There’s No Place Like Home
Intro
The bottom of the Statue of Liberty is inscribed with a famous poem by Emma Lazarus. Its most famous lines read as follows:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
The passage comes from “The New Colossus,”a poem written in 1883 at a time of unprecedented European immigration to the United States. Fifteen million immigrants from Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe came to the shores of the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century in search of better economic conditions and freedom from religious and political persecution back home.
While their memory is forever etched on the base of one of America’s most recognized landmarks, historians have largely ignored African Americans’ equally if not more difficult journey out of the Post-Reconstruction South to the West, which occurred only a few years prior.
Background
The story of these African American pioneers begins in the Post Civil War South. Following the Civil War, the South underwent Reconstruction in which The North sought to legally enshrine their battlefield victories with the addition of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
The Reconstruction Acts also imposed restrictions that required Southern states to establish new constitutions and restricted the voting ability and right of some former Confederate officials and officers to run for public office.
These legal protections were designed to protect African Americans’ voting and civil rights, particularly in the South, where they were seen to be most vulnerable to future infringements.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help freed slaves with their economic and educational requirements, and Federal troops were stationed across the South to enforce these rules.
Unfortunately, even during the Reconstruction era, these measures were at most only partially successful.
Lincoln’s Republican Party, which had instituted these policies, was fought tooth and nail by the Democrats, whose power increased considerably after his assassination and the appointment of Andrew Johnson. Although Johnson opposed Southern secession during the Civil War, he was still very sympathetic to White Southerners.
Johnson took a lenient approach to Reconstruction, which reflected his Democratic leanings and Southern upbringing. Under his administration, some of the first encroachments on African American Rights were made.
These included the instatement of Black Codes across the South restricting the rights of African Americans which included taking away or strongly incurring on their right to own property, restricting their right to mobility, preventing them from leaving their place of work, and making intermarriage between Whites and Blacks Illegal.
Slowly but surely, the Civil and Political rights of African Americans were all but gone by the late 1870s as Southern States regained their former power in the Union. Fearing little backlash from the Federal government, these state governments more blatantly seized what little political and economic gains Blacks had made following the Civil War.
Ruffians known as “bulldozers” terrorized Black communities across the South for voting the Republican ticket through violence and electoral sabotage, all with the support of the White Planter class and State government support. Without the law on their side, sharecroppers often saw their crop partially or completely stolen by White landowners.
Federal troops were practically the only protection African Americans had left. By 1877, they had all formally withdrawn from the South.
Go West
The increasing violence and persecution directed towards Black Southerners as well as the influence of promoters like “Pap” Singleton prompted the “Exodusters,” a term used to describe the movement of African Americans fleeing the South, to migrate westward. They would flee to present-day Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and other states, but Kansas would be their principal destination. This was due to a number of factors.
Most of the Exodusters going West had little money. They came primarily from states in the Deep South like Mississippi and Alabama. Kansas was fairly close and accessible by taking a steamboat up the Mississippi to St Louis. From that point, Exodusters hoped that the last leg of the journey West would be easy.
Because of abolitionist John Brown’s role in “Bleeding Kansas,” a conflict that pitted pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions against one another before the Civil War, Kansas was viewed as a “promised land.” In addition, Kansas became a free state after the Civil War, and its politicians at times actively encouraged African American colonization.
Finally, it was a place where Black Southerners believed they could “start anew” and realize their full rights as Americans. Many Exodusters held an idealistic vision of an exodus out of the South into a land where they could easily politically and financially prosper. This may be explained by earlier Black settlement of Kansas by more organized and well equipped settlers who came before them.
The situation of African Americans in the South only worsened as time went on. According to EJI, more than 1,000 lynchings occurred in Louisiana alone during the Reconstruction period.
A resolution from 1879 by the Colored Refugee Relief Board created to assist the Exodusters best illustrates the danger the Exodusters were fleeing from and what they hoped to achieve in Kansas:
“While in the exercise of their rights as citizens, and occupying the relation of tillers of the soil to the owners thereof, the owners of the land differing with them on the question of politics, adopted a systematic rule of behavior towards them, such as klu-kluxism, cross-roads brigades, intimidation, rangers, decoyers, assassins, and murderers in all shapes and phases — all for one end — the political, social, and moral degradation of the colored citizens of the Southern States.
The system was no sooner conceived and adopted than it was executed, and with such terrible reality that not alone were the bonds of liberty and happiness destroyed and sacrificed, but that greatest of all blessings, life, even was in no way exempted from the rule….which impel the colored citizens of the South, and of which they are natives and to the manor born, to some land in the far West, where homes, protection and security are insured them.”
Problems Faced
By 1879 thousands of African Americans sold what little they had to afford fair on a steamboat up the Mississippi to St Louis. Far from being welcome aboard, they found themselves in danger here too.
Southern businessmen, anxious about losing what amounted to slave labour, tried to prevent Exodusters from going North. They did so through trying to blame the movement on a supposed political conspiracy by the Republican party and threatened steamboat operators bringing African Americans north.
Those who were “lucky enough” to reach St Louis arrived mostly penniless and relatively unaware of the obstacles ahead. The White St Louis community ranged from at first ambivalent to hostile to new arrivals. Neither Federal nor State nor City officials offered much in help, leaving the financial burden of the Exodusters on the African American community in St Louis.
The community organized quickly to take in, feed, and help as many Exodusters coming West as they could, but were in little better financial shape than the emigrants themselves. Despite their best efforts, the African American community in St Louis could not take in all of the Exodusters. Those with shelter lived in deplorable conditions, jammed together in the attics of churches and private residences.
Those without were often left exposed to the elements on the banks of the Mississippi or in abandoned buildings where many quickly fell ill.
Legacy
Out of the more than 20,000 or so Exodusters who left for Kansas in 1879, only about 6,000 of them ever reached the state. The dry unpredictable climate of the Midwest made homesteading particularly difficult for them, most of whom had neither the experience or equipment necessary to farm the land.
The most successful of the settlers in Kansas were those who found opportunity in the booming towns and cities of the state, such as Nicodemus and Quindaro.
Most of these settlements gradually died during the latter 19th and early 20th century or in some cases became incorporated into other cities like Kansas City and Topeka.
Like many of the other towns in the West, these towns died on account of the changing economic and demographic situation of the country. Exodusters often moved on to bigger cities and some even went back South after failing to find their promised land.
Although the Exodusters by and large did not find what they were hoping to, their legacy lives on not only in the towns they settled in and founded, but in the much larger “Great Migration” of millions of African Americans out of the South throughout the 20th century.
These early pioneers provided a story of hope and resilience to those wishing to leave the injustices of the South behind them and fully realize their rights as American citizens.
Resources
- Jack, Bryan. The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters. Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
- https://www.kshs.org/km/items/view/23418
- https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71000831/
- https://www.nps.gov/nico/index.htm
- https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/colored-refugee-relief-board/
- https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/benjamin-pap-singleton/12205
- https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Civil_War_AdmissionReadmission.htm
