In honor of Black History Month, the Friends of the Ferguson Home will host Dr. Roger Hardaway of Northwestern Oklahoma University at Alva for a discussion of the impact of Black Americans on the Oklahoma frontier.
Hardaway began teaching at Northwestern in 1990 and is the university’s longest serving faculty member. He has contributed to the Denver Post and New York based Fast Company.
Those publications sought Hardaway’s expertise on the very topic he will address at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 4 at the Watonga Public Library.
He will discuss the history of the Buffalo Soldiers - the indigenous peoples’ name for Black soldiers - all Black communities, of which Blaine County had three, and the contributions of Black cowboys to the mystique of the American West, which is often overlooked.
Hardaway is the author of A Narrative of the African American Frontier: Blacks in the West 1535-1912 and coeditor of African Americans on the Western Frontier.
T.B. Ferguson was a known supporter of peaceful coexistence between races and was so well thought of by Black citizens the residents of an all-Black town near present day Hitchcock renamed their settlement Ferguson in his honor.
The Hardaway lecture is free and open to the public.