"Father of the Exodus": Benjamin "Pap" Singleton (1809-1892)
Benjamin Singleton was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Enslaved, Singleton was sold several times, but always managed to escape. Eventually, he fled to Canada, then settled in Detroit, Michigan, where he ran a boardinghouse that also sheltered black runaways.
After the Civil War, Singleton returned to Tennessee and began organizing an effort to buy up Tennessee farmland for blacks; his plan failed because white landowners refused to sell at fair prices. Between 1877 and 1879, Singleton and his partner, Columbus Johnson, formed a company that helped hundreds of black Tennesseans move to Kansas.
Those who moved to Kansas became known as "Exodusters." Singleton was described as the "Father of the Exodus." By 1879, some 50,000 blacks had fled to freedom in Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois, while thousands more had been turned back by whites patrolling the rivers and roads.
In 1880, Singleton was called to testify at Congressional hearings on the alarming migration of blacks from the South. By 1881, however, Singleton had begun a new phase in his campaign to aid his people, organizing a party called the United Colored Links in a black section of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because so many natives of that state lived there. Unfortunately, Singleton soon discovered that there was not enough capital within the black community to achieve this goal.
In 1883 Singleton founded an organization called the "Chief League," which encouraged blacks to emigrate to the island of Cyprus. Few responded to his call. In 1885, he formed the "Trans-Atlantic Society" to help black people move back to their ancestral homeland in Africa. By 1887, this group, too, had proven unsuccessful.
Poor health forced Singleton to retire from his self-appointed mission. In 1892, he died in St. Louis. But his vision of a society in which African Americans owned the land, directed the industries and held the power would live on, finding a charismatic champion in Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association of the early 1920's briefly realized many of Singleton's dreams.
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