101 & Counting
Amazing Facts About Foundational Black Americans
Spring 1879 — South to Kansas
Tap the poster to enlarge · Canonical BHED artwork
Did you know a decade before the Great Migration, tens of thousands of Black Americans walked out of the post-Reconstruction South and settled the Kansas plains—the first major voluntary mass migration of African Americans in U.S. history?
After the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, Black Southerners faced sharecropping debt, Ku Klux Klan violence, and the collapse of Reconstruction-era civil rights.
In the spring of 1879, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans fled the South and migrated to Kansas—the land of John Brown—seeking land, safety, and political freedom.
The movement was organized in part by Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a formerly enslaved Tennessean who founded the Tennessee Real Estate & Homestead Association in 1869 to organize Black families to settle in Kansas.
The 1879 wave carried roughly 6,000 people; over the following years the movement reached well into the tens of thousands. They founded all-Black farming colonies like Nicodemus, Kansas, and turned land ownership into a form of resistance.
The Exoduster movement was the first major voluntary mass migration of African Americans in U.S. history. In the spring of 1879, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans fled the collapse of Reconstruction and white supremacist violence in the South and migrated to Kansas, drawn by the promise of land, safety, and political freedom. The movement was organized in part by Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a formerly enslaved Tennessean. Exodusters founded all-Black farming colonies, including Nicodemus, Kansas—the oldest surviving Black settlement west of the Mississippi.
Wait — There's More
More Amazing Facts are on the way.