The First Migrants
How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration
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Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economist Edwards and historian Friefeld (coauthors, Homesteading the Plains) deliver a meticulously researched account of Black homesteading on the Great Plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, framing these early migrants as a precursor of the Great Migration. While the authors spotlight all-Black homesteader communities like Nicodemus, Kans., they mainly focus on homesteaders who lived on remote farms, highlighting the financial risk involved and the emotional turmoil caused by such isolation. Henry Burden, formerly enslaved in Virginia, claimed a tract of land in Saline County, Neb., in 1870; facing calamities like fire and locusts, he struggled to make ends meet. On the other hand, Robert Anderson, born into slavery in Kentucky, made enough money on the tract he acquired in 1891 in Box Butte County, Neb., that he could afford to travel abroad. Agricultural scientist George Washington Carver was raised by his white Missouri enslavers as though he were their own child; in his 20s, he homesteaded alone in Beeler, Kans., where he developed a profound sense of loneliness that stayed with him long after he abandoned the homesteading life. Utilizing a wealth of primary sources and accounts from descendants, the authors make palpable the homesteaders' relentless drive toward freedom through self-reliance. It's a revealing look at an underrepresented chapter in American history. Photos.
