ABSTRACT
The Exodusters were the first mass movement of blacks after the Civil War, but they would be joined in the 20th century by millions of others fleeing the South for a better life in the North, West, and Midwest. Thousands of ex-slaves answered the call sounded by Benjamin 'Pap' Singleton, a minister from Tennessee, to abandon the racial prejudice of the South and go West. Singleton issued circulars like 'The Advantage of Living in a Free State', encouraging blacks to follow him to Kansas. In a time where their political rights were being trampled, lynchings were on the rise, and economic depressions made sharecropping and tenant farming resemble slavery, some Southern blacks decided they had no future in the South. The largest organized exodus to Kansas began in Nashville in 1880, where more than 60,000 unhappy blacks gathered to begin a journey to a new life.
