Mass Migration and the Exoduster Movement

Manifest Racism

• Manifest Destiny was the belief that God's will was for white people to take possession of the whole of the USA and make it productive and civilised.
• Manifest racism was the inhumane treatment of American Indian Peoples- cheating the Indians out of their land, starving them on inadequate reservations, forcing them into conflict and murdering Indian men, women and children.

The Exoduster Movement (1879)

• When the North won the war in 1865, 4 million slaves were freed.
• But many white people in the South did not accept that black Americans should be freed.
• Southerners did everything they could to stop black people becoming independent.
• They used intimidation and violence to stop black Americans voting.
• They refused to sell land to black Americans.
• They forced black Americans into sharecropping.
• Sharecropping was when a landowner allowed a tenant to use some of their land in return for a share of the crops they grew.
• Because the opposition of black Americans continued in the South after the civil war, some black Americans decided to move West and take up homesteads under the 1862 Homestead Act.
• A former slave called Benjamin Singleton pioneered the move to Kansas. Having set up a settlement there in 1873, he promoted Kansas at meeting and in newspapers in the Southern states, and helped many hundreds of black Americans to move there. He helped create the foundations for an extraordinary large scale migration of black Americans to Kansas in 1879.
• In 1879, a rumour spread that the federal government had given up the whole state of Kansas to…