Benjamin Singleton (also known as the "Father of the Black Exodus," or "Pap") was instrumental in bringing exodusters into Kansas during the migration. Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was born a slave in Nashville, Tennessee in 1809 (the exact date is unknown, records of slaves births were generally not well kept). Singleton became a skilled carpenter at an early age and often tried to run away. He escaped to freedom in 1846 by traveling on a route of the Underground Railroad and soon Singleton was able to reach Canada. He remained there for a year before relocating to Detroit where he worked by day as a carpenter and at night on the Underground Railroad. After the end of the Civil War, Singleton moved back to Nashville to work as a carpenter.
Although Singleton was living as a free man, he was not free from racial oppression. His experiences in Nashville led Singleton to believe that Black Americans would never truly feel free in the South. This urge drove his first efforts to help African Americans purchase separate farming communities in his native Tennessee during the late 1860s. By 1869, Singleton was working with Columbus M. Johnson, a local minister for a way to develop economic independence for Black Americans. Singleton and Johnson established the Edgefield Real Estate Association in 1874. The purpose of the association was to help Black Americans own property in Nashville’s surrounding area.
His efforts to secure property and homes for African Americans did not come to fruition due to high land prices and concerns about overcoming historical racial animosities. Singleton concluded that Blacks would never achieve economic equality in the White-dominated South. “The whites had the lands and the blacks nothin’ but their freedom,” he later told a Congressional committee. “By and by the Fifteenth Amendment came along, and the carpetbaggers and my poor people thought they was going to have Canaan right off. But I knowed better”. Within one year of establishing the business, Singleton began researching how to develop Black American colonies in the West. That same year, the business was renamed the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association.
By 1877, the Federal government had left the southern states and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan made terrorizing Black Americans a way of life. Singleton sought a pragmatic racial separatism from White Southerners. Singleton and Columbus Johnson, visited Kansas in 1877 and toured several potential sites for African American farming colonies. Upon their return to Nashville, Singleton and Johnson created leaflets and handouts proclaiming the quality of life in Kansas. Why Kansas? It had plenty of vacant land and few people. The Homestead Act of 1862 said that any U.S. citizen could own 160 acres there if they lived on the land for five years, farmed it, and built a home on it. Plus the benefits of predominately living with members of one’s own race.
Singleton used this moment to lead 73 settlers to Cherokee County in Kansas. Immediately, the group began negotiating to purchase land along the Missouri River, Fort Scott, and Gulf Railroad. Yet, the price of the land was too high. Singleton then began searching for government land through the Homestead Act. The following year he conveyed an even larger group from Nashville to Dunlap County, Kansas. By the spring of 1878, Singleton’s group boarded steamboats in Nashville Tennessee for Kansas. In 1879, an estimated 2500 settlers left Nashville and Sumner County. They named the area Dunlap Colony. Even though new Black settlers struggled to build and grow their communities in Kansas, Singleton continued to advocate for migration to “Sunny Kansas.”
Singleton called for “good citizens” but no loafers, politicians or educated African Americans. On his circulars, he refers to himself as either the “Father of the Exodus,” or “Moses of the Colored Exodus.” The mass migration of African Americans from Tennessee to Kansas inspired similar migrations from and to other states. Large numbers of former slaves and their children left states such as Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and Louisiana for destinations in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado and Oklahoma. In 1879, an estimated 50,000 freed Black Americans had left the South and headed to the West. These men, women, and children relocated to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois.
They wanted to become landowners, have educational resources for their children and an escape from the racial oppression they faced in the South. A more desperate and economically disadvantaged group, collectively known as “Exodusters,” followed the relatively wealthy Singleton colonists into Kansas. Although many had no connection with Singleton, many built relationships settlers from Dunlap Colony. When local White residents began to protest the arrival of Black Americans, Singleton supported their arrival. These Exodusters, hailed largely from Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. Most traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis—where, lacking funds, many got stuck waiting for assistance to travel the final leg of their journey.
Unlike Singleton’s carefully planned and executed migrations, the Exodusters were a more spontaneous migratory movement of former slaves seeking both a better life and an escape from the resurgent racism in the former Confederacy. Singleton had mixed feelings about the Exodusters. He undoubtedly felt sympathy for their poverty and empathy for their desire to leave the South, but they posed a threat to his colonies’ success. Singleton envisioned his communities as places of racial solidarity, but even so, the farm colonies operated on thin margins and would not be able to accommodate large numbers of additional, unplanned immigrants.
