What's Emancipation Got to do With It?

The Hutchinson Emancipation Day Committee is putting on a program entitled ‘What’s Emancipation got to do With It?' on February 17, 2025 from 2:00-8:00 pm, at Memorial Hall, 101 S. Walnut.  This program is to celebrate Black History Month.  There will be speakers, dinner and music.

This program ambitiously sets out to begin to answer this proposition from the multiple lenses of local, state, national, and even international historical perspectives.  many questions are begged, and many answers resound.

Shy do we celebrate Emancipation Day on the First of August in Kansas?  In Hutchinson?  In Nicodemus?  Where Else?  What do the Negro Baseball Leagues have to do with Emancipation Day celebrations?  Can an answer here help provide an answer to the previous set of questions?  How can we contribute to the emerging body of research that is setting historical records straight?

What lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of Black farmers in Kansas?  How do those lessons in perseverance through heartbreak speak to the kind of leadership required in the current day?  How have our Black communities produced a tradition of leadership that insists upon the maintenance of the Emancipation Celebrations?  Can an answer be found in the legacy of the Pan-African Flag?

Can a revival of understanding the origins of our Emancipation Day Celebrations help us regain perspective on the truths of our intersectional, interdependent, abolitionist lives as Americans?  As surely as abolitionism created the American ideals most Americans care about, those ideals have fallen so short and so far that we have to be reminded of their foundation.

This we intend to do.  Please join us!