The New International Encyclopædia/Negro Exodus

NEGRO EXODUS. The name applied to a movement of freedmen from the Southern to the Western and Northern States in 1879 and 1880. The movement began in the early spring of 1879, and before the close of 1880 fully 40,000 negroes had removed to Kansas alone, while a large number had settled in Missouri and Indiana also. Many arrived at their destination poorly clad, generally destitute, and without promise of employment, and for a time there was much want and suffering among them. Large sums of money, however, were contributed for their relief throughout the North, especially in Kansas, where, soon after the arrival of the first band of immigrants, an efficient Freedmen's Relief Association was organized. The only Southern States from which the blacks emigrated in any considerable numbers seem to have been Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The chief reasons given by the negroes for the abandonment of their homes were that they were forced to pay excessive rents, that the system of land tenure in the South was unjust, that exorbitant prices were charged by ‘credit’ merchants, and that the freedmen were wholly denied political recognition and were kept down in every way by ‘bulldozing’ methods. Opponents of the movement asserted that the negroes had been misled by the representations of land speculators, by misguided philanthropists, and by politicians who, in view of the approaching Presidential election, wished to import numbers of Republican voters into various parts of the North, where the Republican majority was doubtful. The movement seems to have been considerably furthered by the ‘Nashville Colored Convention,’ which met in Nashville, Tenn., May 7, 1879, adopted a report setting forth the grievances of the blacks and the many disadvantages, social, economic, and political, under which they labored in the South, and recommending that the negroes should emigrate to those States where their rights were not denied them. For an account of the causes of the movement, consult an article by Runnion, “The Negro Exodus,” in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. xliv. (Boston, 1879); and for arguments justifying and condemning the movement, consult articles by R. T. Greener and Frederick Douglass, respectively, in the Journal of Social Science, vol. xi. (Boston, 1888).