Leaving Texas: The “Texodusters” (Feb 5, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
When the Civil War ended and with it the last vestiges of slavery in the United States, the newly freed enslaved, termed “Freedmen,” celebrated with the spirit of a people finally granted relief from a centuries-old prayer. However, it did not take long for those celebrations to fade and reality to take hold: the “new” South was a whole lot like the old, a place rife with oppression, violence, and discrimination. “Black codes,” disenfranchisement, and limited economic opportunity brought many Texas Freedmen to come to the conclusion that their best course of action was to leave a place that did not seem to want or value them, and perhaps find someplace else that offered a better life. For some of these “Texodusters,” as they have come to be called, Kansas was just that place.
Kansas was seen by many African Americans at the time as somewhat of a “promised land,” both because of its state motto—“Free State”—and the reputation it had gained as a result of the antebellum actions of abolitionist John Brown. One of the first formerly enslaved men to come to Kansas was Tennessean Benjamin “Pap” Singleton. He homesteaded land in the state and then began to first write letters home, and then go back to Tennessee on “recruiting visits” to lure former slaves to Kansas. Singleton’s efforts, along with conditions and other inducements, made Kansas the leading destination for many of these migrants (“Exodusters”), although others went to places such as Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado, and even California.
“Kansas Fever” also spread to Freedmen in Texas, and hit a peak in 1879. Between 1879 and 1880, thousands of African Texans, with the heaviest majority coming from Washington, Burleson, Grimes, Nacogdoches, Walker, and Waller counties, decided to leave the oppression and violence of East Texas. Most Texans traveled to Parsons, Kansas because it was the terminus of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad. Those that did not travel by train left Texas in long “wagon trains.” Once word began to get out that so many Freedmen were leaving Texas, which had the potential of greatly reducing the labor force, some white landowners began to offer economic inducements, such as reducing rentals on farms, in order to convince their black sharecroppers and tenants to remain.
The “exodus” to Kansas, as well as other places in the West, represented something else to these formerly enslaved people. Free movement was one of the things most restricted by the conditions of slavery. Their decision to move was one they made themselves, so for many it represented the epitome of “freedom.” In doing so, they sought better lives for themselves and rejected the violent white supremacist regime that was taking hold in the post-Reconstruction South.
Hardships, discrimination, and exploitation did not end in the “promised land” of Kansas. Many of the new residents gathered in “black towns,” small farming communities adjacent to the homesteaded farms that the former slaves claimed. As those towns grew so did resentment from some whites in the region, and that often led to conflict and tension. More widespread were incidents of land fraud and other swindles directed toward incoming “dusters.” Men sold them bogus railroad tickets, as well as illegal land titles. Such actions led some of the new migrants to leave Kansas, but almost none of them traveled back to Texas or any of their other former homes in the South. Most traveled farther west, with many finding new homes—and establishing burgeoning African American communities—within the growing cities of California.
These migrants, who often lived on marginal land, had to also face the hardships of drought, soil that was difficult to cultivate, and also the difficulty of trying to begin businesses and a life without access to adequate capital—and few if any resources to borrow or acquire funding. Freedmen migration to the West from Texas and the rest of the South began to slow precipitously in the 1880s and had become not more than a trickle by 1900.
It is difficult to find exact figures for the numbers of “Texodusters.” Most chroniclers agree that near 12,000 people left, and at least 7,000 of those left in the few months between the fall of 1879 and the spring of 1880. The town of Nicodemus, Kansas became the largest and most well-known of the “exoduster towns,” but scores of them dotted the Kansas landscape into the early 1900s. Many of those towns began to disappear in the early twentieth century as another migration—often called the “Great Migration”—led African Americans to leave the rural countryside and relocate to urban areas. Although odds were often stacked against these formerly oppressed people, their determination to carve a life for themselves has left a legacy. You can still see remnants of these important places, locales that offered some refuge to the oppressed during a dark period.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.