In 1865 chains and whips became relics of a barbaric past. From Virginia to Texas, people of color hugged each other, danced for joy, and set out to find children sold away during the long night of bondage. Hopes were high. In Texas, Felix Haywood recalled: “We thought we was goin’ to be rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”
For almost a decade African American men and women could feel free to seek new jobs and adventures, a home of their own, and an education for their children. But soon former Confederates ruled the eleven states of the former Confederacy again, and imposed new forced labor systems called sharecropping system and convict-lease. Henry Adams, a former Georgia slave, told the U.S. Congress: “After they told us we were free – even then they would not let us live as man and wife together. And when we would run away to be free from slavery, the white people would not let us come to their places to see our mothers, wives, sisters, or fathers. We was made to leave the place, or made to go back and live as slaves. To my own knowledge there was over two thousand colored people killed trying to get away, after the white people told us we were free, which was in 1865.”
An African American scout for a caravan heading west
Adams told how this return of white supremacy spawned a major African American exodus to the West: “we lost all hopes… We said that the whole South – every State in the South – had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” They were “holding the reins of government over our heads in every respect almost, even the constable up to the governor.”
Saying “Ho for Kansas,” thousands of Southern African Americans headed toward the land sanctified by John Brown’s fight for freedom and the courage of the first Black recruits of the Civil War. Henry Adams became a leader of this new exodus.
Kansas, points out historian Quintard Taylor, was the nearest state to the South that permitted homesteading by people of color. And it was among the first Northern states to accept the Emancipation Proclamation and among the first to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. A white supremacist Democratic Party dominated the South, but Lincoln Republicans governed Kansas.
Kansas had fertile, productive soil, good weather, and water for crops. Its Homestead Act offered 160 free acres to settlers who were willing to improve the land for five years or willing to buy a vast plot in six months for $1.25 an acre. Those who arrived in Kansas, however, found segregated schools and discrimination in hotels, restaurants, theaters, churches, hospitals, and the justice system. But they also found some schools and public facilities that did not discriminate, and both major parties and minor ones seeking their votes.
By 1875 almost ten thousand African Americans in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky began to leave for Kansas towns and cities. Urged on by a thrilling convention in Nashville that year, this movement stimulated other migrations.
In April 1877, Nicodemus, the first Black town in Kansas, was founded by W. R. Hill, a white man, its treasurer, and six Black men. Hill and the others considered it both a vision and business venture. The founders selected a site on good farmland on an open prairie, along the higher bank of the South Solomon River, in what would become Graham County. Hill filed in the Kirwin land office for a 160-acre townsite under the Nicodemus Town Company with an option to buy at $1.25 an acre.
An early Nicodemus poster inviting Black settlers
When Hill emphasized African American pride and free farm acreage to an audience in Georgetown, Kentucky, he recruited 150 men, women, and children for a caravan of migrants. Most arrived at the Kansas site penniless, having spent their savings on transportation. An eyewitness reported that they “looked like a band of tattered refugees from Uncle Tom’s Cabin! With all their worldly possessions tied in bundles balanced on top of the women’s bandanna covered heads and in gunny sacks thrown over the shoulders of the men.” Though some Nicodemus pioneers came with wagons, plows, and teams of horses, they arrived too late in the season to plant crops. Bad luck also dogged the new community. The abundance of wild game Hill promised had left for winter pasturage, and no one could capture the wild horses south of the town. No white Kansan was willing to survey their plots until John Landers came along, but after he finished his work he was slain in an ambush.
Preacher John Samuels and his wife, Lee Anne Samuels, of Nicodemus, Kansas
Troubles mounted. Residents with money had to walk thirty miles to the nearest railroad for purchases. Hill, threatened with hanging by angry residents, fled to one white home, then another, and escaped by hiding in a hay wagon. The day after they reached the new Nicodemus townsite, sixty families from Lexington, Kentucky repacked and left for home.
