DeWitty: Nebraska's Black Homestead Community

In the Sandhills of Cherry County, Nebraska, a community called DeWitty, later renamed Audacious, became the largest and longest-lasting African American rural settlement in the state. Black homesteaders began arriving around nineteen oh seven, drawn by the Kinkaid Act of nineteen oh four, which allowed settlers to claim large parcels of marginal Sandhills land. Many were descendants of formerly enslaved people who had fled to Canada before the Civil War.

By nineteen seventeen the community counted about one hundred families, and by nineteen twenty its residents claimed some forty thousand acres. They built their own church, school, and general store. The Depression and agricultural mechanization gradually drove residents away, and the last African American resident left in nineteen thirty-six.

A Nebraska State Historical Marker was dedicated in twenty sixteen to recognize what these families built here on the open plains.