Traveling Exhibit - Panels

 

Brown v. Board of Education - In Pursuit of Freedom & Equality - Traveling Exhibit
   
Panel 3 - Seeking Liberation in the Promised Land
 The desire for better schooling motivated many African Americans to settle in Kansas during and after the Civil War. Unlike the South, white public opinion in Kansas favored schooling for African Americans.

Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society

KANSAS EMANCIPATION LEAGUE FRIENDS OF IMPARTIAL FREEDOM, Leavenworth, 1862
Established in Leavenworth in 1862, this interracial organization provided supplies to African Americans who came to Kansas during the Civil War. Teacher and civil rights activist, Charles Langston (1817-1892), an African American, served as Secretary of the League.

The settlers of Nicodemus, an African American frontier town, founded the first school in Graham County, Kansas about 1880.


Initiated by Quakers, Dunlap Academy was a mission school established for the African American settlement in Morris County, Kansas in the 1870's.
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society.

  
Migration to Kansas, Harper's Weekly, 1862.
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society.

The first stops for refugees were Union Army camps where some schooling was provided. Migration increased the African American population in Kansas from 627 in 1860 to over 17,000 by 1870.


Pupils assembled outside the African American public school in Leavenworth, Kansas, 1878.
Courtesy Kansas State Historical Society.

To raise funds for a vocational school for African Americans in Columbus, Kansas, Quaker preacher and missionary, Elizabeth Comstock sold this photograph.
Courtesy Kansas Collection, University of Kansas Libraries.