What the 'western exodus' of blacks fleeing racism in the South looked like, starting in 1870.
Share This StoryTweetShareSharePinEmailCommentIn the decade after the Civil War, former slaves in the South searched for a way out. They were sickened and exhausted by the racist terrorism that had followed emancipation. Though freed from slavery, African Americans were routinely cheated, attacked and killed by whites who tolerated them barely, if at all.
Some are well known. The transatlantic and domestic slave trades are the largest of the migrations and also the only ones that were involuntary. The Great Migration of the 20th century – the movement of blacks from the rural South to the cities of the North – is also a touchstone of popular history. The migration timeline starts in the 15th century with the transatlantic slave trade. From 1492 to 1776, about 6.5 million people came to the Western Hemisphere. Only 1 million of them were Europeans; the rest were enslaved Africans.
Most of the millions of slaves brought to the New World went to the Caribbean and South America. An estimated 500,000 were taken directly from Africa to North America. But those numbers were buttressed by the domestic slave trade, which started in the 1760s – a half century before legal importation of slaves ended.
In fact, the only asset many former slaves had was their labor, Painter wrote in "Exodusters." They rented the land they worked, usually paying white landlords with a share of the crop. The landlord kept the books, so the workers invariably came up short. .oembed-frame { width: 100%; height: 100%; margin: 0; border: 0; } function oembedResizeIframe { data=JSON.parse; for; oembedResizeIframe; } window.addEventListener; His colonies eventually faltered, but his efforts flourished. As conditions in the South became more unbearable, blacks left by the thousands in a movement Harper’s Magazine called “The Great Negro Exodus.” Because of Singleton’s fliers, many blacks headed to Kansas. But they went north as well.
“What was so devastating in slavery was the inability to move. Given that, we see lots of movement,” Painter said. “Americans are famously movers. Everywhere you look in American history, you will find people on the move.”
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