June 2022 Meeting Summary

At our dinner meeting on June 15th, Mr. Gary Jenkins, former Intelligence Unit detective with the Kansas City Police Department, gave a very interesting presentation titled: "Freedom Seekers: Stories from the Western Underground Railroad."

Mr. Jenkins told how Kansas abolitionists established a series of safe houses from Kansas, north through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and around Lake Michigan, to Detroit and across to safety in Ontario, Canada.

Mr. Jenkins discussed the regional issues relating to antebellum slavery and the antislavery movement that helped shape the western Underground Railroad. Slaves, with the help of stationmasters and conductors, had to dodge professional slave catchers, federal marshals, and slaveholders on a grueling thousand-mile journey to freedom. The Kansas/Missouri political conditions created the opportunity for the perhaps less known escape route along the western frontier.