Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction

I highly recommend this book to history buffs. I give this book a 4 star. The real reason for Black folks migrating to Kansas was being murdered and terrorized by the white population, plain and simple. There was talk of going to Africa, specifically to Liberia, but the cost to get there was out of the reach of the masses of poor freeman. They just wanted to left alone to live their lives in peace and dignity. Unfortunately, only a small number were able to get to Kansas. There was a successful and concerted effort by the government to keep their cheap black labor in the South on the plantations, under near slave conditions. When many of our ancestors got to Saint Louis waiting for a boat to take them across the river, the river boatmen were made to ignore the mass of humanity or the shores or suffer the consequences. I recommend this book.

The book was an easy and very informative read for me. I am the family historian and this added additional depth to my family research. When you delve into the history during the time your ancestors were living and experiencing it, it adds another dimension to your research. My mother's famiy were slaves in Overton Co. Tennessee and made the exodus to Kansas.

This is a good solid historical account. Well documented and relentless in the telling of the story. It was another reminder for me of the intensity of the oppression of the American southern blacks before and after the Civil War. Once Reconstruction was effectively ended in 1876, the black people of the South were abandoned by the politicians of the North and left to the tender mercies of the southern planters and their hired help. The Exoduster movement involved the movement of approximately 6,000 southern blacks from the South to Kansas starting around 1876 and peaking in 1879. It was a reaction to the terrorism used by the planter class and the white authorities of that time to keep the blacks in their place politically and economically. The fact that blacks outnumbered the white planter class and their minions in parts of the South meant that "appropriate methods" needed to be used by these same people to prevent the black populace from voting. A story worth telling and well told by the author. It is a well documented and footnoted book. The book pays homage to the courageous spirit of the Exodusters, but also provides a reality check against those that would have us conveniently forget terrible injustices in our history. Something to remember as we go forward in our grand national adventures in this year of our Lord, 2007.

The migration of the Exodusters, blacks who moved to Kansas searching for a place in which to be truly free, is a massive and massively overlooked part of history. Nell Painter, in her book Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction, does a credible job of restoring this overlooked part of frontier history to the realm of academic discussion. It is a good book, yet, disturbingly, the voice of the Exodusters is missing. Painter claims that the exact number of Exodusters is unknown, but estimates from 6,000 to 20,000 have been made (184). Constrained by the prices gouged out of their harvests by tenant bosses, they dreamed of a land of milk and honey. This dream, in turn, with a small amount of exaggeration, helped to send them looking in Kansas for what they wanted. Yet, most of this book is about the conditions that led to the movement of the Exodusters and not what they found there, or how they adapted to life in a strange land. There are no reminiscences, no narratives, or stories from descendents. Painter points out the Southern credit system crushed them economically (55), that their schools were inferior (50) because of the practice of hiring deficient white teachers over exemplary black instructors, but there is no mention of whether or not change was achieved in Kansas. Stylistically, Painter has the odd habit of taking end paragraphs to both sum up the previous chapter and introduce the next chapter. It breaks the flow of the book and makes it difficult to read. Also at times, Painter seems to be saying too much too fast. Some of her ideas, the study of black schools and the racial politics that controlled them, and the lineage of the black spiritual/political leaders for example, are books in themselves. Early on, Painter posits that class was just as important as race in the history of the Exodusters (vii). Respectable African-Americans, that is those who agreed with the Anglos, who had been to white schools and spoke like the whites, came out against the Exoduster movement, and for the political party of the planter. Interestingly enough, in the discussion of class issues, Painter doesn't touch much on the poor whites and how they felt about the black movement to Kansas. For example, whether it became easier for them to find work and buy land. Painter is silent on this issue, other than mentioning that poor whites had at one point united with poor blacks in political clubs (39). Painter argues that it was the enactment of certain rules that led to the Southern black's desire to leave the South. These rules forced black membership in "clubs" that obligated them to vote a Democratic party line, required passes to move around freely, and attempted to stop them for owning property. The well-known poll tax (37) is an example of these rules that were an attempt to control and curtail the political power of the African American. These rules led to stress and that stress bred a desire to move wheth

A very comprehensive look at the events precedeing and including Black migration from the South after the Civil War. A must read for anyone interested in Black history or the Civil War.