So, a few days ago, I turn on the TV to watch a little news and low and behold there was one of those political black house servants on TV saying in the Jim Crow era black folks were more conservative. That’s why there was always a man in the house. He said blacks were always conservative anyway. I’m like, what are you doing pushing Jim Crow on these black folks? I have to agree with my man John Leguizamo, when he said, “Latin people for Trump is the same as roaches for Raid…” Same goes for us and trying to convince black that we were better behaved (controlled) under Jim Crow because you are campaigning for the former president, is a card revoking violation!!
Now, I ain’t gonna mention any names because this blog deals with history, not politics and since Byron Donalds and the former president are politicians, well they are off limits…
Yep… off limits…
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Politician: “Yes siree!! We knew how to act back then!! I was raised up North and moved to the Deep South when I was a young man. I’ll never forget my first day down there. After that ass whooping for drinking out of the wrong water fountain, I immediately tuned into a conservative!
I had to learn how to conserve my strength in case those hillbillies jumped out of that pickup truck to whoop my ass again and I had to run…
Yep, it was Jim Crow and an ass whooping that turned me into a conservative… and I have been a conservative ever since…”
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Now between 1910 and 1970 an event called the “Great Migration” took place. More than 6 million African Americans moved to cities in the north to escape the oppressive laws of Jim Crow. I was looking to see if I had an article about Jim Crow, but I’m afraid I have not written about it specifically. I remember thinking about writing about it… must have changed my mind when they lit that cross in my front yard. Yep, burning crosses makes you change your mind about a lot of shat… one thing is for sure… like my people’s down south, I’ve learned how to be a good conservative too… well rested with new tennis shoes… and plenty of them…
Klan: “Come on out here nagger, we know about you!!”
Me: Be right out boss… let me put on my tennis shoes…
Okay… I’ma stop playing… Jim Crow will be our next project.
Anywho, as an overview, Jim Crow were repressive laws that aimed to keep blacks at the same social level as being enslaved. They were made to circumvent the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment, which gave us equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which gave us the right to vote.
For the most part, these amendments were obeyed from 1865 to 1877, with the help of a few civil rights bills and United States troops stationed down south… but after the Compromise of 1877, it was a whole new story.
The Compromise of 1877, better known as the “Great Betrayal,” removed all the remaining federal troops from down south, the same troops that were left there to protect us. We were surrounded by some very salty white folks (SWF) whose every possession had been destroyed in the fight to free us.
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SWF: Nigra… you do know the troops are gone now… don’t you?
US: Yes suh…
SWF: Well, we getting ready to make it happen… now go get a banjo… wait a minute boy!! Ask me if you can go get a banjo!!
US: Can I go get a banjo suh?
SWF: HELL NO!! NOW PLAY ME MY FAVORITE SONG…. BANJO BOY!!
US: OH MY GAWD!!!
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IF You Wanted Too…
Yessiree… they were going to be really ugly for the next ninety something years.
Right after the federal troops left, they begin instituting what were called the black codes.
So, the black codes were laws that restricted our civil rights. They didn’t outlaw our civil right, because that would be illegal, they just restricted around them.
You could still show up to vote if you wanted to… if you wanted to be seen swinging from a tree in front of the polls with a ballot in yo’ mouth…
You could even go into an establishment with white women if you wanted to… if you wanted to be found floating upside down in a swamp missing something…
So yeah, at that time it wasn’t about you not having civil rights, it was about how brave you were to take advantage of them. After a while the government started taking notice and intervened, usually with additional civil right bills. One of the most important bills to come from Washington was the Ku Klux Klan bill signed into law by Ulysses Grant. It’s still on the books today and was last used against Donald Trump by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Anyway, the black codes were the precursors of Jim Crow. The black codes evolved into Jim Crow right after Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which ruled that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution. It was also known as the separate but equal doctrine.
That would be with us until 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education ruled segregation in schools was unconstitutional… even if equal. That ruling desegregated in the United States.
So, I started talking about the “Great Migration,” before we jumped into that other stuff. I brought that up because right after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, there was another lesser known migration. It was called the “Kansas Exodus.”
Now the Kansas Exodus was the first large migration of African Americans from the SWF at the end of Reconstruction. As many as 90,000 African Americans fled the South, settling in places like Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. So, although the main reason for leaving the South were that folks were getting tired of ending up at the end of a rope because of the color of their skin, the black codes also played a major role in their decision.