How did these migrants make out? Most had a hard time and were unprepared for the flat, treeless plains. Many of the migrants lived in dugout homes — which means they were practically living underground for a time, as was the case with a lot of Kansas pioneers. Some didn’t remain in rural Kansas for long, run off by the lack of water, blizzards, prairie fires and other difficulties of life in that part of the country. “Considerable suffering is reported among the exodusters here,” reported the Parsons [Kansas] Weekly Sun on January 15, 1880. Many of the citizens of Kansas were not happy about the migration. “We want it understood that the exodus is a curse to Kansas,” the Burlington Independent said. “It is a weary and loathsome burden to the people.”
Some African American leaders, such as P.B.S Pinchback and Blanche K. Bruce were critical of the movement. They objected to any scheme of moving masses of negroes into the North. Frederick Douglass vehemently oppose the exodus movement and argue that it was best for the Black laborers to remain in the South. Douglass maintained that Southern freed people should remain in the South and fight for their rights as citizens rather than leave. He felt that such emigration schemes were “delusional and a scam.” In an essay on the exodus, Douglass proclaimed that all people needed a “native land” and that “wandering” was not good for any group of people.
Against these race leaders Singleton spoke with considerable feeling. "They had good luck," he said, "and now are listening to false prophets; they have boosted up and got their heads a whirlin', and now they think they must judge things from where they stand, when the fact is the possum is lower down the tree--down nigh to the roots;" they either 'saw darkly' or were playing into the hands of the southern planters who feared a scarcity of labor. To those who objected that negroes without means should not come to Kansas he replied that "it is because they are poor that they want to get away. If they had plenty they wouldn't want to come. It's to better their condition that they are thinking of. That's what white men go to new countries for, isn't it? Who was the homestead law made for if it was not for poor men?"
However, Pap was finally made to see that popular opinion in Kansas was not in favor of encouraging further migration of "paupers," and through the influence of the whites he was brought to the point where he used his influence to discourage the exodus movement. But unwillingly did he come to this. In May, 1879, he had denounced in advance a meeting of the National Negro Convention soon to be held at Nashville for the purpose of considering the causes of the exodus and the condition of the blacks. He feared that the Negroes like Douglass and Pinchback would control the convention and try to keep the Blacks in the South. He wanted the Kansas Negro Convention, which was to be held about the same time, to inform southern negroes about Kansas and assist them to get there.
Overall, some 25,000 freedmen migrated from the South to Kansas. The migration began to decrease in the summer of 1879. By 1880, according to the United States Census, 5,418 African Americans from Tennessee lived in Kansas. In 1880, he spoke before the U.S. Senate to discuss the reasons Black Americans were leaving the South for the West. In his testimony explained at length his plans and methods As a result, Singleton returned to Kansas as a spokesperson for Exodusters. By 1880, so many Black Americans had arrived in Dunlap Colony and its surrounding areas that it caused a financial burden to settlers. As a result, the Presbyterian Church assumed financial control of the area. The "Kansas Freedmen's Relief Association" was organize in order to save some of the needy Blacks from starvation, and to provide schools.
The self-proclaimed "Father of the Black Exodus" would spend the rest of his life after the Kansas migration supporting various Back-to-Africa movements. In 1883, he attempted to encourage and aid Blacks in emigrating to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which he thought would eventually become an Afro-American nation. When that failed, Benjamin was again attracted by the Liberian or Ethiopian movement. In 1885 Singleton, organized the United Transatlantic Society, intending to have all Blacks relocate from the U.S to the British colony, Sierra Leone off the coast of Africa. The United Transatlantic Society had considerable strength for several years; it held regular meetings and always passed resolutions in favor of Black "national existence" in Liberia.
The United Transatlantic Society lasted until 1887, but it never managed to send anyone to Africa. With his communities established, Singleton moved into Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1890s, and began work on an urban, industrial equivalent to his agricultural colonies. Singleton called his new organization the United Colored Links. The purpose of the organization was to provide support to Black Americans to establish businesses, schools, and other community resources. After a surge in membership following its initial summer convention, the United Colored Links gradually lost membership and receded into obscurity. The aging Benjamin retired from his self-imposed mission to aid Blacks. In 1884 the African American community of St. Louis gave him a celebration, and so it was until he died at Topeka in 1892 at the age of eighty-three.