Leavenworth is located in northeastern Kansas at the junction of U.S. Geography Leavenworth is on the west bank of the Missouri River In 2008, an underground series of "vaults" was found in the city, apparently built during the late 19th century. Day was a former educator and principal in Leavenworth.įort Leavenworth was located outside the city limits until its territory was annexed by the city on April 12, 1977. Leavenworth appoints its mayor from among the members of the Commission, and Day was named mayor in 1971. Day had been elected to the City Commission one year earlier. In 1972 Benjamin Day became the city's first African-American mayor. (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded a few years later, and absorbed most members of the AAC.) African Americans in the region were horrified at Alexander's murder by the mob and created the first state chapter of the Afro-American Council, then the only national organization working for civil rights. His father Alfred Alexander, an exoduster, said "The people have mutilated him, now let them bury him." The city arranged burial. His family refused to claim his body for burial. An inquest concluded he had been killed by "persons unknown". On January 15, 1901, Alexander was taken from jail by a mob of 5,000 people and to the site of the murder of Pearl Forbes, where he was brutally lynched: burned alive. He refused the governor's offer of state militia, and was unable to protect the prisoner. The sheriff needed to bring him to Leavenworth for arraignment at the county court. Witnesses had identified a "large white man" and a "slight black man" as having been seen in the vicinity of the attacks, Police moved him to the penitentiary during questioning, but a lynch mob was forming in Leavenworth. 20th century to present įred Alexander, a 22-year-old black veteran of the Spanish–American War, was arrested on circumstantial evidence following months of assaults on young white women in late 1900. Īfrican Americans continued to migrate to the state of Kansas after the war. African Americans gained suffrage in 1870 after passage of the federal 15th constitutional amendment, and the legislature voted for their right to sit on juries in 1874. In Kansas, Langston worked for black suffrage and the right of African Americans to sit on juries, testify in court, and have their children educated in common schools. Charles Henry Langston was an African-American leader from Boston who worked and lived in Leavenworth and northeast Kansas in the Reconstruction era and afterward. In 1866, the 10th Regiment of Cavalry, an all-black unit within the U.S. By 1865 it had attracted nearly one-fifth of the 12,000 blacks in the state. Refugee African Americans continued to settle in the city during the war. Although the federal government never approved this early version of the state constitution, it was considered one of the most radical of the four constitutions drafted for the new territory because it recognized freed blacks as citizens. On April 3, 1858, the " Leavenworth Constitution" for the state of Kansas was adopted here. In the years before the American Civil War, Leavenworth was a hotbed of anti-slavery and pro-slavery agitation, often leading to open physical confrontations on the street and in public meetings. Abolition supporters helped them find refuge. Its location on the Missouri River attracted refugee African-American slaves in the antebellum years, who were seeking freedom from the slave state of Missouri across the river. The city developed south of Fort Leavenworth, which was established as Cantonment Leavenworth in 1827 by Colonel Henry Leavenworth. Leavenworth, founded in 1854, was the first city incorporated in the territory of Kansas.
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