By 1878 Nicodemus had a population of seven hundred and had largely turned to farming. People used milk cows to pull plows. Osage Indians brought the town’s neediest families meat and a share of their government rations. Nearby whites offered charitable contributions, but Kansas governor George Anthony and U.S. officials refused to help.
When we got in sight of Nicodemus the men shouted, “There is Nicodemus.” Being very sick I hailed this news with gladness. I looked with all the eyes I had. I said, “Where is Nicodemus? I don’t see it.” My husband pointed out various smokes coming out of the ground and said “That is Nicodemus.” The families lived in dug-outs. We landed and struck tents. The scenery to me was not at all inviting and I began to cry.
From there we went to our homestead fourteen miles west of Nicodemus… Days, weeks, months, and years passed and I became reconciled to my home. We improved the farm and lived there nearly twenty years, making visits to Nicodemus to attend church, entertainments, and other celebrations. My three daughters were much loved school teachers in Nicodemus and vicinity.
Willianna Hickman, in the Topeka Daily Capitol, August 29, 1939
Nicodemus families and their wagons
In 1878 the energetic, knowledgeable Edwin P. McCabe, twenty-nine, arrived and was selected as secretary of the Nicodemus Town Company. Hardworking and ambitious, he threw himself into land sales, became a federal surveyor, and began his political career.
In 1879 McCabe and other leaders voted to reject further outside aid, rely on Nicodemus’s harvest, and thus return to the original goal of a self-sufficient community. That year the ambitious Fletcher family added immeasurably to Nicodemus’s community life. Z. T. Fletcher opened a retail business he had purchased from a white man, and his wife Frances Fletcher established the town’s first school in the family’s sod hotel. The school term of three to six months began after the fall harvest was in. On seats made of blocks and logs, she taught fifteen children arithmetic, literature, moral values, and hygiene. Pupils relied on a dozen books donated by a former slave. The poverty that first plagued the settlement had its impact on education. When a child was asked to comb his hair before coming to school the next day, he arrived with much of his hair cut off, explaining that his family did not own a comb.
Education in Nicodemus was taken seriously. In two years 39 percent of Nicodemus residents could read and 25 percent could write – at a time when the U.S. national average was under 10 percent and white frontier literacy rates were only marginally higher. After further efforts, reading levels for all citizens between fifteen and forty-five rose to 56 percent.
Nicodemus was different from other communities. It celebrated August 1, the date when England ended slavery in its West Indies colonies. It boasted 58 white residents and 258 African Americans, when Graham County’s four thousand citizens were 88 percent white.
By 1880 Nicodemus boasted a school, three churches, a hotel, two stores, a livery stable, and a benevolent society. But few prosperous people were attracted to Nicodemus. Many residents, using town work as a step to owning farms, left for the countryside. Soon Nicodemus had annually elected township officers – a trustee, clerk, treasurer, road overseer, and two constables. Its justices of the peace were elected for two years. The school board had one white and two Black members. Its leaders heatedly promoted the town as the best choice for county seat, but the new governor, John St. John, picked Millbrook, a white town.
After four years of lean harvests, in 1884 crop yields and prosperity returned and spurred a new recruiting effort. White residents with capital owned most of Nicodemus’s fifteen stone and fourteen farm buildings, and a year later Nicodemus had a newspaper owned by whites, the Western Cyclone, which sought newcomers regardless of race. Whites also started the Nicodemus Enterprise. Both papers emphasized harmony and interracial cooperation.
Four Nicodemus women pose before their clapboard home.
In its first decade Nicodemus was peaceful, with only one shooting, one theft, one disorderly conduct incident, and three fist fights. By 1887 the town had four churches, two newspapers, two blacksmith shops, two barbers, a shoe store, a land company, literary societies, and baseball clubs; there were dances, parties, lecture, choruses, and festivals.
However, chances for growth ended when two railroad lines, after serious consideration of Nicodemus, decided to bypass it. Without a rail line, many residents began to leave.