Most black folks in the South during that time stayed in the countryside or the more rural areas. You very rarely found a black person who had been born in a town or in a city.
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Birth Certificate:
First Name: Alred- Middle Name: Cletus- Last Name: White
Sex: Male Pickaninny
Race: Naggar
Date Of Birth: Last night
Place Of Birth: Outside
Address: Massa White Naggar Cabin
City: What??!!
Mother: Auntie White
Father: Lynched
Parent Signature: Massa White
Attendant or Physician: Pine Sol
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So, with most of the black population living in the countryside, vigilantes were able to take advantage of the situation. As a matter of fact, in Louisiana black folks outnumbered whites after the war, but whites were better armed. We had a couple of hunting rifles and a slingshot or two, but the whites had machine guns and cannons. They were better equipped than when they were in the Civil War.
So, we didn’t have a chance at “tall!!” They were just walking around disrespecting black folks at will…
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Disrespectful SWF: You sure got an ugly woman there Nigra… where did you find her… in the ugly aisle at Manny Monkeys and Tar Baby Emporium? Ha!! Ha!! Ha!!
You: Yeah that’s right… I found her right next to the aisle with the extra-large ass kicking and stomping into the ground boots that come with a cleaning rag to wipe the dodo off… I got two pair in case one pair wears out….
Disrespectful SWF: OH YEAH!!
You: YEAH!!
Disrespectful SWF: Well next to that aisle they got seven large hairy muscular white men with confederate tattoos on their foreheads and long scraggly patchy white beards buying 1000 rounds of piercing hot lead nagger bullets, and as soon as I holla “NAGGERS!!,”… they gonna come out here and shoot you… AND YO’ MONKEY!!!
You: You got it… let’s go honey…
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A State of Mind…
So yeah, people were getting tired of all that B.S. One man in particular was extremely tired of it. His name was Benjamin Singleton, but everybody called him “Pap.”
Now Pap was enslaved in Tennessee, but escaped in 1846 and went to Ontario, Canada. After a while he came back and lived in Detroit, Michigan. Michigan was part of the Northwest Territory and when it became a state in 1837 it forbade the owning of other humans in its state Constitution.
Once there, Pap started talking his shat. He became a leading abolitionist speaking fervently about African American right.
Sometime before the Civil War ended, Pap made his way back to Tennessee… as a matter of fact it was in 1862 that he went back to Tennessee. Although in 1862 Tennesse was a confederate state, the Union had whooped that thang in the Battle of Nashville and made them cry. They “deeestroyed” Hood’s army and Lincoln installed a military governor named Andrew Johnson. Johnson had served as a congressman in Tennesse before the war, but fell out of favor, when he opposed secession. He was impeached by the state house but was not convicted in the state senate. So, when the war broke out, he was still seated in Washington. The SWF wanted his azz on a platter too, referring to him as a snitch and a traitor, but since the Union controlled most of Tennesse, Johnson wasn’t thinking about them. If the name sounds familiar, he was Lincoln’s vice president and took over after Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.
So yeah, Pap went back to Tennesse during the civil war and while he was there it became obvious to him that black folks would never achieve economic independence faquing with these people. I mean after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they blamed the entire cause of the war black folks… both in the North and South!
By the way, before Johnson would except Lincoln’s invitation to be his VP, he had to promise that Tennessee would be exempt from the proclamation. The proclamation freed all enslaved people in states that were in rebellion with the United States. Tennessee, birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan was in “TOTAL REBELLION!” However, they were allowed to keep slaves during the Civil War.
What Comes Around…
Anyway, Pap went back to Tennesse and worked as a carpenter. Although Tennesse was controlled by the Union, former enslave people were still the subject of racial violence. After the war, in 1869 Pap joined up with this black minister named Columbus Johnson. Together they started looking for a way in which blacks could get out from under the economic yoke of the SWF.
At first, they tried to play ball with them, I mean money talks and BS walks… They started a real estate company called the Edgefield Real Estate Association. The idea was to purchase land in the Nashville area. So, that was a workable idea because Tennesse was a prime agricultural area for growing cotton. Blacks could purchase land and become cotton growers. Yep, on paper it was a good idea… but when the SWF saw the paper, they set it on fire! Some refuse to sell land to blacks and others wanted more money than the land was worth. Without the ability to buy land, Pap started looking elsewhere.
