Source: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: “Promises Betrayed”
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Download and ShareBenjamin "Pap" Singleton was one of the leaders of what was called the "Great Exodus," a migration of tens of thousands of African Americans, called "Exodusters," out of the South into Kansas in the late 1870s. He was born into slavery and escaped several times to Nashville before settling in Canada for several years. (In Canada, he ran a boardinghouse where other fugitive slaves stayed.) When Reconstruction began after the Civil War, Singleton returned to Tennessee, where he worked as a carpenter and a coffin maker.
Making coffins for many black victims of white violence, he came to the conclusion that there was no place for blacks in the South, and they should migrate. He had no faith that the democratic process would ever be extended to blacks; therefore, he felt, they should live separately from whites. In the 1870s, he journeyed to Kansas to see if his people could find land there. "We needed land for our children," he later told a Congressional committee. "That caused my heart to grieve and sorrow ... Pity for my race caused me to work for them ... Confidence is perished and faded away. We are going to leave the South."
He began to publicly speak out in favor of migration in the 1870s. He traveled to South Kansas around 1876 and found land that was suitable for establishing a community. In 1878, his association regularly transported black people to Kansas, where he incorporated the Singleton Colony in Morris County. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the South was once again in the hands of former slave owners, some 40,000 Exodusters left the South. Singleton believed he was carrying out God's plan for his people. Although many thousands of blacks migrated to Kansas on their own, or were inspired by other leaders, Singleton took credit for the migration in it's entirety, stating, "I am the cause of the whole Kansas migration."
Singleton's efforts certainly inspired the founding of other colonies, including Nicodemus, the most famous black community in Kansas. In 1885, he founded the United Trans-Atlantic Society and advocated for the emigration of African Americans from the United States. Singleton's colonies survived and prospered for a while, but declined by the early twentieth century. Most of those who left Southern states for Kansas either failed to make it to Kansas or returned to the South.
--adapted from the website The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Nell Painter The question of should we stay at home in the South, should we stay at home in the United States... should we move somewhere else to the North, should we move to the West, or should we leave the United States entirely.
Song ‘Deep River, Deep River’
Narrator Feeling trapped and helpless and in the need of answers, some turned to an unlikely source. An old man who had been born in slavery.
Pap Singleton: We needed land for our children. That caused my heart to grieve and sorrow. Pity for my race caused me to work for them. Confidence is perished and faded away. We are going to leave the South.
Narrator: In 1874, Pap Singleton, a former slave would lead a group of 300 blacks to Kansas. John Brown struck his first blow against slavery there. God must be in Kansas and black people wanted to go where God was. No one spoke this call stronger than Sojourner Truth.
Narrator as Sojourner Truth: I have prayed so long that my people would go to Kansas and that God would make straight the way before them. This colored people is going to be a people. Do you think God has them robbed and scourged all the days of their life for nothing?
Marquetta Goodwill: Many of the people… saw their promised land, saw their Jordan River being those places that they had to cross over into, where freedom would be away from those who had basically had their feet on their necks all the time, just like Pharaoh had done in the Bible. So many of them followed their leaders so they could have their life to themselves however they wanted that to be built.
Nell Painter: They also believed in the God of Daniel, who was an avenging God, this is the God of the apocalypse, the God of the second coming, the God of the decision of who was going to go to heaven and who was going to go to hell.
Narrator: But as much as Kansas loomed as a promised land for many blacks, getting there could become a journey through hell. Many would perish from starvation and exposure. One group fell victim to yellow fever. And there was always the fear of murderous whites. 01:16:08:00
Narrator as Riverboat Captain: I saw colored men and women cast themselves to the ground in despair, heard them groan and shout their lamentations. What is to become of these wretched people God only knows? Here were nearly half a thousand...scattered along the banks of the mighty Mississippi, without shelter, without food, with no hope of escaping from their present surrounding and hardly a chance of returning from whence they came.
Narrator: For those who survived to make it to Kansas they found a land of hard winters, torrential rains and violent tornadoes. But through spiritual and emotional conviction, they sustained themselves, and within a few years over 20 towns would be built.
Narrator: But not all blacks thought the answer was to leave the South. Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had become the leading black voice for abolition, opposed any mass exodus.
Narrator as Fredrick Douglass: “…The country will be told of the hundreds who go to Kansas, but not of the thousands who stay in Mississippi…They will be told of the destitute who require material aid, but not the multitude who are bravely sustaining themselves where they are…If the people of this country cannot be protected in every State of the Union… the sovereignty of the nation is an empty one, and the power in individual States is greater than the power of the United States.
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