there while you were elsewhere. Driving through Omaha, I had that same
sense—that I had walked into a room where we had always been a part of the conversation,
sometimes in our absence. I had the deepest sense that history was just as alive as the trees in the
earth, etched into the sky, and had become the arbiter of what was possible and what could be. The
past had been left to dictate the possibilities of the present; all the while, some things had become
stuck in there, remnants of the past’s perpetuity.

In the late 1880s, at the beginning of American Reconstruction, Omaha became a clarion call for
migrants and immigrants alike: African Americans fleeing the Reconstruction South, Italians, Jewish
people, and Eastern Europeans—all were ready to rebuild and realize their dreams. In the
possibilities of this era, Black communities opened grocery stores, pharmacies, offices, dental
practices, law firms, and churches, formed political and social leagues, and created a Black mecca to
achieve what had been denied to them for so long by this country. This occurred alongside other
migrants who were aiming to rebuild as well. As history has taught us, what cannot be celebrated by
all will somehow, someway, be attempted to be crushed by a few.

Omaha was not immune to the racist fervor that charged through the United States in the early 20th
century. In 1919, a white mob stripped, beat, lynched, and tossed Will Brown, a 41-year-old African
American laborer, into a bonfire, after being identified as a “suspicious negro” in connection to a
rape and assault of a white woman. The mob was hellbent on destroying more than Will’s body. It
wanted to terrorize the Black people who had made a home there. To protect the African American
community, they were relegated to a few blocks. What followed was decades of being relegated and
segregated to certain parts of the city, and what was once an unofficial policy for the means of
protection became redlining for the means of divestment and neglect.

What the city did was more than just stop investing in infrastructure in North Omaha; it ceased
investing in the spaces of possibility for people—churches, parks, hospitals, schools, sidewalks,
businesses, homes. Up and down 24th Street stand emblems of that neglect: abandoned lots,
boarded-up buildings, the possibility that drew so many to Omaha, stuck in the ashes of the past.

As palpable as the history was, the sense of possibility was also present. There are stewards of this
possibility. Ms. Nancy, affectionately referred to by everyone who knows her, poured that
stewardship into No More Empty Pots, an organization in North Omaha dedicated to nourishing
people and the community, built on the foundational belief that food can be a gateway to healing,
repair, and transformation. Hearing Ms. Nancy speak about the emotional generosity that emerges
when food becomes nourishment and transcends mere subsistence is like watching a vision being
constructed in real time. This vision has led to the expansion of No More Empty Pots to include a
greenhouse with the sole aim of producing organic produce for community members, beginning to
nourish the people from the inside out.

The potential that Ms. Nancy has felt since moving to Omaha has always been in the air; they are the
fissures of that same sense of possibility that drew migrants and immigrants here centuries ago. Call
it remnants of the buildings that once stood on North 24th, or embers of ancestral dreams, but it’s
still here. It fuels the work and the desire to keep showing up, to remind people that the creation of
a community is a shared vision and that they, too, matter in its formation.

That conviction that people matter is embedded in every aspect of Heart Ministry, which is designed
and built as a space of care, not charity. People aren’t just handed bags of food and sent away; they
shop for their food and navigate the aisles as they would in a grocery store. I remember being
younger and visiting food pantries with my family, shrouded in shame and aware that, to receive, we
needed to abandon any sense of choice, dignity, and assume a hollowed-out existence of
unmeasured gratitude. At Heart Ministry, people are not expected to be grateful for what is given;
choice isn’t sacrificed for grace because food and access involve something different— a reordering
of how we practice care and how we give.

As much as parts of Omaha felt concave to history, everyone I spoke to—those born here, raised
here, those who came and never left, and those who left and returned—had, in their own way, heard
the reverberations of that call of possibility. You don’t stay in a place unless you believe in it, unless
you love it enough to witness its magnificence. I believe that’s why so many Black people and
immigrants across this country have remained in places that seek to hollow out communities. We’ve
heard echoes of that same possibility, we believe in the work to make possible what is now, what is
present — in the air, in the trees, and in the earth. Remaining, rebuilding, recreating, and redesigning.
These are acts of restoration, not just of buildings, but of people, of community, and of possibility.