Exodusters - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Exodusters were a name given to African Americans who moved from states that were along the Mississippi River to Kansas. This happened in the late 1800s. It was called the Exoduster movement or the Exodus of 1879.[1] It was the first migration of black people after the American Civil War.[2] About 40,000 black people moved from the south to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado.[3]

Black people moved from the south because they were treated very bad. They were running away from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, and they were running away from black codes and Jim Crow laws. They were treated like second-class citizens.[4] This was during Reconstruction.

References[change | change source]

  1. Van Deusen, John G. (1936). "The Exodus of 1879". The Journal of Negro History. 21 (2). Association for the Study of African American Life and History: 111–129. doi:10.2307/2714567. JSTOR 2714567. S2CID 224830636.
  2. Johnson, Daniel M.; Campbell, Rex R. (1981). Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 51. ISBN 0-8223-0449-X. OCLC 6421175.
  3. "Slavery in America Encyclopedia". Archived from the original on 2007-08-27. Retrieved 2007-10-19.
  4. Gates, Henry Louis (1999). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. Basic Civitas Books. pp. 722. ISBN 0-465-00071-1.