Local Historian Catalogs 'Kansas City CALL' Archive

Phil Dixon covered the 1985 World Series for The Kansas City CALL. In fact, he covered all the games that year and in the years that followed. His contract amounted to no more than a handshake with the paper’s owner and publisher, Lucile Bluford. 

“We had a deal, and the rest is history,” Dixon says. 

Forty-one years later, he’s making his mark on that “history” in another way. Dixon is cataloging the paper’s long-inaccessible materials archive for the Library. 

The CALL was one of 22 newspapers published by Kansas City’s Black community when it launched in May 1919, and the only one that remained in print for long.  

It did more than survive; The CALL became one of the largest and most important Black newspapers in the nation and continues today to represent and advocate on behalf of the interests of Black Kansas Citians. 

Since 2023, the Library — and every Library patron — has had access to the entire collection of digitized microfilm through ProQuest. 

The online database of The CALL’s newspaper archive includes articles and photographs dating to the newspaper’s founding in 1919, covering the Civil Rights era, Black businesses, sports, entertainment, and military service, and culture. 

In 2025, the Library took responsibility for the physical archive, which is made up of decades’ worth of photos, letters, and other print matter. Each item requires a fair bit of research so that he can describe and categorize it appropriately. 

And, he says, “The CALL is broader than I think anyone ever imagined.”

For him, that means that the more he works on it, the more he’s begun finding connections between the archival materials and the rest of his life.

For instance, before he accepted the position at the Library, he’d planned a trip to Ghana. 

“Well, when I started going through The CALL’s files, I found the first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah,” Dixon says. 

“[In the photo] he was meeting with a guy who built a dam in Tennessee, in a river. Nkrumah wanted to create a dam in the Volta River in Ghana. Then when I went to Ghana, I was on the lake where the dam was built. It's like my history meets reality.” 

Six months into the project, after handling hundreds and hundreds of items, he’s begun to see his old editor a little differently.

It’s not only that she was extremely careful with the physical collection in a time before digital publishing, Dixon says, but her selection of what to publish and hang onto afterward showed great curatorial clarity. 

“This is more than just Kansas City history,” he says. “It's American history. It's international. It's every aspect of life: college life, high school life, political life, sporting life, community life, church life. It's everything, and for that I think she's the greatest collector I've ever seen.”

In addition to once having written for The CALL, Dixon is a cofounder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, a historian, public speaker, and author of nine books, mostly about baseball. 

When he saw that the Library was looking for someone to work on the paper’s archives, he jumped at the chance.

“It's an exciting opportunity. If you love history, it's like going to a museum every day and learning every day,” Dixon says.

What’s more, he says he feels like it’s his personal mission to pick up where Bluford left off. As a great student of history who’s about to turn 70, he’s uniquely positioned to do that.

“I know the end story to a lot of these people. I'm able to tell that end story, so I'm able to see the full person, you know, their life's achievements,” he says. “So I feel like I'm completing her work.”

Dixon’s project is still in its early stages and is projected to be available to the public in late 2027. Once complete, his findings will deepen and broaden the existing CALL collection and strengthen it as a leading resource for anyone researching Black history and culture locally, nationally, or internationally.

Lucile Bluford Day is July 1. Stop by the Bluford Branch for a free celebration.