If you could open a box filled with pieces of North Omaha's past, what would you find?
Maybe a photograph of a musician who once filled a North 24th Street club with music. A ticket from the legendary Dreamland Ballroom. A photograph of a neighborhood business, church, or community organization. A document showing Black Omahans organizing for jobs and civil rights. Or maybe you would find a familiar name or face and realize that a piece of your own family's story is part of North Omaha history.
Those are the kinds of discoveries waiting inside the archives of the Great Plains Black History Museum.
Opening the Boxes
Through a partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Criss Library, photographs, documents, and other materials collected over decades are being organized and made easier for the public to discover. On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, the public gets a closer look.
The free virtual program “From Rhythm to Rodeos: Stories from the Great Plains Black History Museum Archives” will take visitors inside portions of the collection that have been arranged and described through the museum's partnership with UNO. The program highlights stories involving North Omaha musicians, early Black settlement in the Great Plains, sports, and rodeos.
The North Omaha We Know, and the North Omaha We May Not Know
North Omaha history has names and places many of us immediately recognize — the Dreamland Ballroom, North 24th Street, the DePorres Club, and the churches, businesses, schools, and organizations that became anchors of the community. But an archive allows us to look beyond the familiar names and discover the people who made everyday life in North Omaha possible.
There are musicians whose names may never have appeared in large letters on a marquee. Teachers who introduced generations of children to music. Business owners who opened their doors every morning. Church members and neighborhood organizations that quietly helped families. Veterans who returned home and built new lives. Young people who played sports, joined clubs, cleaned up neighborhoods, and grew into community leaders. Those stories matter, too.
From Dreamland to the Fight for Civil Rights
Some materials already associated with the collection offer wonderful examples. A 1952 ticket advertising Earl Hines and His Famous All Stars at the Dreamland Ballroom opens a window into the thriving music scene that once surrounded North 24th Street. Photographs connected to Florence Pinkston-Mitchell, the influential North Omaha music teacher, offer another glimpse into the community's rich musical tradition.
There are also materials documenting the DePorres Club, the Omaha civil-rights organization that challenged racial discrimination years before many of the best-known events of the national Civil Rights Movement. Photographs show DePorres Club members protesting discriminatory hiring practices at Reed's Ice Cream in 1953. These aren't simply interesting old photographs and papers — they help us see the people behind the history.
It Started With Bertha Calloway
Much of this history is available today because one woman understood that it needed to be saved. Bertha Calloway, founder of the Great Plains Black History Museum, began collecting materials documenting African American history decades ago. She understood something that feels just as important today: if we don't preserve our own stories, pieces of them can disappear.
Calloway and her husband purchased the historic Webster Telephone Exchange Building at 2213 Lake Street in 1975, and the museum formally opened there in 1976. Today, the museum operates from another important North Omaha landmark, the historic Jewell Building at 2221 N. 24th Street, home of the legendary Dreamland Ballroom.
More Than 100 Years of Stories
The archival collection being processed through the partnership with UNO spans approximately 115 cubic feet of material dating from 1870 to 2015. The project is supported by a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives.
Their work is not changing North Omaha's history. It is helping more people find it. Because preserving something is only the first step. People also need an opportunity to see it.
Why Seeing These Items Matters
There is something different about seeing history with your own eyes. Reading that North Omaha once had a thriving music scene is one thing. Seeing a ticket from the Dreamland Ballroom makes that history feel closer. Reading about Black Omahans fighting employment discrimination is important. Seeing photographs of people standing together and demanding change puts faces on that history.
You Don't Have to Wait
You don't have to wait until September 15 to explore Black history. The Great Plains Black History Museum has an online exhibit you can visit anytime, right from home: Black and White in Black and White: Images of Dignity, Hope, and Diversity in America explores the photography of John Johnson, a Black photographer who documented African American life in Nebraska during the early 1900s.
His photographs offer an intimate look at everyday Black life during an era when African Americans were often portrayed through stereotypes or simply left out of the historical record. Instead, Johnson's camera captured people as they lived — families posed together, children played, musicians held their instruments, men and women dressed for portraits, friends and neighbors gathered together. They are photographs of Black people living, learning, working, creating, and building community.
More of North Omaha's Story Is Waiting
That's what makes From Rhythm to Rodeos more than an online history program. It is an invitation to look at North Omaha again. Some names and places may be familiar. Others may send someone searching for a name they recognize. A photograph might lead to a phone call to a grandmother, grandfather, aunt or uncle. Someone might discover that the person in an old photograph attended their church.
Bertha Calloway began preserving these materials because she understood the importance of protecting Black history. Decades later, boxes containing those stories are being opened, organized, and made more accessible to the people whose history they represent. Thanks to the work of the Great Plains Black History Museum, more of those stories are coming out of the boxes and back into the community.
North Omaha's history isn't just something that happened here — it is the story of the people who lived here, worked here, created here, and made this community what it is today.