Exodus of 1879
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The Exodus of 1879 (also known as the Kansas Exodus and the Exoduster Movement) refers to the mass movement of African Americans from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century,[1] and was the first general migration of blacks following the Civil War.[2] One of the most important figures of the Exodus was Benjamin "Pap" Singleton.[3] To escape the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Jim Crow laws which continued to make them second-class citizens after Reconstruction,[4] as many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.[5] In the 1880s, blacks bought more than twenty thousand acres of land in Kansas, and several of the settlements made during this time (Nicodemus, Kansas, for example) still exists today.[5] This sudden wave of migration came as a great surprise to many Northern white Americans, who did not realize that black southerners were free in name only.[6] Many blacks left the South with the belief that they were receiving free passage to Kansas, only to be stranded in St. Louis, Missouri. Black churches in St. Louis, together with Eastern philanthropists, formed the Colored Relief Board and the Kansas Freedmen's Aid Society to help those stranded in St. Louis to reach Kansas.[4]
The Kansas Fever Exodus refers specifically to six thousand blacks who moved from Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to Kansas.[7] Many in Louisiana were inspired to leave the state when the 1879 Louisiana Constitutional Convention decided that voting rights were a matter for the state, not federal, government, thereby clearing the way for the disenfranchisement of Louisiana's black population.[4]
The Exodus was not universally praised by African Americans; indeed, Frederick Douglass was a critic of the movement.[8] It wasn't that Douglass disagreed with the Exodusters in principle, but he felt that the movement was ill-timed and poorly organized.[9]
References
- ^ Van Deusen, John G. (1936). The Journal of Negro History. Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, Inc. p. 111.
- ^ Johnson, Daniel Milo (1981). Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History. Duke University Press. p. 51. ISBN 082230449X.
- ^ Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, retrieved 2007-10-19
- ^ a b c Gates, Henry Louis (1999). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Basic Civitas Books. p. 722. ISBN 0465000711.
- ^ a b Slavery in America Encyclopedia, retrieved 2007-10-19
- ^ Calhoun, Charles William (2003). The Human Tradition in America: 1865 to the Present. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 13. ISBN 0842051295.
- ^ Painter, Nell Irvin (1992). Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 184. ISBN 0393009513.
- ^ Romero, Patricia W. (1968). I Too Am America: Documents from 1619 to the Present. Publishers Agency. p. 150. ISBN 0877812063.
- ^ Sernett, Milton C. (1997). Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Duke University Press. p. 14. ISBN 0822319934.