EXODUSTERS
In 1868 the KKK lynched several Black men and one woman in Maury County. This terrorism caused a movement among Blacks to relocate to Kansas, where there were land grants available. In early 1875, the Columbia Herald reported that landowners in Maury County were complaining because more than 500 Black males had left for Kansas. This situation created a critical lack of manpower for agriculture labor. (Credit to Michael Bennett for the following information)
Between 1874 and 1879 more than 1500 African Americans from Maury County had left for Kansas. Although the North had won the war and it was no longer legal for Black people in Maury County to be held as slaves, their lives in Maury County were still extremely difficult, and constantly under threat of violence and harsh treatment. Those who tried to exercise their new right to vote, especially community leaders and their families, were targeted. The newly formed Klu Klux Klan, founded in neighboring Giles County in 1866, became active in Maury County as well. The year of 1868 was particularly harsh, with numerous lynchings and murders.
Tennessee’s governor declared Marshall Law in eleven counties, including Maury.
A series of meetings were held in Nashville to plot a new course of direction. In 1869, the Nashville Republican Banner quoted an attendee named Randall Brown as saying, “My heart bleeds for my people. We have 5,000 colored men in the vicinity and God knows how they are supported now, and how they exist in the future. How long are we to be hewers of wood and drawers of water? Let us go where we can grow lawyers, doctors, and teachers, where we can do as good as anyone else in our society.”
Benjamin, “Pap” Singleton, a former slave from Tennessee who escaped north and returned after the war, is given much credit for leading the migration and creating the settlements in Kansas. He led the first group of 300 from Tennessee in 1873. He organized a second group from Lexington, Kentucky, and there was a third.
Doomed to extreme poverty, little to no education, along with threats and intimidation, by 1874 over a thousand African Americans in Maury County chose to leave the south, going west to Kansas. The migration was became known as the Exodus Movement, after the exodus in Egypt in the Bible, or Exodusters.
The Columbia Herald reported in 1875 that so many Black males had migrated to Kansas that there was no one to work their fields. Kansas was chosen because the Federal Government had a land grant program, offering 160 acres to anyone who lived on the land for 5 years, built a home, and made other improvements. By 1880 the number of Blacks living in Kansas had increased to 43,107.
However, getting to Kansas was itself an expensive proposition, and many made it as far as St, Louis and could not afford to travel further, eventually settling there.
Establishing a homestead also a sizable amount of money to invest. A team of mules and plow, building materials for a house, barn, and other outbuildings could cost $1000 or more, money those escaping from the south rarely had. A terrible drought in the years 1874-1875 brought one settlement in rural Kansas to an end, causing many of those who had come from Tennessee, including Maury County, to settle in a Topeka, Kansas neighborhood that came to be called Little, Tennessee.
It was from this neighborhood that a Mr. Oliver Brown and his 9-year-old daughter, challenged the public school system in what is now known as the landmark Brown versus the Board of Education, leading to the desegregation of America’s schools.
Tennessee’s Black Emigration Movement