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Kwanzaa Stories: Benjamin "Pap" Singleton- The Black Exodusters| | Kwanzaa Stories: Benjamin "Pap" Singleton-The Black Exodusters
It is important, most important for us to teach our children the stories of our heroes. Some of these heroes are in our own families and the stories should be handed down. Kwanzaa is a good time for that. There should be at least 7 stories told each night of the celebration to give our children good strong roots and a sense of who they are. Kwanzaa will also have a lot more meaning for them if they can research the hero for a particular day of Kwanzaa and tell that story, or even act it out.
Try it and see what works for you and your family.
Here is a personal favorite:
Benjamin "Pap" Singleton
(1809-1892)
A leader in the "Great Exodus" that brought thousands of African Americans west from the post-Reconstruction South, Benjamin Singleton became toward the end of his life a pioneer of black nationalism who launched one of the first back-to-Africa movements in the United States.
Singleton was born in 1809 in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was several times sold as a slave but always managed to escape. Eventually, he fled to Canada, then settled in Detroit, Michigan, where he ran a boardinghouse that frequently sheltered runaway slaves.
Returning to Tennessee after the Civil War, Singleton became convinced that it was his mission to help his people improve their lives. He began in the late 1860's by organizing an effort to buy up Tennessee farmland for blacks, but this plan failed when white landowners refused to sell at fair prices.
Undaunted, Singleton set his sights on Kansas, where he and a partner named Columbus Johnson staked out a black settlement in Cherokee County (which failed) and a second settlement in Morris County. Singleton spread the word about his settlements through posters that circulated widely across the South, and he formed a company with Johnson that helped hundreds of black Tennesseans move to Kansas between 1877 and 1879.
Those who answered Singleton's call to head west became known as "Exodusters," and Singleton himself was described as the "Father of the Exodus." But the massive migration of African Americans from the South that reached a peak in 1879 was not inspired by Singleton alone. The driving force was the withdrawl of federal troops from the South in 1877, which marked the official end of Reconstruction and the return of racial oppression through segregation laws and the terrorist activities of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. By 1879, which became known as the year of the "Great Exodus," some 50,000 blacks had fled to freedom in Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois, while thousands more had been turned back by whites patrolling the rivers and roads.
In 1880, Singleton was called to testify at Congressional hearings on the alarming migration of blacks from the South. By 1881, however, Singleton had begun a new phase in his campaign to aid his people, organizing a party called the United Colored Links in a black section of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because so many natives of that state lived there. Affiliated with the Greenbacks, a white workers' party that called for fundmental social change in the United States, Singleton's Links party was intended to help African Americans acquire their own factories and start their own industries. Unfortunately, Singleton soon discovered that there was not enough capital within the black community to achieve this goal.
Shifting his sights again, in 1883 Singleton founded an organization called the Chief League, which encouraged blacks to emigrate to the island of Cyprus. Few responded to his call, so in 1885 he formed the Trans-Atlantic Society to help black people move back to their ancestral homeland in Africa. By 1887, this group, too, had proven unsuccessful. Suffering poor health, Singleton was forced at last to retire from his self-appointed mission, and in 1892 he died in St. Louis. But his vision of a society in which African Americans owned the land, directed the industries and held the power would live on, finding a charismatic champion in Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association of the early 1920's briefly realized many of Singleton's dreams.
For more information: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas Following Reconstruction (University of Kansas Press, 1986).
"Image and Reality on the Kansas Prairie: 'Pap' Singleton's Cherokee County Colony," Kansas History (Summer 1996).
The Program | P
BENJAMIN "PAP" SINGLETON (1809- ? )
Benjamin "Pap" Singleton called himself the "father of the Black Exodus," a movement that began during the late 1860s and continued into the 1880s, when thousands of freedmen resettled in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Indiana, and other areas. Singleton led nearly 8,000 blacks to Kansas via steamboat, train, and wagon.
Singleton was a former Davidson County slave, born around 1809, and raised and trained as a cabinet maker. After being sold and sent to New Orleans, he escaped back to Nashville and then to Detroit and Canada. During the Civil War years, Singleton left Detroit and returned to Nashville, which was under Union army occupation. He made a living building cabinets and coffins, while he lived in a large Union camp for fugitive slaves along the riverbank in Edgefield (East Nashville, near the Jefferson Street bridge). When peddling his wares, "Pap" Singleton, as his fellow freedmen called him, preached to idle, destitute former-slaves about going west to farm and own federal homestead lands.
In September of 1869, black Nashvillians held a large meeting about migrating from the South Elias Polk, Robert Knowles, Randall Brown, Henry Carter, and Daniel Wadkins argued the pros and cons of leaving the South. Many of Nashville's freedmen were frustrated because of crowded and impoverished conditions, recent outbreaks of racial violence by whites, and the 1869 electoral defeat of their city Republican ticket by white Conservatives (Democrats). When the mass meeting failed to gain a vote for the exodus, Singleton and a Summer County black preacher, Columbus M. Johnson, organized a homestead association. Johnson was concerned about addressing the large federal contraband camps, which housed impoverished freedmen in Gallatin and Hendersonville. In 1872, the association sent a committee to investigate Kansas for settlement. A year later, Johnson, Singleton, and 300 persons boarded steamboats on the Cumberland River to settle in Cherokee County, Wyandotte, and Topeka, Kansas. For years, the north end of Topeka was called "Tennessee Town."
In April of 1875, Singleton, William A. Sizemore, and Benjamin Petway called for a state convention to discuss black migration to the West. The convention met in Liberty Hall (44 Cedar Street, now Charlotte), which was built in 1872 by and for Nashville's first black bank, the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company. The convention formed the Tennessee Emigration Society, sent delegates to Kansas, and resolved: "To the white people of Tennessee, and them alone, are due the ills borne by the colored people of this State." The Memphis Bulletin newspaper reported that the "chiefest ground of discontent is inadequate labor prices and delays in paying the same. A repair of this evil would tend greatly towards checking the flow of [black] immigration out of the State, already begun." Then the Nashville Colored People's Cooperative Emigration Club was formed "to improve the moral, intellectual, social, and material interests of the colored people." The leaders hoped to relieve crowding in Tennessee's urban black neighborhoods, resettle the black poor, and build a politically powerful society in the Far West.
Singleton, Sizemore, and their followers formed the Edgefield Real Estate Association, located at No. 5 Front Street. They held rallies in Brentwood and other black communities, raised funds by charging five cents for parties, and published newspapers to publicize the colored migration. Singleton criticized Frederick Douglass and other Republicans for opposing the freedmen's exodus from the South, saying, "Such men as this should not be leaders of our race any longer." But Douglass simply argued that the Negroes should remain in the South and fight the racist attempts to reenslave them. In Nashville, Singleton plastered lettered posters announcing: "Leave for Kansas on April 15, 1878." He established a colony at Dunlap, Morris County, Kansas, in June of 1879. At least 2,407 local blacks joined the exodus.
The Nashville Union and American called the Black Exodus "a foolish project," and white employers supported a campaign to attract Chinese laborers to replace the black workers. By 1882, the Black Exodus had stopped. The waters of the Cumberland River washed out all traces of the black emigrants who boarded so many steamboats near Edgefield. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton died out West during the late l880s and was buried in an unidentified grave.
Bobby L. Lovett
+++++++++++++++++++ | | | Posted 12/29/2007 7:22 AM - 16 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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