Blind City Podcast, a grassroot movement dedicated to discussions surrounding the Black and Brown communities, is holding a summit on human trafficking in St. Louis. The Sister Call to Action Summit will be held at Emerson Performing Arts Center at Harris-Stowe State University on Thursday, March 16, at 6 p.m. and will feature a live podcast hosted by Langford Cunningham, the creator of Blind City Podcast. A former teacher and counselor at the Juvenile Center in St. Louis, Cunningham will speak with friends and local organizations such as the Healing Action, which deals strictly with human trafficking victims, and Community of Hope, which helps young mothers in need of clothes for their children and themselves. During Cunningham’s interviews with the guests, there will also be opportunities for students and community members to ask questions, and local artist Asiaa Marie is scheduled to perform.
“The only way you can create change is to be ready to change yourself and change your community.” Cunningham says. Since 2007, the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which helps connect victims and survivors of sex and labor trafficking with services, has received 6,166 signals and identified 1,542 cases of human trafficking in the state of Missouri alone. In 2021, there were 240 cases identified involving 327 total victims.
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“[The Sister Call to Action Summit] is to bring women together to talk about the issue of human trafficking—these missing women, minority women in St. Louis—that hasn’t been getting much immediate attention,” Cunningham says. “There’s been a lot of women out of Berkeley, Missouri, that have been missing since 2002…I want to alert [people] to those two things that we’ve dealt with in our community, minority women being murdered and being abducted. I want to shed light on it.”
Cunningham originally began podcasting to keep his mind busy and fight against his depression after losing his sight to glaucoma. His passion for aiding others in desperate situations has helped grow Blind City into a program that’s broadcast in Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, and Georgia. Between the podcast’s growing success and the summit, Cunningham hopes his work will bring real change to the community.
“You don’t have to be from that community to help out,” says Cunningham. “This is about humanity. We all need to make a change. All the communities that have the resources should be able to help the communities that don’t have as many resources. We need to put the word neighbor back into our community.”
