The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters

Bryan M. Jack

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780826266163
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the aftermath of the Civil War, thousands of former slaves made their way from the South to the Kansas plains. Called "Exodusters, " they were searching for their own promised land. Bryan Jack now tells the story of this American exodus as it played out in St. Louis, a key stop in the journey west.

Many of the Exodusters landed on the St. Louis levee destitute, appearing more as refugees than as homesteaders, and city officials refused aid for fear of encouraging more migrants. To the stranded Exodusters, St. Louis became a barrier as formidable as the Red Sea, and Jack tells how the city's African American community organized relief in response to this crisis and provided the migrants with funds to continue their journey.

The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters tells of former slaves such as George Rogers and Jacob Stevens, who fled violence and intimidation in Louisiana and Mississippi. It documents the efforts of individuals in St. Louis, such as Charlton Tandy, Moses Dickson, and Rev. John Turner, who reached out to help them. But it also shows that black aid to the Exodusters was more than charity. Jack argues that community support was a form of collective resistance to white supremacy and segregation as well as a statement for freedom and self-direction—reflecting an understanding that if the Exodusters' right to freedom of movement was limited, so would be the rights of all African Americans. He also discusses divisions within the African American community and among its leaders regarding the nature of aid and even whether it should be provided.

In telling of the community's efforts—a commitment to civil rights that had started well before the Civil War—Jack provides a more complete picture of St. Louis as a city, of Missouri as a state, and of African American life in an era of dramatic change. Blending African American, southern, western, and labor history, The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters offers an important new lens for exploring the complex racial relationships that existed within post-Reconstruction America.

1

Escape

I think I am too good a man to stay down there
and be killed, and don’t intend to do it.

— JACOB STEVENS, EXODUSTER

George Rogers, a hard-working sharecropper with little to show for it, had lived a difficult life. By 1879, when Rogers was thirty years old, he had experienced the worst that America had to offer—slavery, terror, and grinding poverty. After years spent toiling in the Southern cotton fields, with his body bent under a blazing sun, Rogers was only further in debt. For some, such hopelessness would lead to both calloused hands and a calloused heart. George Rogers did feel frustration, but remarkably, he also felt hope—hope that he could still give his children a chance at a better life. More than anything else, though, he felt fear.

In the previous decade, Rogers, from Madison Parish, Louisiana, had witnessed groups of white ruffians (commonly known as bulldozers) and night riders terrorizing and murdering other African Americans, and he feared they might kill him as well. Once, in nearby Franklin Parish, Rogers had seen the mutilated body of an eighteen-year-old victim of mob violence. Coming upon the scene the morning after the murder, Rogers spoke with the young man’s mother and learned that as many as thirty men had targeted their victim for “being a smart boy” who read newspapers. The mob, dressed in Ku Klux Klan attire, invaded the woman’s home, grabbed her son, and, ignoring the mother’s cries, shot him in cold blood. They moved back outside, leaving him to die, but the young man did not die immediately; the pain and shock from his wounds caused him to moan and cry out. Unable to comfort her son, his mother begged him to keep silent so that his cries would not draw the attention of the mob. Unfortunately, the young man continued to loudly moan, and the mob eventually heard his voice and burst through the door to finish the job. Years later, the scene was still vivid in George Rogers’s mind: they “shot him and shot him all to pieces and made sure of it.”¹

After witnessing further violent acts, and hearing rumors of more to come, Rogers began fearing for his own life, and the lives of his wife and three children. To escape, he joined approximately fifty other people and boarded a northern-bound boat to ride the Mississippi River out of Louisiana to safety. Kansas was his ultimate goal; he had heard that Kansas was a fertile land that would allow him to support his family in safety and give his children a chance at a future. African Americans who left the South for Kansas in the spring and summer of 1879 were known as Exodusters, their name derived from the biblical story that spoke of escape from oppression and slavery. Like many Exodusters, George Rogers had only enough money to pay his riverboat passage to St. Louis; to complete his journey he was going to need help. In St. Louis, he would find it as the St. Louis African American community organized to support his and others’ attempts to start a new life. This community, its role in aiding the Exodus during its most intense period in the spring of 1879, and how that role contributed to the securing of African American freedom, are the focus of this study.²

Unfortunately, George Rogers’s story was not unique; many people told similar stories of violence and intimidation, experienced in person or learned through third parties. African Americans had been trickling out of the South for years, but in the spring of 1879, thousands began leaving at once. In some areas, the movement had been growing since the end of 1878; by early 1879, it was a reality. The Exodusters were convinced that their movement would be successful, even in the face of inadequate funds and lack of preparation or leadership. Without a Moses to lead the escape en masse, the migration instead was more personal, as individuals, families, and small groups made decisions about when, where, and how to leave. One Exoduster expressed the common sentiment that “every black man is his own Moses in this exodus.” In spite of the lack of planning and organization, the Exodusters’ objective was consistently uniform, as nearly all Exodusters set their sights on Kansas, a land that came to represent freedom to the migrants. Inducements to return to the South, deprivation, and observers’ warnings of hardships failed to convince the Exodusters to give up their migration.³

