History
Exodusters
Exodusters were African Americans who migrated from Southern states to Kansas in the late 19th century. They were seeking better economic opportunities and escape from racial discrimination and violence. The migration was one of the largest in American history and contributed to the growth of African American communities in Kansas.
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4 Key excerpts on "Exodusters"
eBook - PDFThe Death of Reconstruction
Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901
- Heather Cox Richardson, Heather Cox RICHARDSON(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
They were leaving intolerable conditions that threatened their lives and property, and were setting out to improve their fortunes as farmers in the West. Northerners described black emigrants in the same terms that they talked about white laborers who were trying to work their way up. The West was a haven for all men who were “strong” and “self-helpful”; anyone able to “do well in the East” was “pretty certain to do better in the West, because of less compe-tition and capital and many more opportunities there.” According to the New York Times, the emigrants were leaving Southern conditions that were “unfortunately only too strongly like those which have driven many a foreigner across the seas, to seek in our land the liberty to labor for himself and his family.” The Exodusters were acting as good laborers, trying to improve their economic situation through their own efforts. The Northern Republican and independent press presented them in an extraordinarily positive light. 13 In 1879, Northern attitudes toward Southerners and workers pro-vided a backdrop against which Exodusters could shine. Northern Re-publican and independent observers contrasted the emigrating African-Americans with the unrepentant, violent, and grasping white South-erners. The congressional rider fight continued until July as the Demo-cratic Congress passed one piece of legislation after another designed to force the government to bow to Southern demands for the removal of all federal troops from the South. President Hayes vetoed five bills, attack-ing the rider policy as “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional.” Sug-gesting that the old Confederate theory of state’s rights was behind the rider attempts, he drew popular approval by insisting that the national government was superior to the states.” The New York Times reported a Southern plot to seize the government and, failing that, to recommence the Civil War. 14 Disaffected workers also made the Exodusters look good.
eBook - PDFAfrican Americans in the Nineteenth Century
People and Perspectives
- Dixie Ray Haggard(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- ABC-CLIO(Publisher)
African Americans in the Nineteenth- Century West James N. Leiker 10 T he year was 1879. The failures of Reconstruction, in which African Americans hoped for relief from generations of binding oppression and slavery, had become evident, its hopes crushed in the federal govern- ment’s withdrawal of Union troops from the former Confederacy two years before. As the northern public lost interest in the cause of black rights—a cause for which so many of its people had sacrificed—leaders of the once- defeated South asserted again the primacy of local rule, and with it, a sys- tem of legal and social subordination over millions of former slaves. In that year, more than 26,000 Exodusters, named from the biblical story of another people who fled bondage for a ‘‘promised land,’’ headed to Kansas, searching for freedom and opportunities in the beckoning American West. The great Frederick Douglass had dedicated his life to such principles, but he nonetheless described the ‘‘Kansas Fever’’ as unfortunate and ill- timed. For Douglass, the migration sent a pessimistic message that racial equality in the South was unfeasible, and that westward expansion would only produce restlessness and unsettlement: ‘‘The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is by no means a good one’’ (Douglass 1953, 335–338). Obviously, many African Americans disagreed. Three decades later, a young man named Oscar Micheaux bid farewell to Armour Avenue in Chicago, the destination of thousands of blacks during the Great Urban Migration of the early 20th century. With $2,340 in savings and Horace Greeley’s words of ‘‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country’’ ringing in his ears, Micheaux did indeed roam from place to place as a railroad porter before finally homesteading on a farm in South Dakota.
eBook - PDFThe Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century
- Keneshia N. Grant(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Temple University Press(Publisher)
(Painter 1977: 159) In 1874 and 1875, Black people began going to Kansas from Tennessee in a seemingly spontaneous movement that was based on rumors of free transportation and government sup-port through land allotments and farming supplies. Such people as Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who were motivated by personal business interests, helped them along in their movement. A Ten-nessee native, Singleton first encouraged Black families—mostly from South Carolina and Georgia—to move to Tennessee. When it became clear that investment in Tennessee farms would be tre-mendously difficult, Singleton began to suggest that Black people buy land and settle in Kansas (Painter 1977: 115). The Kansas Exodus of 1879—the Exoduster Movement—was a planned migration to Kansas in reaction to the abandonment of Reconstruction. When Reconstruction ended, southern Dem-ocrats led the charge to repeal its gains by enshrining discrimi-nation into law during a period they called “redemption.” Black people, on the other hand, called the post-Reconstruction era “the Nadir.” In some Black communities, the end of Reconstruc-tion’s inclusive policies led to debate about whether they should leave the South en masse. Between the two movements, approxi-mately twenty-six thousand additional Black people moved to 44 Chapter 2 Kansas from various parts of the central South—mostly Loui-siana, Mississippi, Texas, and Tennessee (Painter 1977). Some migrants opted to go even farther to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Approximately thirty thousand people migrated to mid-Atlantic states, with about half of them settling in Penn-sylvania (Johnson and Campbell 1981). These migrations were important to the spatial placement of Black people in America. By 1910, Black Americans lived in more places than ever. Although many faced resource challenges that contributed to their decisions to remain in the South, some left to try life in the North.
eBook - PDF- George Brown Tindall(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of South Carolina Press(Publisher)
8 THE LIBERIAN EXODUS THE Negro penchant for migra-tion which became notorious after the Civil War was the outgrowth of unsettled conditions and the novelty of freedom, but was kept alive by the poverty that Negroes experienced as the mudsills of a depressed agriculture. Without worldly goods, Negroes could easily pull up stakes and move off in search of better conditons and better employers. The mobility of the Negro sharecropper has been a constant factor in the South since the Civil War. In addi-tion to the mobility brought about by the search for improved economic conditions, railway excursions became an important part of Negro social life. The Negroes, said a white observer, are lit-erally crazy about travelling. The railroad officials are continually importuned by them to run extra trains, excursion trains, and so on, on all sorts of occasions: holidays, picnics, Sunday-school cele-brations, church dedications, funerals of their prominent men, circuses, public executions. . . . They attract whole counties of negroes, and it is delightful to witness their childish wonder and enjoyment and behavior on the cars. 1 So common had these practices become that by the end of Re-construction it was axiomatic among whites that delight in travel was a racial characteristic of the Negroes. The Negro rarely pos-sesses any home attachments, said one. He is continually on the wing . . .; and as he can with facility ingratiate himself among strangers of his own color, he would not be disconcerted were he as quickly transported from one State to another as Aladdin's wife or as Noureddin in the Thousand and One Nights. 2 1 A South Carolinian, Atlantic Monthly, XXXIX (February, 1877), 682. 2Jbid., p. 677. [ 153] 154 SouTH CARoLINA NEGROES The violent political campaign of 1876 and its aftermath brought widespread uncertainty among the Negroes of the state and in-terest in the possibility of emigration.
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