As Nicodemus struggled to survive in 1879, a massive exodus of African Americans burst free from the Southern states, a people’s response to the triumph of white supremacy. The Republican Party, in return for control of the White House after the contested 1876 election, struck a deal with the Democrats to withdraw the last federal troops from Southern states. In 1877 this handed the constitutional rights of former slaves back to their former masters.
From Virginia to Louisiana to Texas, people of color met to discuss what might be done, where they might go. A solution was slow in developing and passed through several stages. In 1870 a “Committee of 500” African American men formed in the South and over the next half dozen years dispatched a hundred or more investigators to report on labor conditions throughout the region. Agents worked alongside the people whose conditions they examined, and used their wages for their expenses. Their reports revealed patterns of unrelenting political, economic, and social persecution punctuated by violence that did not spare women and children. Free men and women, Henry Adams reported, were still “being whipped, some of them, by the old owners,” and many were “being cheated out of their crops.”
The Committee of 500 appealed to the president and the U.S. Senate, Adams said, “to help us out of our distress, or protect us in our rights and privileges.” When this plea went unheeded, they requested land in Western territories or “an appropriation of money to ship us all to Liberia, in Africa; somewhere where we could live in peace and quiet.” With no response from Washington, committee members wanted to ask “other governments outside of the United States to help us get away from the United States and go there and live under their flag.”
Three early Kansas posters issued by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton
After all suggestions were ignored or rejected, Adams and his committee summoned conventions to consider their people’s choices. Women were among the most outspoken advocates of emigration, some declaring they would leave even if their husbands refused. Many were widows whose husbands who had been slain by night-riding bands and who had to support large families. By 1875 women emerged as emigration’s driving force.
Exodus from Vicksburg, Mississippi, for Kansas in May 1879
In the spring of that year what some papers called “Kansas Fever” saw upwards of seven thousand penniless, ragged men, women, and children pack up and leave for Kansas. Some sailed up the Mississippi on riverboats and others walked up the Chisholm Trail. By early 1880 about fifteen thousand had settled in Kansas.
The “Great Exodus” was a spontaneous, leaderless movement largely of poor, bedraggled families, propelled by a faith and hope that peace and land awaited those who reached “the John Brown land.” But as historian Nell Irvin Painter points out, these emigrants had a clear understanding of the cruel tyranny they sought to escape, particularly the relentless brutality it visited on women and children.
The white South reacted with a fury at the thought of losing a cheap labor supply. Leaders of the exodus were denounced as troublemakers and local agents were driven out of town or beaten. One man who came back to gather his family for the trip to Kansas was seized by whites, who cut off both his hands and threw him in his wife’s lap, saying, “Now go to Kansas to work!” In May 1879, white Mississippians had closed the river and threatened to sink all vessels carrying migrants. General Thomas Conway reported to President Hayes: “Every river landing is blockaded by white enemies of the colored exodus; some of whom are mounted and armed, as if we are at war.”
That December, Democrats in Congress ordered an investigation of the exodus, fearing it was a Republican plot to move voteless Black men into northern areas where they would vote Republican. In the spring of 1880 a Senate committee dominated by Democrats began to call witnesses. African Americans who testified told tales of violence and hatred in the “Solid South” and their hope for liberty and land in Kansas.
Black attorney John H. Johnson of St. Louis described how migrants he interviewed all agreed there was “no security for life, limb, or property” in the South. “We tried to get some of them to return and consulted with them on the subject, and they said they would rather go into the open prairie and starve there than go to the South and stand the impositions that were put upon them there.” “It’s no use,” said one farm laborer, “I will go somewhere else and try to make headway like white workingmen.” Women were adamant about not returning to a South that denied their children an education and violated their daughters with impunity. “What, go back!… I’d sooner starve here,” said a mother.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a leader of the famous exodus of 1879
One of the most interesting witnesses was Benjamin Singleton, a tall, lean Tennessee ex-slave who since 1870 had actively mobilized the migration. He insisted, “I am the whole cause of the Kansas migration!” Because of his exaggeration, some historians have credited Singleton with the Great Exodus.
