Because conditions in the South were so bad, with segregation, disenfranchisement and the violence and terrorism of lynching, African Americans began to leave the South.

Men such as Alexander Crummell, since the 1850s, had advocated emigration to Liberia. Crummell had actually gone to Liberia, but was kicked out. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the AME church preached the same back to Africa gospel. African Americans had every reason to be alienated from white American society.

In 1879 Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, of Tennessee, encouraged more than 70,000 African Americans to leave Tennessee and go to Kansas. Henry Adams of Louisiana urged migration to the West as well. However, when the African Americans arrived in Kansas, they found Jim Crow segregation there, too.

In Kansas, Singleton and the African Americans established their own separate town, called Nicodemus. However Singleton became disillusioned with the United States altogether, and later in the 1880s advocated emigration back to Africa. But he himself did not go. Nor did many of the blacks in Kansas. The flight to Kansas was called Kansas Fever or the Kansas Exodus.

In Mississippi, a handful of blacks disillusioned by white supremacy formed their own separate all-black town, with their own officers, sheriffs, etc. It was formed by Isaiah Montgomery, in 1887, and called Mound Bayou.

In the 1880s some blacks began to seek a separate black territory or state in the West. They felt that if they could not live in peace with whites, and with respect --in the country of their birth-- then it would be better to voluntarily separate themselves from white racists into a state of their own.

In 1882 a convention of African Americans at Parsons, Kansas petitioned Congress to set aside every third section of Kansas for black settlement. Their petition was ignored.
 
 

Before the Civil War, the Creeks, Cherokees and Chickasaw Indians of Oklahoma, or the Indian Territory, which was not yet a state, had slaves. It is estimated that 4,000-5,000 blacks lived among the Indians there, although they were relatively well treated and some Indians intermarried with the blacks. In 1866 Congress required the Indians to emancipate their slaves, with land. About 1,000 black "allies" of the Seminole Indians, displaced from Florida, also lived in Oklahoma. In the 1880s a black lawyer from Fort Smith, Arkansas, named S. H. Scott, advocated the creation of a separate black state out of part of Oklahoma. In 1884, Republican president Chester Arthur recommended to Congress that the black freedmen among the Indians on Oklahoma be settled in a single, compact district of Oklahoma. Congress did not act on the proposal. Nevertheless, several all-black towns did develop in Oklahoma. One was Langston, established in 1889 by Edwin McCabe. Another was Boley (1903-1904). Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and segregation and the poll tax soon became state law.

PERSONAL INTERPRETATION AND COMMENTARY

Given the terrorism to which African Americans were subjected in the South, the failure of Congress to approve the Stevens Plan, the assault on human dignity represented by segregation, the second class treatment of African Americans in the South, one may regret that the Radical Republicans were not able to prevail upon the Congress to resettle blacks out of the South into the West during Reconstruction, or even create black states in some of the Southern states where blacks were the majority of the population (South Carolina) or even subdivide some of the existing states.

But land in the West was the road not taken. It could have been achieved most easily in Oklahoma.* However White supremacists were determined that blacks would have no organized land base of their own. But given what happened in the South as a result of the failure to give land to the former slaves, as compensation for the back wages owed to them for 225 years of slavery, from 1640 to 1865, it is hard for me not to conclude that relocation to the West, with land, would have been better than remaining in the South as so much human prey. Anything would have been better than staying in the barbaric South, with its greedy hands dripping with the blood of African American people.

Also, please note that the advocates of a separate black territory were not seeking integration with whites. They had given up on living with whites in the South or Kansas or elsewhere. They did not even seek the end of segregation in the South: They left the South. Instead, they wanted self-determination. They wanted power and control over their own destiny, with their own land, and farms, and businesses, towns and institutions, here in the country of their birth. . There, Thomas Moss would not have been lynched. These self determinationists seem to have concluded that maybe a racist society isn’t fit for black people to live in. Maybe white supremacists aren’t fit to be lived with.* Singleton and Scott and others wanted a separate state of their own. For me, it is sad and indeed tragic that they were not able to achieve one. It is part of the shadow that is cast by the past. It is the shadow and the weight and the burden of history. (Sometimes, history is tragedy). To fully appreciate history, one must have a tragic sensibility.