“Why would a white person want to visit a black history museum?” I asked Phyllis Bass, director of the Richard Allen Cultural Center in Leavenworth, Kan. It was a rhetorical question, and as with everything I asked, she was ready with an answer.

Although the center was built in 1992 and it’s right on Fourth Street, one of the main streets in town, this was my first time here. It’s named after Richard Allen, the minister who founded the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1816. The local AMEC church, once part of the underground railroad in the 1800s, is the group that started the museum.

There are numerous artifacts and photos. Some are uplifting, such as a case devoted to Colin Powell, the four-star general who is credited with requesting a Buffalo soldier memorial in town, and a display on the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate degree back in the 1800s. But some are very disturbing: The thick leg chains worn by a slave; photos of black men hanging by the neck from trees; and a photo taken in 1933 of hundreds of Klu Klux Klan members walking down the middle of Delaware Street in Leavenworth.

“When people come in here, Caucasians, they begin to apologize. I say, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t need to apologize,’” Mrs. Bass says. “This was in this country, but it’s not here now. But you’ve got to look at it to know you never want it back again.”

Mrs. Bass is a diminutive 82-year-old, but when she talks, her voice is like that of powerful preacher. That’s because she didn’t learn a script about what’s in this museum, she lived it.

“I used to hate white folks. By the time I was 9 years old, I was ashamed of who I was from the way they taught us and treated us,” she says. “They called us (names) and everything else. You couldn’t get a job. You had to go in the back door, and you couldn’t get a decent job. It didn’t matter what kind of education you got, you weren’t going to get it.”

She shows me an 1860 tallow light on display that was stolen from a plantation by a slave when he was 11 years old. A photo of the plantation hangs next to it. The slave went on to graduate from medical school in 1878, she says. A pistol and the sock it was stored in is displayed below the tallow light. It was used to scare the Klan away from killing his family, she explains.

“It (the gun) stayed in that sock for years,” Mrs. Bass says. “It has been passed to the fourth generation of doctors. The first was the runaway slave. Then his son became a doctor, then his son became a doctor. And (then there’s) my son.”

The former slave’s name was Dr. John Silo Bass, her husband’s grandfather.

A man named Staff Johnson, whom friends called a pack rat, is credited with donating most of the original artifacts to the museum. His family came to Leavenworth in 1855, one year after the town was created. It was his grandfather who helped found the Leavenworth AMEC church. When it structurally gave way, turning into piles of rubble, he saved nine of the 10 pieces of the cornerstone, which is on display. It’s dated 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was buried.

A photo of a white woman, Joy Kozak, hangs on one of the walls in the museum, and Mrs. Bass says it will never come down. That’s because when the museum was struggling to renovate, she came to the rescue with help and money. Mrs. Bass hopes people of all races can learn from this.

“What I tell people is if you knew me, you might like me. But we don’t take the time to know the person,” Mrs. Bass says. “It’s just as wrong for me as a black person to hate you as it is for you to hate me. Both of us are going to hell if that’s the case.”

As for the answer to why anybody should visit this museum, here is the famous, yet haunting, quote she likes to give: “A nation or race of people who refuses to learn of its past is soon doomed to relive it.”

The museum is located at 412 Kiowa St., in Leavenworth and is open from 1 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. Admission is $5. For more information on tours and exhibits at the museum, visit richardallenculturalcenter.info or call (913) 682-8772.

Sylvia Anderson can be reached at sylvia.anderson@newspressnow.com. Follow her on Twitter: @SJNPAnderson.