Neither Southern violence, a congressional investigation, nor Northern resentment halted the Great Exodus. After seventeen hundred pages of testimony, senators had learned that the movement was not a Republican plot but a response to unrelenting racial oppression – and a people’s vision of becoming landowners.
Exodusters arriving in July 1879 at crowded relief facilities, as shown in Harper’s Weekly, July 5, 1879
Leading Black political figures – called “representative colored men” – such as Frederick Douglass, opposed the exodus, fearing it meant abandoning the fight for justice in the South. Some critics, shocked by the emigrants’ poverty and lack of skills, wondered how they would be able to support their families. The Topeka Colored Citizen welcomed the emigrants, editorializing, “It is better to starve to death in Kansas than be shot and killed in the South.” But it sternly warned against laziness in Kansas: “everybody must work or starve.”
Because they arrived in such large numbers, the “Exodusters” encountered immediate relief problems. Topeka’s mayor, Michael Case, refused to spend taxpayers’ money on the emigrants, but Governor John St. John and his wife personally welcomed the Exodusters and helped raise funds for their relief.
Later, as Kansas relief facilities became strained beyond capacity, Singleton, Adams, and other leaders of the migration advised people to choose other destinations. To provide relief for the newcomers, citizens of Kansas collected over $100,000. One-fourth of the aid came from English sympathizers in the form of Staffordshire pottery. Philip D. Armour, after a personal tour of refugee facilities in Wyandotte, Kansas, collected $1,200 in donations from Chicago industrialists and, together with beef from his meat-packing plant, sent it to Kansas.
The word it has been spoken;
The message has been sent:
The prison doors have opened,
and out the prisoners went.
To join the sable army of African descent,
for God is marching on.
Sojourner Truth, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 24, 1879
Some famous antislavery figures arrived to aid the migrants. In late 1879 Sojourner Truth, calling it “the greatest movement of all time,” came to help “her race in Kansas, waking, watching, waiting for the salvation of her people.” Clara Brown left Colorado with donations and volunteered her labor. Laura Haviland, a white abolitionist, joined with African American Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, director of the Kansas Relief Association, to raise money, collect food and clothing, and find work and homes for families.
In May 1880, Harper’s Weekly contrasted the 1879 exodus to Kansas with earlier escapes of slaves.
In a few years, Haviland was able to report remarkable gains: “Comparatively few call for assistance who have been in the state for a year, and most of these are aged grandparents, the sick, and widows with large families of small children. Of those who came in the early Spring of 1879, many have raised from one hundred to four thousand bushels of corn each year, but divide with their friends and relatives who follow them.”
Some fifteen thousand emigrants took jobs as farm laborers or worked for railroads, in mines, or as domestics and launderers. About a third of the newcomers moved to rural areas in the first year. Those with cash were able to purchase twenty thousand acres of land and built three hundred homes. In Graham County, people plowed a virgin prairie with spades. The pioneers soon accumulated property and cash totaling $40,000, hardly a fortune, but more than critics expected.
In 1886 a government survey found that about three-quarters of families owned homes, and because nearly all Black women worked, family income equaled that of white workingmen. The early years on the Kansas plains were also filled with heartbreak. Almost two thousand in Nebraska received a mixed welcome, and a group of 150 from Mississippi were driven out of Lincoln.
In 1880 arriving migrants were welcomed to Kansas by Governor St. John and his wife (in back of right barrel).
Kansas homesteaders – the Taylor family – pose in their Sunday best at their home.
Those who reached Denver in the 1880s found, the Denver Republican reported, “that the owners of houses would not rent to them.” This situation was alleviated when settlers of both races agreed “to build and sell these colored men small houses on the installment plan.”