The reasons that people gave for leaving the South during the Exodus of 1879 typically fell into three categories: lack of personal safety, lack of political opportunity, and lack of economic opportunity. Related and overlapping, these reasons were evident as Southern landowners exploited African American sharecroppers, threatened them with violence if they reacted, and used violence to maintain control of the political and judicial systems. Threats and violence directed at politically active African American Republicans guaranteed white Democratic Redeemer domination of the Southern political system. Violence directed at nonpolitical African Americans served as a warning to everyone that whites would stop at nothing to ensure domination of life in the post-slavery South.⁴

As George Rogers’s story illustrates, bulldozers viewed as threats any African Americans who were challenging the system by becoming better informed; thus the killing of the young man for being a “smart boy” who dared to read newspapers. As Reconstruction ended and hopes of creating a racially moderate society became more distant, the system of white supremacy in the South became more overt. This “tri-partite system of social, political, and economic domination” (as Aldon Morris defines it) remained in place until the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and left many African Americans like George Rogers with the feeling that escape from the South was their only option. If they remained in the South, they feared that the neoslavery of the sharecropping and tenant system would engulf them, or, even worse, that the chattel slave system would be reinstated and reenslavement would follow. African Americans had been living with bulldozing and violence for several years, and had suffered under slavery before that. As white Redeemers gained an even tighter hold on Southern areas, a future that threatened even worse oppression sparked a desire in many blacks to leave.⁵

Their fears of exploitation had foundation. A. G. Horn, editor of the Meridian, Mississippi, Mercury, spelled out many Redeemers’ goals toward African Americans. Horn wrote, “We would like to engrave a prophecy on stone, to be read by generations in the future. The Negroes in these states will be slaves again or cease to be. Their sole refuge from extinction will be in slavery to the white man.” Orange Pucket, a sharecropper who joined the Exodus, spoke of the fear of reenslavement when he stated, “there is a general talk among the whites and colored people, that Jeff Davis will run for President of the Southern States; and the colored people are afraid that they will be made slaves again.” Although such a development might sound outlandish to modern ears, for a group of people for whom reading the newspapers was a life-and-death matter, it was a very real fear. For Pucket, such a scenario felt especially likely because he had witnessed white planters’ attempts to control the African American population by controlling their mobility. He stated, “They are already trying to prevent their going from one plantation to another without a pass. They tell us that we must submit to it or they will make us do so with muskets.” To further illustrate the point that his freedom was tenuous and threatened by whites, when Pucket left for Kansas, a white planter “shook his fist in my face, and said, ‘Damn you, sir, you are my property’” before Pucket escaped.⁶

Fortunately, some of the Exodusters’ stories are available to us through newspaper interviews and sworn affidavits given while they were on their journey or shortly after they reached Kansas. In St. Louis, relief leaders provided a notary public to take Exoduster statements that were later introduced into congressional testimony. The St. Louis Commission sent Colonel Frank Fletcher to Kansas to report on the condition of the Exodusters; in doing so, Fletcher conducted interviews with the migrants. Laura Haviland, a Quaker and former abolitionist who led Exoduster relief efforts in Kansas, conducted interviews with Exodusters as well.

Unfortunately, owing to the attitudes of the period, the overwhelming majority of these recorded sources were male. The Exodus of 1879 was primarily a movement of families—men, women, children, old people, and young people were all fleeing the South. One Exoduster was asked why so many old people were making a trip in which they would be more of a burden than a help. He explained that if their fathers and mothers were left behind in the South, they would be killed. In spite of the variety of ages and the presence of both genders, it was the adult men who were speaking for the movement in the affidavits and the interviews, leaving the women and children seemingly silent. However, groups that may seem silent often are not. Building on the work of Elsa Barkley Brown, Robin DG Kelley notes that the family is a central institution of political ideological formation. Although only men were allowed to vote, women and even children had their say as “newly emancipated African Americans viewed the franchise as the collective property of the whole family.” Consequently, Kelley argues, “households hold the key to understanding particular episodes of black working-class resistance.”⁷

The Exodus of 1879 was an archetypal example of working-class resistance, and it is reasonable to assume that the families “owned” their migration similar to how they “owned” the franchise of their men. Although most of the voices that we are hearing are male, the thoughts and hopes that they are expressing are collective. However, not all of the voices we are hearing are male. One example of a female Exoduster speaking for the group occurred on the St. Louis riverfront early in the migration. When a reporter informed a group of Exodusters that they were mistaken to expect government help of free transportation, land, and mules, and then asked them if they would soon be returning South, a woman holding a baby immediately replied loudly and clearly, “What, go back! Oh, no; I’d sooner starve here!”⁸

