Freedom’s Frontier NHA’s Director of Strategy and Public Affairs Johnny Szlauderbach joined KCUR’s Up to Date today to discuss Quindaro and the push to designate the site a National Historic Landmark.

Quindaro, a pre-Civil War community along the Missouri River in Kansas City, Kansas, served as a vital Underground Railroad stop and later the birthplace of Western University, the first historically Black college west of the Mississippi. Today, only ruins remain — overgrown, unstable, and largely inaccessible to the public — and the site still lacks the federal protections many say it has long deserved.

Last year, the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Board unanimously recommended Quindaro for National Historic Landmark status. Then the administrative process stalled. Kansas Reps. Sharice Davids and Derek Schmidt and Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II have since introduced the Quindaro National Historic Landmark Act, bipartisan legislation that would secure the designation directly through Congress.

Szlauderbach traced Quindaro’s origins to the Wyandotte Nation, forcibly removed from New England to the Kansas-Missouri border in the mid-1850s. Strongly opposed to slavery, the Wyandotte established an Underground Railroad site along the Missouri River, leveraging the town’s strategic position between Missouri — a slave state — and Kansas Territory. As the Bleeding Kansas period intensified, abolitionists and Black Americans joined them, building Quindaro into a major station linking eastern and western Underground Railroad networks.

At its peak, Quindaro was a legitimate port city with around 100 buildings — offices, shops, hotels, and bars. Prominent first-wave feminist Clarina Nichols ran a newspaper there. After the Civil War, residents founded the Quindaro Freedman’s School, which grew into Western University, eventually the second largest HBCU in the country.

“Quindaro was unique,” Szlauderbach told host Steve Kraske. “It is unlike any other town that existed at the time in the sense that you had different ethnic groups working towards a common goal.”

National Historic Landmark designation would unlock funding through the Historic Preservation Fund, enabling archaeological excavation, a future visitor center, and public tourism. With Kansas City set to host World Cup matches this summer, Szlauderbach noted that tours of the site are already being planned. “There’s so much potential here,” he said.

Freedom’s Frontier, one of 61 congressionally designated national heritage areas in the country, has championed Quindaro since its founding in 2006. For Szlauderbach, the site’s significance extends well beyond its history. “It’s almost like the American project in miniature — and that it happened here, in Kansas, means something.”

Listen to the full interview on KCUR’s Up to Date.