In honor of Black History Month, I would like to share with you a piece of American history that I hold very dearly.  It begins with a road trip I had taken as a child with my family.

At the age of nine, I attended my first “Homecoming” in Nicodemous, Kansas—the town where my father was born.  While homecoming resembled a family reunion, it was so much more.  There, I learned that in 1877, several newly emancipated African Americans from Kentucky placed a bet on themselves and on the American Dream.  As it turns out, I am a descendant of these formerly enslaved Americans, who established the first all-black settlement on the Great Plains.  These early settlers suffered through a brutal winter, where many died.   Some people turned around after seeing the scarcity of resources. Most were extremely poor farmers who came without money and other provisions. A poster stating “ALL COLORED PEOPLE THAT WANT TO GO TO KANSAS CAN DO SO FOR $5.00” hangs proudly in my uncle’s living room today.

The following year in 1878, my Great-Great Grandfather, R.B. Scruggs (whom my father is named after), founded the “Emancipation Celebration” in his grove of trees—later renamed “Homecoming.” By the 1920s, thousands attended the event which consisted of horse races, boxing matches, parades, and baseball games. My father and his siblings spent every summer as children in Nicodemous, which was always capped with Homecoming.

Our family did not make the pilgrimage to Nicodemous every summer.  But when we did, I definitely felt the connection to my lineage. From playing in the same baseball games that my father undoubtedly played as a child, to attending a Saturday evening dance, Homecoming has shaped a part of my core identity.   In 1996, President William Clinton signed the Nicodemus Bill, designating Nicodemus a National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. It is the only remaining all African American town, settled at the end of Reconstruction, west of the Mississippi.

This summer will mark the 134^th Annual Homecoming Celebration, and I look forward to hopefully taking my son there for the first time to experience this mark of history.

R.B. Scruggs, through his enterprising tree farm, was also able to send my great-grandmother to college at what is now Emporia State University, where she studied to become a teacher. Four generations later, I followed in her footsteps and became an educator myself upon graduation.  I am so proud of this lineage and the incredible foresight of my great-great grandfather to mark the historical moment of African American emancipation, and in turn the first all-black pioneer town in the United States.

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