The woman who was quoted was stating the same sentiment that the numerous men who were quoted elsewhere expressed, that she would just as soon die in freedom than submit to reenslavement. Another example of how women took ownership of the migration appears in Frank Fletcher’s report on the condition of the Exodusters. Fletcher notes that when Southern landowners sent men to Kansas to persuade the Exodusters to return home (and promised to pay their passage back to the South) it was “the women who drove them off.” The interviews, affidavits, and other sources allow, in many ways, the Exodusters to speak for themselves. Their voices will help us to better understand the motivations that would make thousands of people leave their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs and endure an arduous flight to a land that most of them had never seen.⁹

Charlton Tandy spoke with many of the female Exodusters as they passed through St. Louis. Although he did not obtain affidavits from them, he later testified to Congress that in talking to the women he learned that the threat of sexual exploitation was a fact of life for many African American women in the South. Echoing the Cult of True Womanhood which held that purity of body was the female ideal, Tandy testified that African American women “were desirous of being virtuous and living a pure life, for they regarded their virtue just as much as the Anglo-Saxon did, and they wanted to rear their children up—their girls—to live a virtuous and industrious life.” However, their purity was threatened because they were often the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of white men. He continued, “If they [white men] saw a likely, intelligent, and buxom colored girl, these men would have them, and it has become innate to pursue that course in having negro women, and they said to me that while they were desirous of being virtuous and all that kind of thing, that yet they were overawed with fear with these men.” The proof of the years of sexual exploitation was written, in Tandy’s opinion, in faces all across the South. He stated, “And it is plain to every one’s eyes that if you go South, you can see them there ring-streaked like the cattle in olden times, by the thousand.”¹⁰ In graphic testimony, Tandy related gruesome stories of violence against African American women in the South. One female Exoduster stated to Tandy and other witnesses that bulldozers had taken her baby from her arms and dashed its head against a tree, killing it. When asked for proof, the woman showed Tandy the blood of her child that stained the apron she still wore. Tandy later told a story related to him by Exodusters from Grand Gulf, in Warren County, Mississippi. A force of thirty white men went to the house of an Exoduster to lynch him before he could leave for Kansas, but the man escaped. In retribution, the bulldozers lynched the man’s pregnant wife, hanging her from a nearby tree and crushing the baby that was delivered as she died. The violent experiences that they had lived or heard about convinced many Exodusters to leave the South.¹¹

Historians and sociologists often describe migration of people from one area to another through a theory known as “push-pull.” In short, this theory holds that “push” factors compel people to leave an area while “pull” factors help determine migrants’ intended destination. These push-pull reasons are not always equal. People may have few reasons for leaving their homes but still leave because they are pulled by strong forces in their destination. Conversely, people might have significant push factors causing them to leave and give little thought to where they land. During the Exodus of 1879, the push factors were the social, political, and economic subjugation that African Americans faced in the South. Pull factors included Kansas’s reputation as a “free state” before the Civil War (especially as the home of John Brown), the opportunity for land ownership that Exodusters thought Kansas provided, previous African American migration to Kansas, and words of encouragement from Kansas officials.¹²

The Exodusters had numerous valid reasons for leaving the South, but for most it was not just a headlong rush to go anywhere else. True, they were fleeing the South, but they also were specifically going to Kansas. Some Exodusters accepted offers of jobs from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and other plains states, but most Exodusters turned down these opportunities to instead settle in Kansas. The Exodusters perceived opportunity and equality in Kansas while simultaneously needing an avenue of escape from the South. Kansas, and the hope that it offered, became a lifeline for the Exodusters.¹³

Every migrant to the North had their own story to tell. Elder Perry Bradley, a traveling preacher from Mississippi, did not leave the South in the Exodus of 1879, but waited and left the next year instead. However, his compelling story still helps explain the terrors that African Americans faced in the South. Bradley’s sermons gained the notice of bulldozers on April 15, 1879, during the Exodus. On that day, Bradley was preaching at a school in Hillsboro, and preached the morning service without incident. However, that night, a gang of armed men dragged him from his night service and pulled him into the woods. The gang did not attempt to conceal their identities. According to Bradley, the leader warned him to quit connecting Christianity with African American liberation, a popular theme of preachers in the wake of emancipation. When Bradley refused, the torture began. Stripping him of his clothing, the mob forced the preacher to lie facedown on the ground, as men tied each of his hands and feet to a stake. Standin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Escape
• 2. Relief
• 3. Encouraging the Exodus
• 4. The Red Sea
• 5. The Gateway to the West
• 6. Beyond the Exodus
• Bibliography
• Index