2024 LAFAYETTE COUNTY, MO JUNETEENTH CELEBRATION

THEME:

" A LONG TIME COMING"

GUEST SPEAKER

RAY ANTHONY SHEPARD

Friday, June 14, 2024

Higginsville Community Building 

Fairground Park

801 West 29th Street

Higginsville, MO  64037

6 pm

The Lafayette County Juneteenth Foundation is excited to announce that Mr. Ray Anthony Shepard will be our guest speaker on Friday, June 14, 2024, at the evening activity.  We are delighted to host Mr. Shepard and bring him back as he requested. He was last with us in June 2019.  After joining us on tour of the Pennytown hamlet area in Saline County, MO, Ray knew that he would finish the book, A Long Time Coming.  He asked to come back to Lafayette County, MO to share it.

A Long Time Coming has won received three starred reviews and was named a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal, Booklist and Kirkus Reviews.

                                         

About the Author

Ray Anthony Shepard is a grandson of a slave, a former teacher, and retired editor- in-chief of a major education publishing company. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he received a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Now retired, he is dedicated to a new “personal chapter” for himself as an author, specializing in chronicling the little-known facts of the Black experience in the United States.

“I write to provide readers of any age, especially secondary school students, with a fuller view of American slavery and a corrective history of the struggle and anguish of courageous individuals who sought to pursue full American citizenship.”

–Ray Anthony Shepard

Shepard is the author of two other books. 

Runaway is a picture book biography of Ona Judge, a biracial enslaved servant, who defied George and Martha Washington and the first Fugitive Slave Act when she fled from President’s House in Philadelphia (1796). The story focuses on Ona’s decision, and the risks she faced escaping from the life she knew—enslavement—to the unknown life as a fugitive in New Hampshire, a state in the process of becoming slavery free.  Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge by Ray Anthony Shepard

George Stephens and James Henry Gooding felt duty-bound to enlist in the Union Army and prove to the country that “they were worthy of being freemen.” Among the first to sign up for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, an all-Black regiment, they eagerly recruited other free Black men to join them. But it wasn’t long before Stephens and Gooding discovered the harsh realities of army life. As soldiers and also as the war’s first Black correspondents, both men’s eyewitness reports exposed the dangers and the tragedies they experience on and off the battlefield, as well as the shocking injustices they endured in the Union Army.   Now or Never! 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery by Ray Anthony Shepard