Preserving Nicodemus

FRED de SAM LAZARO: The Kansas plains are filled with the lore of pioneers who, in the mid-1800s, laid the foundation of what would become America's bread basket. Less well known is the smaller wave of newcomers for whom the journey meant something more.

ANGELA BATES: It really represents African American experience in the west, leaving war-torn, volatile... (humorless laugh) Jim Crow South,and coming to experience real freedom.

SAM LAZARO: Historian, Angela Bates's ancestors were among an exodus of freed slaves who left the South in the years following the Civil War. Nicodemus was one of several all-Black settlements that sprung up across the U.S.

BATES: It was a dream before even Martin Luther King was born. And so it was a dream that actually became a reality.

SAM LAZARO: Despite grinding poverty in a harsh climate, Bates says they forged a community here. It was a hard life building a town here, right? 

BATES: It was for any pioneer, no matter what color you were. But for the African American that had endured slavery, I say it was easier. They had a choice, and so even though the hardships of living in holes in the ground, which were called dugouts, that was better than living in an environment where you had no choice. 

SAM LAZARO: By the early 1880s, Nicodemus had a population of about 500. It had a bank, a post office, and several businesses and was poised for more growth, anticipating that the railroad would soon come through, the equivalent in those days of a town being hooked up to the internet for the first time. Alas, the railroad decided to lay its rails just a few miles to the south of this town.

BATES: As soon as the railroad bypasses your town, your economic viability is definitely in question. And then Nicodemus started to decline.

SAM LAZARO: That was the fate of other all Black towns, most absorbed into larger municipalities, or simply abandoned as residents migrated in search of work. For those who stayed on here in the decades that followed, life was a struggle, as it was for Black farmers across the country who were largely excluded from critical government lending and price support programs.

So, all this prairie land, all this... all this farm land here was Black owned at one point?

JOHNELLA HOLMES: At one point, all of it.

SAM LOZARO: And now?

HOLMES: Maybe about 10% of it?

SAM LAZARO: Johnella Holmes is director of the Kansas Black Farmers Association. 

HOLMES: You know, most of them that had to give up their land and their farm, they didn't walk away with a nest egg. 

SAM LAZARO: What is the condition of Black farmers today?

HOLMES: Dismal, they're still losing acres. They're still walking away from their farming. The, the parents are no longer encouraging the, the children to go ahead and assume the debt and, you know, and continue to farm.

SAM LAZARO: Much of Nicodemus lies in ruin today, but for Holmes and others who call themselves descendants, there's something special about this place. That's why Holmes moved back after retiring from her job at Kansas State University.

BATES: Both my parents grew up here.

SAM LAZARO: Angela Bates grew up in Pasadena, California, but like her parents, felt the tug. 

BATES: And so when they moved away, they always came back because this is home, home being our own, all-Black town. And very proud of that.

SAM LAZARO: In the '90s, Bates led a campaign that successfully designated Nicodemus as a national historic site, memorializing the little-known Black pioneer experience. As school children come on field trips, and others gather for annual homecoming days held in the summer, they get a different take on Black history.

BATES: Too often, we look at slavery, and as we look back, we... all we see are the atrocities. But out of that came great things. It created greatness in people and tenacity in people. And so what they were doing out here on the isolated high plains of Kansas was phenomenal. I'm proud of that legacy. It runs in my veins and it just makes me feel that the world needs to know the story.

SAM LAZARO: Out of a history defined by struggle, Bates says she wants to create a future that can inspire hope.