Exoduster Movement

• The American Civil War ended

  1865
• The anti-slavery north won the American Civil War
• Over four million African-Americans were freed from slavery in 1865
• Many of the southern states could not accept this and they continued to try and restrict black Americans freedom
• Ways the southern states restricted black Americans freedom

  • The KKK terrorised black Americans throughout the southern states and used intimidation to prevent black Americans form voting
  • The southern states forced many black Americans into sharecropping
• Sharecropping

  A system where a landlord gives a tenant some land in return for a proportion of the crops they grow, keeping black farmers working on white plantations for free
• Life for black Americans remained difficult in the southern states
• Some black Americans decided to move west to file homestead claims
• Many began to move to Kansas, which had always been a free state
• Exodusters

  • Black Americans who moved west to Kansas
  • Much of the good farmland was already taken by 1880
  • Left with difficult farming land and struggled to survive
  • Many had believed the land would be free but struggled to afford the fee to file a homestead claim
  • Many became ill on the journey to Kansas, as they had travelled through areas infected with yellow fever
• Benjamin Singleton


  A former slave who pioneered the move of black Americans to Kansas by advertising it to those still living in the south
• By 1880, over 43,000 black Americans had settled in Kansas
• A rumour spread that the US government was giving away free land for ex-slaves in Kansas

  1879
• Exodusters

  Black Americans who moved west to Kansas
• Kansas government's response

  Gave Exodusters a small amount of state funding to help them begin their life in Kansas
• White Americans in the southern states were less supportive, believing it was wrong of the government to help the migrants
• News of the difficulties of life in Kansas spread back to the south

  The amount of new migrants began to decline by the 1880's