Around 1875, he started thinking about the American West.
The next year he and Johnson went to Kansas to scout land. They liked what they saw and came back to recruit blacks to leave.
Now there was a hiccup at first. Around seventy-nine folks left to go with them to a place called Cherokee County, in Kansas, however by the time they arrived, gold and silver had been found there. They couldn’t even afford the piece of ground they were standing on, less more talking about owning a farm. They started looking somewhere else.
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You: Well honey, looks like it’s the same old stuff. They got the land, they got the guns… they got everything…
Honey: Don’t worry baby… we will find something…
Johnson: Hey man look… I heard there is a piece of land up there in the canyon… used to belong to a miner… but they say he hasn’t been there in ages… it’s up for grabs!! They say the first man that stakes it… then it’s his!!
You: How do I get there? (Johnson drew him a map…)
Later…
You: It’s kind of rough up here honey… not sure if we can grow anything… but I’m willing to try if you are…
Honey: You can do anything you put your mind to baby! Yes, let’s do it!!
Hey baby look up there, it looks like a cave! It’s probably the miners cave who use to own…
You: Hold on baby!!! You hear that? Someone’s coming!!! It might be the miner. Quick, let’s go hide!!
Miner: Yep!! Naggars, naggars, naggers!! Everywhere I look Bob! Dang it, you can’t even spit without hitting one! And Uppity!!! Why just a few weeks ago I had to threaten a nagger… he back sassed me right in my eyeball!! Told that nagger if he didn’t show me some respect… I was gonna call out the boys and we was gonna shoot a nagger in the ass five times!! Just as I was getting ready to call them.. he took off. Ain’t seen him since…
Bob: Yeah, it’s about time we started putting them in they place!! Look, I’m fixing to go to town and pick up some supplies… We gonna need some grub and bed rolls. It looks like it’s going to rain… might have to sleep in the cave. You get that ready.. and I’ll be back before sundown…
Miner: Okay… I’ll get it ready… ( Bob rides off and the miner goes to the cave…)
Miner thinking to himself… It sure is dark in here… dang it!! Its staring to rain!! I left some wood in the back… I’ll get that to start a fire…. wood is wet outside… Wait!!! What’s that noise!!
Miner: Hello… is anyone here? HELLO!! I SAID IS ANYONE IN HERE!!??
You: Naw… it ain’t no one in here… except me and my monkey…
Miner: OH MY GAWD!!!
You: Yep…
Later on…
You: Well Johnson… we decided to go with you… we don’t think we can stay here…
Johnson: Well, you sure are welcome to go with us… by the way, those are some really nice looking boots you got on… looks like you got a little something on them… dang… what have you been doing? Stumping up and down in a pile of it? Here… take this rag…
You: No thanks… they come with a rag…
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As I Walk Through…
Yep… they come with a rag….
So anyway, Pap and Johnson had to find another location.
They eventually found land at the former Kaw Indian Reservation near the town of Dunlap, Kansas. Now it was a reason they settled on this land, they were able to acquire it through the Homestead Act. There were several Homestead Acts. The first one occurred in 1862. The government opened up millions of acres of land for farming as long as you hadn’t taken up arms against the United States. Even women and immigrants were able to apply for the program. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was the one which explicitly included African Americans. Remember although General Sherman and his armies had gone through the South like a gallon of hot laxative, burning and eating everything in sight… the land was still owned by the former plantation owners. The last thing they wanted to see was African Americans owning land… planting cotton…. hiring out of work confederate soldiers to pick it… and riding around on horses with big Panama hats supervising white folks…. somebody was going to die… naw… hold on… everybody was going to die if that happened.
So, even though the 1866 Homestead Act was available, remember what I told you about the black codes? Yeah, you could apply if you wanted too… Wanted to be found 100 years later by some archaeologist digging up some land you tried to buy from a confederate colonel with one leg and a patch over his eye…
Still, regardless of the discrimination and barriers that were put up to impede blacks from owing land, within a generation fully one quarter of all southern black farmers, were now farm owners because of the Homestead Acts. Most of them even lived long enough to plant their first crop…
SWF: “Naggar, there’s gonna be consequences and repercussions if I see you bend over and put one seed in that ground!!”
Okay… let me stop… I’m kidding.
