The Legend of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton and the Exodusters of Kansas.
Hello, cowboys, cowgirls, and everyone who are fond of the western cowboy lifestyle, I know that some of you heard of Benjamin Pap Singleton and the African Americans who settled in the Kansas area. I looked up about him and the Exodusters from different sources to post accurate facts, so here it is.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was born as a slave in 1809 in Tennessee where was several times sold as a slave, but he managed to escape. He fled to the northern part of the Midwest, possibly close to Canada. Sources claimed that he settled in Michigan and established and operated a secret boardinghouse for escaped slaves. After the Civil War and the emancipation, Singleton returned to Tennessee where he convinced himself to help his people to improve their lives.
In the late 1860s, he began to organizing an effort to buy up Tennessee farmland for blacks, but failed when the white landowners refused to sell, even at a fair price. According to some sources, African Americans enjoyed rights and privileges as American citizens in the South, but that changed when the federal troops were removed, their rights were no longer secure. The Ku Klux Klan set up a campaign to strike terror and exterminate the blacks who refused to submit their will and the sharecropping system virtually re-enslaved Black tenant farmers.
Singleton set his sight on Kansas as he considered that it was famous for Jim Brown’s efforts and it’s struggle against slavery. He also considered the state new Canaan and claimed himself as black Moses. Benjamin Singleton and his partner named Columbus Johnson staked out a black settlement in Cherokee County, but it failed, and a second settlement in Morris County. Singleton spread the words about his settlement as he traveled through the South organizing parties to colonize in Kansas, as well as distributed promotional posters that circulated widely across the south, and he formed a company along with Johnson that helped hundreds of blacks move to Kansas between 1877 and 1979. Nearly 300 African Americans followed Singleton to Kansas, some lived in “Singleton’s colony in Cherokee County, others settled in Wyandotte, in Topeka's Tennessee Town, and in Dunlap Colony near present Emporia. When the blacks headed west, they been described as Exodusters and Benjamin Singleton himself described as the “Father of the Exodus”. More sources claimed that 50,000 blacks fled to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois, but some had been turned back by whites patrolling the rivers and roads. By the year 1879, it became known as the year of the “Great Exodus”.
In 1880, Benjamin Singleton was called testify at the Congressional hearings about the Exodusters. Singleton began a new phase in his campaign to aid his people, organizing a party called the United Colored Links in the black section of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because so many of that state lived there. Affiliated with the Greenbacks, a white workers' party that called for fundamental social change in the United States, Singleton's Links party was intended to help African Americans acquire their own factories and start their own industries. Unfortunately, there was not enough capital within the black community to achieve this goal because blacks who migrated to the state had no money nor economic resource as they arrived daily by hundred and struggled economically. The Black communities appealed to the state government for assistance, resulting in the creation of the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association in 1879. The mission of the KFRA was to collect and distribute resources for struggling African Americans in Kansas. Though many African Americans came unprepared, most who remained were able to improve the quality of their lives and made important contributions to the state and the communities in which they lived.
In 1883, Benjamin Singleton shifted his sights again and founded an organization called the Chief League, which encouraged blacks to emigrate to the island of Cyprus. Few responded to his call, so in 1885 he formed the Trans-Atlantic Society to help black people move back to their ancestral homeland in Africa, but, unfortunately, by 1887, this group had been proven unsuccessful. Singleton retired from his self-appointed mission due to poor health and he died in 1892 in St. Louis. His legacy lives on as his influence spread among the African American communities, inspired them to established a society in which blacks owned lands, directed industries, and held power would live on. It was probably the first black organization that was successful at as to improve African Americans to uplift themselves and contribute among within themselves. The second Black/African American organizations that followed Benjamin Singleton’s movement’s footstep is Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association which it was successful in the 1920s as it encouraged black people globally.