Life in Kansas continued to be a mixed blessing. In 1888 Frederick Douglass was turned away by a Leavenworth innkeeper, but he was received with honor at one of Topeka’s best hotels. As the Black population headed toward 10 percent of the total, towns began to enforce residential segregation. In 1889 the editor of the American Citizen wrote of Topeka: “There are houses and lots and additions in and near this city where no negro can rent or buy at any price, let him be ever so talented, cultured or refined, and there are others where if he rents or buys, his life and property are in danger.” Lynchings were not uncommon in Kansas, and more people of color than whites died at the hands of white mobs, but Black mobs also intervened to prevent lynchings.
Sons and daughters of the Great Exodus soon graduated from Nebraska high schools. Most large towns and many small ones had an integrated police force and integrated fire departments. Tom Cunningham became Lincoln’s first African American policeman, and Topeka hired thirteen Black police and nine Black firemen. Dr. M. O. Ricketts, an ex-slave who graduated from the University of Nebraska’s College of Medicine in 1884, was twice elected to the state legislature; five others followed in his footsteps. By the end of the century, African Americans in Kansas, better off than their sisters and brothers in the South, voted in elections, and were pleased they made the journey.
The Shores family of musicians settled in Custer County, Nebraska, and were photographed in 1887 displaying their new baby, dog, horses, wagon, and sod house.
Edwin P. McCabe rode to political success with the Exodus. In 1882, when he was thirty-two, McCabe was called “the recognized leader of his race in the west.” At that year’s Republican State convention he was nominated for state auditor by acclamation as the cheers of 6 Black and 394 white delegates, reported a local paper, rent the air and hats flew in the smoke-filled hall.
Nebraska homesteaders (left to right) Grace, Truth, Glen, Robert, and Hannah
Elected twice to this office, McCabe became the highest Black official in West. Then he was not renominated. He left to prospect for gold in California. Finally he headed to Oklahoma and dramatic new political adventures.
Unknown Nebraska pioneer
Mrs. and Mrs. John Adams of Nebraska
At Marble Falls, Texas, prisoners in the 1880s worked at a quarry to obtain the rock used to build the Texas State Capitol.
In the decades after the Civil War, separate Black communities sprouted in the Western states. Historian James M. Smallwood has written, “At different times both during and after Reconstruction, blacks established at least 39 separate communities in fifteen Texas counties to escape white control.” These included Kendleton in Fort Bend County, Shankleville in Newton County, Board House in Blanco County, and such settlements as Andy, Booker, Cologne, Mill City, Roberts, Union City, and Oldham. By 1870 more than five thousand former slaves attended four dozen Texas schools.
African Americans also created their own towns of Dora, Blackdom, and El Vado in New Mexico. In 1883 “Mr. Watkins,” a Black Chicago firefighter, brought families to the Dakota Territory to settle. In Nebraska a number of African American farm colonies had taken root by 1889, one near Crete that used windmills, and another in Harland County begun by two hundred Tennesseans.
In 1908 Army Chaplain Allen Allensworth and Josephine Allensworth, believers in African American economic solidarity, persuaded investors to sponsor a town named after them in Tulare County in central California. By 1913 Allensworth boasted a library, school, church, civic center, and a park.
A young Mrs. Boyer plows her field in Blackdom, New Mexico.
Oliver T. Jackson arrived in Colorado in 1887 and dreamed of starting a community based on Booker T. Washington’s self-help philosophy and an urge to “get back to the land.” A generation later, in 1911, Minerva and Oliver Jackson began Dearfield on 320 acres in Weld County, aided by seventy enthusiastic middle-aged pioneers from Denver. Though they lacked both agricultural experience and capital, Eunice Norris, a resident, rhapsodized of Dearfield’s benefits: “People got along well. It was a peaceful sort of situation: struggling people working hard; they didn’t have time for trouble. There was a spirit of helpfulness.”
O. T. Jackson, founder of Dearfield, Colorado, holding child
Church services at Dearfield
The Jacksons advertised Dearfield as a “valley resort” complete with a gas station, barn pavilion for dances, and a variety of exciting food and drinks. Residents planted a dozen crops, reported one farmer, and “everything came up fine,” only to be devastated by grasshoppers. The community prospered during World War I. Jackson looked forward to creating “the wealthiest Negro community in the world,” but success finally eluded Dearfield’s farmers after an agricultural depression struck in the early 1920s.
