Welcome to the Park of the Week Newsletter for April 18, 2024. This week’s park celebrates the oldest remaining African American town west of the Mississippi River.
Nicodemus National Historic Site
Location
Graham County, Kansas, United States
Claim to fame
Nicodemus, Kansas is a town originally built by African Americans who migrated from other states–predominantly in the South–after the end of Reconstruction. Blacks then were being terrorized by racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and with the end of Reconstruction they feared for their safety.
Nicodemus was founded to provide African Americans with not only safety but also opportunities they didn’t have in the South, like economic, religious, and educational freedoms. But building a new town on the prairie was not easy. Originally the townsfolk built their homes out of the earth, digging burrows, as there was no wood nearby.
The earliest residents had few tools or supplies, and life was difficult. Yet they persevered, beginning to farm their own land and build a community. Later settlers brought more funds, and the community became self-sufficient, eventually growing into a thriving town, at one time home to hundreds.
Reason to visit
Nicodemus National Historic Site maintains a visitor center, park bookstore, and five historic structures that were integral to the spirit of the town. The five buildings–two churches, house/hotel, town hall, and school–were built by hand by town residents. Each represents a kind of freedom–religion, education, business-ownership, home-ownership, and community–that African Americans had been denied in the places they left behind. These freedoms became in many ways the five pillars of the African American community.
Though small (only 14 people were counted in the 2020 census), the town of Nicodemus has a large footprint in the story of self-determination, hard-work, and hope of the African American people. The town still hosts a yearly celebration of Emancipation form slavery, called Homecoming.
Wild Fact
At the time Nicodemus was first conceived, Kansas was famous for its battles over slavery prior to the US Civil War, a period known as Bleeding Kansas. Here abolitionist John Brown rose to national fame after leading skirmishes in Kansas to secure it as a free state, including some that killed pro-slavery activists. This racial violence was a precursor to that of the Civil War.
Abolitionists won out, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state. It would continue to be seen as a place of hope and pro-Black activism, drawing migrants like those who built Nicodemus and later being the site of the lawsuit that would end the racial segregation of US schools: Brown v. Board of Education.
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