The Exodusters

Reconstruction ended in the South in eighteen seventy-seven. Federal troops withdrew. The legal protections that had, however imperfectly, shielded Black Southerners during the decade following the Civil War were withdrawn with them. White supremacist violence returned to the former Confederate states without federal check.

What followed was one of the largest voluntary mass migrations in American history up to that point.

Between eighteen seventy-seven and eighteen eighty, between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Black Americans left the South for Kansas. They called themselves Exodusters, drawing on the Biblical image of the Israelites' escape from Egypt. They believed, based on reports and recruitment pamphlets and the testimony of those who went ahead of them, that Kansas offered land, legal protection, and the chance to be left alone to farm.

Their leader, in the sense that the migration had one, was a formerly enslaved man from Tennessee named Benjamin Singleton, who went by the name Pap. Singleton had been promoting Kansas emigration since the early eighteen seventies, printing and distributing broadsides, organizing wagon trains. When the migration became a flood in eighteen seventy-nine, he claimed credit and the federal government called him to Washington to explain what was happening in the South that was driving so many people north.

The Exodusters built dozens of communities across central and eastern Kansas. Most are gone. The railroads went through some and bypassed others, and the communities the railroads bypassed shrank and died. Some families scattered to Kansas City or Topeka or smaller towns. Nicodemus, here in Graham County, is the only community to survive to the present as a recognized historic site.

The families who stayed did not stay because it was easy. They stayed because the Kansas plains, however unforgiving, was theirs.