High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [75]
By 1877, the year the last of the federal troops were withdrawn from the South, racism and repression had become so onerous for former slaves that a committee was formed by Civil Rights leaders with members from all sections of the South. The committee, at its own expense, sent investigators throughout the region to report on conditions. Their reports were devastating: lynchings, whippings by former masters, and a horrifying litany of abuses of the privileges newly earned. The committee appealed to Washington, but its entreaties went unheard. Land was requested in the West or an appropriation to ship people to Liberia, but this request remained unacknowledged. Finally, black delegates from fourteen states met again in Nashville under the aegis of black congressman John R. Lynch of Mississippi and resolved to support migration, declaring that “the colored people should emigrate to those States and Territories where they can enjoy all the rights which are guaranteed by the laws and Constitution of the United States.” This declaration assisted what became known as the Exodus of 1879. Former slaves left in droves, with many of the newly formed African American churches sponsoring migrating groups. It is estimated that between twenty thousand and forty thousand African American men, women, and children made their way westward to Kansas in ten years. Their numbers were such that they swamped the facilities that had been readied for them and provoked a government investigation into the handling of the move and subsequent failure of the reception services. But move they did and endure they did. They called themselves Exodusters, building on the biblical imagery of an exodus to freedom that had pervaded many of the slave songs.
The Exodusters moved into a West of possibility. All-black towns, such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and Langston, Oklahoma, were being founded by the blacks who earlier had migrated to the area. Nicode-mus’s secretary, Reverend S. P. Roundtree, published a broadside on July 2, 1877, addressed “To the Colored Citizens of the United States.” In it, he advised them,
We, the Nicodemus Town Company of Graham County, Kan., are now in possession of our lands and the Town Site of Nico-demus, which is beautifully located on the N.W. quarter of Section 1, Town 8, Range 21, in Graham Co., Kansas, in the Great Solomon Valley, 240 miles west of Topeka, and we are proud to say it is the finest country we ever saw … Now is your time to secure your home on Government Land in the Great Solomon Valley of Western Kansas.
The town was named for Nicodemus, a legendary slave who had arrived in the United States on a slave ship and purchased his own freedom. The living wasn’t as easy as the optimistic Reverend Roundtree predicted; the tidal wave of Exodusters had caused a breakdown in services, and the newly arriving folks had to live in dugout caves for the first year and contend with drought and crop failure. But the town grew and prospered, until the Missouri-Pacific railroad passed it by later in the century, after which it began to languish. Zachary Fletcher, one of the town’s original residents and its postmaster, built its first hotel, the Saint Francis Hotel and Livery Stable. By 1880 there were two hotels, a newspaper, a bank, a drugstore, and three general stores. And by 1887, Nicodemus had an ice cream parlor as well as a baseball team—poignant proof that the African Americans leaving the South just wanted one thing: their own piece of the American dream. In other parts of Kansas, the tidal wave of Exodusters also overburdened the