Document 15.12 Black Migrants to Kansas, 1880

Black Migrants to Kansas, 1880

African American women also went west in significant numbers: 6,000 in the year 1879 alone. They and their families left the South in hopes of escaping white supremacy and racial violence. Most migrated to Kansas, where Benjamin “Pap” Singleton had promoted organizing new communities. In the following interviews conducted by Colonel Frank H. Fletcher, who was appointed to study African American migration to Kansas, several Kansas “Exodusters” reflect on their journey.

I give you the exact language of the colonists as written down by me at the time, thinking that their own expressions, although ungrammatical, will present more clearly the information sought.

NANCY GUPTIL Came from Middle Tennessee. Heard neighbors talking of Kansas two or three years. We received two or three circulars that told about Kansas. I lived with a white man who took Kansas papers. There are not many such white men in the South. I find things here a heap better than I expected. We have forty acres. We came last May. We built our house in the fall. My husband finds enough work around here to support us. We had plenty of supplies to live on through the winter. We got them by working for white neighbors. Politics never pestered us at the South, but the people took all we made. People treats us better here than they did there, because they is willing to pay us what we work for. Before I came we had letters about this country from a son-in-law at Topeka. We have a prayer-meeting every Wednesday night, and every two weeks of a Sunday in my house. Am a Baptist. I wouldn’t go back for nothing. Singleton lived in Nashville. All my people are mighty well satisfied here. . . .

MRS. WILLIAM RAY Came from Texas in a wagon of our own; stopped a while at Fort Scott. We left Texas because they treated us so bad. They took out my husband’s brother-in-law and shot him three times in the face. They came after my husband one night and made him give up his pistol. They took my aunts and son-in-law out and beat them. They struck my aunt and cut her, because she would not tell where her son was. We have been on this place between four and five years. We have a hundred and sixty acres. My husband hires help. [At this point the husband, who had been ploughing in an adjoining field with two other men, came up and continued the narration.] Last year I raised five hundred and sixty bushels of corn, fifty bushels of wheat, one hundred and sixty bushels of oats, two hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. I sold fifteen dollars’ worth of garden vegetables, one cow, ten hogs, four or five dollars’ worth of chickens, six bushels of plums, three hundred pounds butter and two bushels of eggs. I have now seven horses, twenty hogs, and eight head of cattle. My children are learning to read and write. They go to the same school with the whites. We have church and Sunday-school in the schoolhouse. We are Baptists. . . .

MRS. CARTER Came from Tennessee to St. Louis, and lived there three years. We thought when we left Tennessee that we would be furnished a horse and plow and a hundred and sixty acres. That story rushed up a great many. We heard there was plenty of land at Topeka. Singleton said we would have to pay for land. Hill said the Government would help us and find us something to eat. I think this is a very good country; none of the colored colonists have to beg for any thing they need. My husband gets all the work he can do. They pay him very well. I would scratch in the ground here before I would go back South. I have seen droves come in, that were run away from what they made down South. My husband could not get his money at all there.

Source: Col. Frank H. Fletcher, Negro Exodus: Report of Col. Frank H. Fletcher, Agent Appointed by the St. Louis Commission to Visit Kansas for the Purpose of Obtaining Information in Regard to Colored Emigration (1880), 3–6.