While reporting my recent story on Black farmers, I had the chance to learn more about some of the people who founded #Nicodemus, Kansas - the last remaining African American settlement west of the Mississippi.
This is John and Lee Anna Samuels.
📻: hppr.org/hppr-news/2021…
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The Samuels' great-great-great-granddaughter, Angela Bates, was kind enough to share their story with me.
When John and Lee Anna got married, they were enslaved on two different plantations in Kentucky. Bates says John was able to visit Lee Anna two days a week.
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They became separated when Lee Anna's plantation moved to western Missouri. John was later sold to another plantation in Missouri.
Slavery continued in Missouri for two years after the Emancipation Proclamation until the state abolished it in 1865.
3/x stltoday.com/news/local/his…
After emancipation, the Samuels moved to Leavenworth, KS.
In 1879, John organized a group of settlers who headed west to Nicodemus. The railroad didn't go there, so they walked 35 miles from the nearest train stop in Ellis.
"They were made out of some tough cloth.” -Bates
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Along with roughly 150 other Black homesteaders, the Samuels helped establish a 36-square-mile farming town in #westernkansas that was entirely owned, operated and governed by African Americans.
It's still home to some of their descendants today.
📻:hppr.org/hppr-news/2021…
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More than a century later, descendants of the Samuels and other Nicodemus settlers successfully pushed to get the town designated as a historic site with the @NatlParkService.
It's one of only four national historic sites in the state of Kansas.
nps.gov/nico/index.htm
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And John and Lee Anna Samuels' great-great-great-granddaughter, Angela Bates?
She's now the executive director of the Nicodemus Historical Society.
Here she is walking me through some of the archives that she helps maintain in #westernkansas.
📻:hppr.org/hppr-news/2021…
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"As a steward of that history, my responsibility is not only to make sure that we collect it, preserve it and interpret it.
But we need to share it, so the nation will know that there's a place that represents what African Americans did with their freedom."
-Angela Bates
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