It’s All in Yo’ Mind…
As I was saying earlier, they eventually found some land in 1878 that straddled the Kansas and Missouri border and established the Dunlap Colony one year later. The Kansas-Missouri railroad also ran through there next to the Cumberland River. It was up this river via steamboat that Pap’s settlers and other settlers made their way to Dunlap and beyond. More than 2400 black folks came to Dunlap, escaping the SWF in Nashville and around the Sumner County areas. So, Ima tells you right now, those SWF must have been extra salty, because the first wave of black settlers that arrived there lived in dugouts!! A dugout is a hole in the ground with roof over it! However, they made it work and the colony was successful. It’s still there. The 2020 census had 27 people living in the community, probably ancestors of the original settlers who came there in 1878.
By 1879, the “Kansas Exodus” became the “Great Exodus” as more than fifty thousand left the South because of the SWF. They migrated to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois seeking land, better working conditions, and the chance to live in peace. They were known as the Exodusters. Now many of the white folks already living in Kansas had a grim view of so many poor blacks coming to settle there. In 1880 they even called Pap to appear before the US Senate to ask him what do y’all think y’all Nigras are doing? He told them about the SWF and how they were making like miserable for African Americans down South and pointed to the many successful colonies he had set up. Although many of the blacks leaving the south had no direct affiliation with Pap, he became the spokesman for the Exodusters. Eventually the Presbyterian Church took over and Pap had no more dealings with his colony in Dunlap. Pap was 72 years old in 1880 and he was affectionately known as “Old Pap.” Even in his golden years he advocated for the economic freedom of African Americans. He started an organization called the “Colored United Links” (CUL). It was sort of like a federal reserve for black folks. Its aim was to combine the financial resources of all black people to build black-owned businesses, factories, and trade schools. They held several successful conventions and at one time had gained the attention of the Republican party. Republicans viewed the organization as a potential powerful political entity. But you knew how that was going to end up. Ain’t no way the undercover SWF were going to let any powerful black organization with lots of money into national politics. Remember some folks in the North had an axe to grind against African Americans because of the high cost in lives that the Civil War produced in the cause of our freedom. History says the shat failed and the members of the CUL grew apart.
After the failure of the CUL, Pap was convinced that there was no way the SWF would give economic freedom to the formerly enslave African Americans as long as we stayed here.
In 1883 he and another group of African Americans proposed that we all pack our shat and go to Cyprus. Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean and of course that idea went down in flames… and I think after it went down, somebody threw gas on it… It was rejected.
However, that didn’t deter Pap. In 1885 he started organizing around Pan Africanism.
He founded the United Transatlantic Society (UTS), with the goal of having all blacks relocate from the United States to Africa to colonies in Sierra Leone and Liberia. These colonies were sorta like home being founded by Great Britain and the United States. Even in those days we didn’t know there were large and powerful kingdoms and cities in Africa. I guess the reason a lot of us didn’t go back in those days was because of the idea that Africa was a jungle full of wild beast and savages, and the only thing you could look forward to was being eaten by a lion or being slow roasted over somebody’s campfire surround by poles with people heads stuck on them and folks standing in front of yo’ fire with forks, knives and plates.
That impression is still with a lot of us even today. The first thing the enslavers did was to try and make us forget our history and ultimately our country of origin. We slowly turned from Africans to Coloreds to Negros to Blacks and finally to African Americans… and after all our sacrifices… I’m okay with that.
I’m African American…
Okay, that’s enough of my personal views, let’s get back to history!
So yeah, the UTS wanted us to go back to Africa. The UTS lasted for two years advocating going back to Africa… they never sent anyone.
At The Buzzer…
By 1889 Pap was 80 years old and in poor health. Still, he raised his voice one last time… this time advocating for the newly opened Oklahoma Territory to be reserved as an all-black state. So, we know that didn’t happen, but considering the time and circumstances… it was a good shot… unfortunately the buzzer had rung.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton died on February 17, 1900, at the age of ninety-one in Kansas City, Missouri. He is buried in the Union Cemetery there. It is estimated that more than twenty thousand people migrated to Kansas as a result of Singleton’s efforts.
Molefi Kete Asante, professor of African and African American studies at Temple University named Benjamin “Pap” Singleton as among the 100 Greatest African Americans to have ever lived. Rest In Peace Pap…
Thanks for reading ©Hill1News
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