On February 24, a sunlit date marked with historical memoirs and oral histories, family and community filled the Lancaster Community Library meeting room for “A Family’s Journey into the Life and Legacy of the Honorable Armistead Stokalas Nickens.”
This historical presentation was co-hosted by Brenda Campbell and Francine Aytes Hunter, The Nickens Historical Highway Marker Committee, and the Lancaster Virginia Historical Society.
Antionette Diantha Aytes set the tone with storytelling, much like envisioning and sitting in on family conversations at the dinner table, about the inspirational beginnings of this journey and the discovery of family history as conveyed by the late matriarch Gazelle Nickens Aytes. Dr. Karen E. Sutton followed with the analytical research of the “The Nickens Nine,” free Black ancestors who fought in the American Revolutionary War.
Jacqueline Morris Whitman, great-granddaughter of Nickens, fluently related the biography of his early life, his vision for building a school for Black residents in the county, the co-founding of Calvary Baptist Church, and his early advocacy for building a bridge in Tappahannock, later to be known as….
