Exodusters

Exodusters was a name given to African Americans who migrated from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century, as part of the Exoduster Movement or Exodus of 1879. It was the first general migration of blacks following the Civil War. The movement received substantial organizational support from prominent figures, Benjamin Singleton of Tennessee and Henry Adams of Louisiana. As many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.

The number one cause of black migration out of the South at this time was to escape racial violence or "bulldozing" by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, and widespread repression under the Black Codes, discriminatory laws that rendered blacks second-class citizens after Reconstruction. Vigilantes operated with almost total impunity, and no other issue was of more importance to the majority of southern blacks living in the countryside. Given the extreme level of discrimination and violent intimidation blacks faced in the rural South, the Exodusters can more accurately be described as refugees.

Although blacks greatly outnumbered whites in Louisiana, black armed resistance was practically inconceivable. According to William Murrell in testimony given to the United States Senate, “the white people in Louisiana are better armed and equipped now than during the war.” As evidence of the frightening lawlessness, which empowered the terrorist activities of the Louisiana White League in the mid-1870s, the League “managed to seize a huge cache of arms from the arsenal in New Orleans…worth about $67,000-” stolen directly from the United States government.

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