Residents of Dearfield, Colorado
Despite fifty years of labor in behalf of a better Colorado, the only state monument to Barney Ford is a hill just southeast of Breckinridge’s city limits called, until 1964, “Nigger Hill.” Actually, white vigilantes drove Ford and five other companions off the place in 1860. Ford and other African American prospectors had begun digging for gold on the spot. They were prohibited from filing a claim by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, so Ford asked a white lawyer to file the claim in his name. The lawyer complied and, as soon as they struck gold, dispatched the local sheriff with an order to the miners to vacate the land in twenty-four hours. That night, as the six prospectors pondered their choices, white riders galloped up to speed their departure and seize their gold. Ford and the others had to flee on foot without food or blankets. Because they could not find any gold, the desperadoes began the legend that Ford had buried it somewhere on the mountainside, which they renamed “Nigger Hill.” Many a man would try his luck on the land, but none struck it rich.
Colorado pioneer Barney Ford
Pioneer H. O. Waggoner
Both Ford and his good friend Henry O. Waggoner had begun their lives enslaved in the South, and once Ford and a gray mule were sold for $460. At seventeen Ford was told his mother had drowned while trying to locate an agent for the Underground Railroad who would help him escape. Both men taught themselves to read and write, and when Ford escaped from slavery, the two met for the first time, in Chicago. Waggoner was a correspondent for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper and a local paper, and they became Underground Railroad conductors. Ford eventually married Julia, Waggoner’s sister-in-law.
When gold was discovered in California, the Fords left for the West Coast. But when their ship docked in Nicaragua, they decided to open the “United States Hotel” there and returned to Chicago richer by five thousand dollars. Ford headed west again, this time alone, to try his luck as a prospector in Colorado. In Denver he was not allowed to board a stagecoach and had to take a job as barber in a wagon train heading west. At Mountain City he was refused a hotel room and had to board with Clara Brown. On more than one occasion before Waggoner joined him in Colorado, white outlaws jumped his claims.
Barney Ford’s Inter-Ocean Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Ford and Waggoner opened various businesses – barbershops, restaurants, and hotels – in Denver. But in 1865 after Colorado’s constitution prohibited equal male suffrage, a prosperous Ford took his family back to Chicago. His Colorado friends asked him to lobby in Washington against the Colorado statehood bill. Ford eagerly stepped into the fray and spoke with Senator Charles Sumner, who helped eliminate the provision. Ford then brought his family back to Denver.
Ford’s Inter-Ocean Hotel, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Together with African American pioneers Ed Sanderlin and W. J. Hardin, Waggoner and Ford established Colorado’s first adult education classes in Waggoner’s home. They taught adults reading, writing, arithmetic, and the principles of democratic government.
Rocky Mountain News ad for Ford’s restaurant, September 1, 1863
Ford’s business ventures were highly successful. He built and ran two fancy, prosperous Inter-Ocean hotels, one in Cheyenne and another in Denver, which catered to everyone from presidents to prospectors. Dinner at the hotel acquired a reputation as far east as Chicago for “the squarest meal between two oceans.” Three times fires gutted his businesses, and each time he managed to rebuild.
Ford became the first African American man to serve on a Colorado grand jury; Waggoner became the first to serve as deputy sheriff of Arapahoe County. In 1882 Barney Ford and Julia were the first people of color invited to a dinner of the Colorado Association of Pioneers.
This Bonham, Texas, band took part in a fair around 1910.
The definitive History of the State of Colorado, published in 1895, allocated to Ford a two-and-a-half-page biography, larger than for territorial governors and other prominent whites. The author, however, did not mention Ford’s race, and later editions of the book replaced his picture with that of a white man. But in 1964 local maps changed “Nigger Hill” to “Barney Ford Hill.”
