
The path to equality has been anything but smooth. It's taken courage and dedication by everyday people coming together for a common goal to carry the country toward true equality. Parents, teachers, secretaries, welders, ministers, and students drove their communities, and the country along with them, toward justice in a series of often unsteady turns leading to the Brown v. Board decision.

Discover a complete and authentic army post from the 1860s -1870s! This well-preserved fort on the Santa Fe Trail shares a tumultuous history of the Indian Wars era. The sandstone constructed buildings sheltered troops who were known as the Guardians of the Santa Fe Trail.

Promises made and broken! Who deserves to be free? The fight for freedom! Soldiers fighting settlers! Each of these stories is a link in the chain of events that encircled Fort Scott from 1842-1873. All of the site's structures, its parade ground, and its tallgrass prairie bear witness to this era when the country was forged from a young republic into a united transcontinental nation.

Formerly enslaved African Americans left Kentucky at the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period to experience freedom in the "Promised Land" of Kansas. Nicodemus represents the involvement of African Americans in the homesteading movement across the Great Plains. It is the oldest remaining Black settlement west of the Mississippi River.

Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America, but within a generation most of it had been transformed into farms, cities, and towns. Today less than 4% remains intact, mostly in the Kansas Flint Hills. Established on November 12, 1996, the preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of the once vast tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Here the tallgrass makes its last stand.