12 AMERICAN BLUES THEATER In 1879, an African-American man from Louisiana wrote a letter to the governor of Kansas that read in part: "I am very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of black freedom." This man was not alone. Thousands of African-Americans made their way to Kansas and other Western states after Reconstruction. The Homestead Act and other liberal land laws offered blacks (in theory) the opportunity to escape the racism and oppression of the post-war South and become owners of their own tracts of private farmland. The large- scale black migration from the South to Kansas came to be known as the "Great Exodus," and those participating in it were called "exodusters." The post-Civil War era should have been a time of jubilation and progress for the African-Americans of the South. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution had granted them citizenship and the Fifteenth Amendment outlawed suffrage discrimination based on race, color, or previous slave status. However, many Southern whites sought to keep blacks effectively disenfranchised and socially and economically inferior. During the era of Reconstruction in the South (1865-1877), federal troops occupied the states of the former Confederacy to ensure compliance with laws and regulations governing Southern states' re-entry into the Union. President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877 and pulled the U.S. troops out of the South. This gave the white ruling class of the South free reign to terrorize and oppress freed blacks without interference from the U.S. Army or anyone else. Murders, lynchings, and other violent crimes against blacks increased dramatically. It was likely at this point that many African-Americans began to feel that leaving the South forever was their only real chance to begin new lives. Movement to parts further west, such as Kansas, began almost immediately after the end of Reconstruction. What was it about Kansas that particularly attracted African- Americans to that state? First, purely logistical and geographic factors must be considered: Kansas is much closer to the South than far-off spots like California and Oregon. Another factor—a human one—also played a role in the selection of Kansas as the new Promised Land. The exploits of anti-slavery activists like John Brown gave Kansas an almost holy sacredness to many African-Americans. In Kansas, blood had been spilled to keep slavery out. Many of the African-Americans that migrated to Kansas prior to the 1879 exodus came from Tennessee, where there was a "colored people's convention" in Nashville in May 1875. Many town promoters, including the notable Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, saw this convention as a way to convince people to migrate to Kansas. The convention resulted in the designation of a board of commissioners to officially promote migration to Kansas. This board would later stipulate that would-be migrants needed at least $1,000 per family to relocate to Kansas; very few interested in doing so had such funds. Nevertheless, many freed blacks determined to leave Tennessee anyway. ABOUT THE GREAT EXODUS One of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton’s flyers Like the characters of Flyin’ West, thousands of African-Americans from the South migrated west following the Civil War. The largest and most well-known of these migration efforts was known as the “Great Exodus” in the late 1870s.