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Juneteenth Speaker
On June 19 Brenda and Will were featured speakers at a Juneteenth celebration in Vandalia for FREEDOM NEXT, a youth group affiliated with the Cass County GOP. To teach the youth more about the Underground Railroad history in the Vandalia area, Brenda gave a short overview of the UGRR in the area. Stating that Cassopolis and Vandalia were the intersection of two major lines on the Underground Railroad, she described how over 1,500 freedom seekers came through here to go on to Canada. It was almost exclusively a Quaker community, dedicated to the cause of freedom, at great risk to the participants. Then Will took on three first-person characters, 
changing outfits and accents to describe a raid by slave owners in 1847 that planned to capture blacks and take them back to slavery. The Kentucky Raid was stopped in its tracks by local citizens, and the outrage from the South hastened the Civil War.