Author Ray Anthony Shepard - 2019 Lafayette County Juneteenth Keynote Speaker

Author Ray Anthony Shepard will be our keynote speaker. Ray was born in Sedalia, his father’s hometown. His mother was born in Marshall, where her father was enslaved until the Missouri Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in January 1865. Although Ray grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska he returned to Sedalia each summer to stay with his grandmother who lived at 305 West Johnston Street.

After serving in the US Army, Ray graduated from the University of Nebraska, taught middle school American History in Davenport, Iowa and then earned a master degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he received a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. After graduating from Harvard he began a career in educational publishing and became the industry’s first African American Editor-in-Chief of a major publishing house.

After retiring from publishing he launched an encore career writing biographies for young adult readers about the lives of well-known and little-known African Americans who tipped the scales toward justice and equality.

Ray’s young adult biography, Now or Never! 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery, is the story of two black Civil War soldiers whose battlefield dispatches documented their battle against Northern white racial arrogance as they fought Confederates’ attempt to establish an independent slave empire. It is the story of why and how black men answered Frederick Douglass’s call: “through Massachusetts we can get our hands on treason and slavery.” Their story gives readers a better understanding of how difficult it was for the country to free itself from human slavery and the economic gain of enslaved labor. Sergeant George E. Stephens and Corporal James Henry Gooding were just two of the 180,000 black Civil War soldiers who with courage and pride offered to sacrifice themselves on the altar of freedom to liberate enslaved African Americans.

Now or Never! received starred reviews from Kirkus and the School Library Connection and was selected by Kirkus and the New York Public Library’s “Best Books for Teens 2017.”

The National Teachers of Social Studies chose it as a Carter G. Woodson (the founder of Black History Month) Honor Book.

For more information go to www.rayanthonyshepard.com

Copies of Now or Never! 54^th Massachusetts Infantry's War to End Slavery

will be available at the event.

 
The evening program will be held on Friday, June 14, 2019 in Higginsville, MO. The time will  be announced later.

     Watch for the full 2019 Lafayette County Juneteenth Celebration schedule and details!
     Please mark your calendars!

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery. June 19, 1865, union soldiers, led by General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with 2000 Federal troops to issue the order hat the Civil War had ended and that all slaves were free. This was two and half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that had become official on January 1, 1863.  The first Lafayette County Juneteenth celebration was held in 2005.   Since 2015, a number of annual celebrations have occurred. 

The Mission Statement of the Lafayette County Juneteenth Foundation

Lafayette County Juneteenth Foundation mission statement is to develop and implement a one-day festival that promotes the celebration of family, celebrates African-American freedom, and cultivates mutual involvement of social service entities, and economic participation of the county-wide business community.

The Lafayette County Juneteenth Foundation is a non-profit organization under 501(c) (3).