Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction

In 1879 a Black man in Louisiana wrote to the governor of Kansas that he was "very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of black freedom."

He was far from alone. After Reconstruction, thousands of African Americans headed for Kansas and other western states. The Homestead Act and other generous land laws offered them, at least in theory, a way out of the racism and oppression of the post-war South and a chance to own farmland of their own. To people who had spent their lives working white masters' land without freedom or pay, that must have looked like an answer to prayer, and many were willing to leave the only place they knew for one few of them had seen. The mass movement from the South to Kansas became known as the "Great Exodus," and those who took part in it as "exodusters."

Residents of Nicodemus, Kansas, on Washington Street around 1885.

The post-war South

The years after the Civil War should have been a time of celebration and progress for Black Southerners. Slavery was over; the Fourteenth Amendment made them citizens; the Fifteenth Amendment outlawed denying the vote on account of race, colour or previous enslavement. But many white Southerners set out to keep Black people shut out of politics and kept down socially and economically.

The vote. Freed people largely supported the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation; much of the white South stayed loyal to the Democrats and hated Republicans of any colour. When Black voters turned out in large numbers for Republican candidates, whites at the polls used every means they could devise to keep them from voting. Many never cast their ballots, and those methods also helped elect white Democrats.

Work and land. Most freed people had known nothing but farming, and even those with other skills met a region with few alternatives and a determined white supremacy. With no money to buy land, many had to go back to work for the same whites who had enslaved them, now paid with a share of the crop that, after deductions for food and other necessities, came to a pitiful wage. It was not slavery in law, but to many it can have seemed little better — and with families to support and few other skills, there was no obvious way out.

Reconstruction's end. From 1865 to 1877 federal troops occupied the former Confederate states to make sure they followed the laws governing their return to the Union. The protection they gave Black residents was often slight, but it was better than nothing. When President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877 and withdrew the troops, white rulers were free to terrorise freed people with no interference from the Army or anyone else. Murders, lynchings and other violence against Black people rose sharply. It was probably then that many decided leaving the South for good was their only real chance, and the movement west began almost at once.

Why Kansas?

There was plenty of frontier land elsewhere, and slick, often misleading town-site promotion was not the whole story.

• Distance. Kansas was never part of the South — except in the eyes of pro-slavery Missourians before the war — but it was far closer to it than California or Oregon, and much simpler and cheaper to reach. For many, a boat or train to St. Louis was the real start of the journey. Conditions aboard were poor, but riding beat walking, and whatever lay between St. Louis and Kansas seemed less daunting than what they had left.
• Meaning. The deeds of anti-slavery fighters like John Brown gave Kansas an almost sacred standing. Blood had been shed there to keep slavery out, and the memory made it seem the right place to start again.

Before the Great Exodus

Many of the African Americans who reached Kansas before 1879 came from Tennessee, where a popular movement arose seemingly from nowhere in 1874 and led to a "colored people's convention" in Nashville in May 1875. Town promoters, among them the well-known Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, saw it as a way to recruit settlers for Kansas. The convention named a board of commissioners to promote migration officially; the board later said a family needed at least $1,000 to move, which very few had. Many left anyway, and promoters like Singleton, called "conductors," led families to Kansas.

Thousands of freed people moved to Kansas over the 1870s. Because they came gradually, few whites noticed. The exodus of 1879 was different.

1879: "Kansas Fever"

The great exodus grew largely out of Louisiana's 1878 elections, in which the Democrats made big gains, winning several congressional seats and the governorship. Black Republicans had been coerced, threatened, beaten and even murdered to keep them from the polls, and when the Democrats claimed near-total victory, many Black Louisianans decided it was time to go.

On January 16, 1879, Senator William Windom, a white Republican from Minnesota, introduced a resolution that actually encouraged Black migration out of the South. That resolution, white bigotry, and the letters and newspaper reports of those already in Kansas convinced many to make the move, and by early 1879 the "Kansas Fever Exodus" was under way. It took about 6,000 people, mainly from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Many had heard rumours of free passage all the way to Kansas and were bitterly disappointed to find there was none; very few turned back because of it.

Many white Southerners took a racist, patronising view of the exodus. However much they disliked dealing with free Black people, they wanted them as cheap labour, and they pressed their officials to stop the migration. A U.S. Senate committee eventually spent three months in 1880 investigating its causes; it broke down into partisan squabbling and achieved little.

St. Louis

People kept leaving. By early March about 1,500 had passed through St. Louis on the way to Kansas, and in Mississippi and Louisiana thousands more crowded the riverbanks waiting for steamers. One white man wrote that the Mississippi's banks were "literally covered with colored people and their little store of worldly goods," every road to the river "filled with wagons loaded with plunder and families who seem to think that anywhere is better than here."

Many arrived in St. Louis with no means of going further, some unable to feed their families. The city's clergy and business leaders formed committees to help them survive and move on, collecting food and money locally and from sympathisers from Iowa to Ohio. Shelter was the worst problem: many slept outdoors by the waterfront where the steamers had left them. Their care became a political fight, especially once the Democratic-leaning Missouri Republican began printing anti-Black stories and tales of misused donations. By the time the last exodusters left — by rail, wagon, boat or on foot — even the most sympathetic residents were probably glad to see them go.

Opposition at home

In the South, Black community leaders and ministers often praised the exodus, likening it to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Others spoke against it, arguing that those leaving endangered the people who stayed and that democracy needed more time; the best known of them was Frederick Douglass.

White Southerners went to great lengths to stop it: arrests and jail on false charges, beatings and other violence. Intimidation did not keep many from leaving. What finally did was steamboat captains refusing to pick them up — some of whom, one can only suppose, had been threatened or paid.

After the exodus

The exodus began to fade by early summer 1879, and though some kept coming, the mass movement ended with the 1870s. In 1870 Kansas had about 16,250 Black residents; by 1880, some 43,110. Between the earlier, gradual migration and the 1879 exodus, the state had gained nearly 27,000 Black residents in ten years — far fewer than stayed in the South, but each one a person who acted on the hope of a better life and on the freedoms promised since the Emancipation Proclamation. Few found Kansas the Promised Land they had hoped for, but they found a place where they could live freely, with far less racial interference than in the South.

Further reading

• Athearn, Robert G. In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80. Regents Press of Kansas, 1978.
• Crockett, Norman L. The Black Towns. Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.
• Hamilton, Kenneth Marvin. Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877–1915. University of Illinois Press, 1991.
• Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Touchstone, 1996.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. W.W. Norton, 1976.
• Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African-Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. W.W. Norton, 1998.

Sources

• National Park Service, Nicodemus National Historic Site and Homestead National Historical Park, Exodusters.