BY GARY LI
On Wednesday, February 26th. The Diversity Speaker Series: Children of the Promised Land presentation was held at FHSU’s Forsyth Library.
Executive Director of the Nicodemus Historical Society, Angela Bates, whose ancestors were among the original settlers of Nicodemus in 1877, has devoted much of her career to sharing the history of African American migration and the preservation of history and architecture in Nicodemus.
“I was asked to come and share a Humanities program that’s entitled Children of the Promised Land. It’s about the first and second generation of children actually born free here in Kansas as it relates to it to Nicodemus.” Bates said, “I expounded not only on that in terms of the children and their mothers, what it was like before emancipation as they were dealing with slavery in Kentucky contrasting that with one basic word which is choice and what it was like for them as mothers of these children after emancipation.”
Bates hopes that those in attendance were able to take away a better understanding of what it was like to be a slave in the south as well as what it was like for slave mothers to raise their children in that dynamic before moving to the Kansas area.
“I hope this is students walked away with a better understanding of what it was like to be a slave in Kentucky and how it contrasted to being a slave in the other parts of the south like Mississippi or even the Carolinas where they had huge plantations,” Bates said. “What it was like for the mothers having children born into slavery and all of the dynamics of the social and emotional trauma that they had to deal with during slavery learning about all of that”
The event helped the audience understand the past and present of African American life and gain a deeper understanding of the diversity of social classes.