For more than a century – until 1999 – an old Louisiana sugar plantation beside the Mississippi River held a painful secret. Locals knew it as Carville, the only leprosy colony in the continental United States. 

The Kansas City Symphony brings its series of free outdoor chamber concerts to the Library.  

How close are we to ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment? The question hangs anew over Congress. And the courts. Erica Benson, the campaign coordinator for Project 28 MO, a Kansas City-area organization working for ERA ratification, moderates a panel of officials, experts, and ERA activists as they assess the decades-long effort to enact what would be the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enshrining the principle of gender equality in our founding charter.

One hundred years ago this month, women won their fight for the right to vote – though not all of them. Black women, who had pleaded as passionately for suffrage as they did for African Americans’ civil rights, welcomed the 1920 passage and ratification of the 19^th Amendment as only a partial victory. Many Native and Asian Americans and other women of color were not granted citizenship and likewise kept at arm’s length from voting booths. University of Minnesota historian Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu recalls and examines those revealing silences amid the celebration of the landmark constitutional amendment.