Full Description
Winner of the Denver Public Library's 2024 Caroline Bancroft History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Nebraska Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Spur Award
Finalist for the 2024 ASALH Book Prize
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Jon Gjerde Prize
The First Migrants recounts the largely unknown story of Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000 acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states. Some created Black homesteader communities such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and DeWitty, Nebraska, while others, including George Washington Carver and Oscar Micheaux, homesteaded alone. All sought a place where they could rise by their own talents and toil, unencumbered by Black codes, repression, and violence. In the words of one Nicodemus descendant, they found "a place they could experience real freedom," though in a racist society that freedom could never be complete. Their quest foreshadowed the epic movement of Black people out of the South known as the Great Migration.
In this first account of the full scope of Black homesteading in the Great Plains, Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld weave together two distinct strands: the narrative histories of the six most important Black homesteader communities and the several themes that characterize homesteaders' shared experiences. Using homestead records, diaries and letters, interviews with homesteaders' descendants, and other sources, Edwards and Friefeld illuminate the homesteaders' fierce determination to find freedom-and their greatest achievements and struggles for full equality.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface by Angela Bates
Acknowledgments
Note on Terminology
1. Land!
2. Push and Pull
3. A New Start at Nicodemus
4. Nicodemus Flourishes
5. Henry and Mary Burden's Flight to Freedom
6. Homesteading Alone
7. DeWitty and the Sandhills
8. The Speese Family Odyssey
9. Opportunity in Sully County
10. Tragedy and Failure at Empire
11. Oscar Micheaux, "The Homesteader"
12. Sand and Success at Dearfield
13. Struggles in the Desert at Blackdom
14. Black Homesteaders and the Great Migration
15. Gen H's Legacy
Epilogue: Where Are the Black Farmers?
Appendix: Black Homesteaders and White Racism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
