#exodusters

Duster. Greenhouse Affect #28. August 15th, 2021.

Hello, cowboys, cowgirls, and everyone who are fond of the western cowboy lifestyle, I know that some of you heard of Benjamin Pap Singleton and the African Americans who settled in the Kansas area. I looked up about him and the Exodusters from different sources to post accurate facts, so here it is.

Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was born as a slave in 1809 in Tennessee where was several times sold as a slave, but he managed to escape. He fled to the northern part of the Midwest, possibly close to Canada. Sources claimed that he settled in Michigan and established and operated a secret boardinghouse for escaped slaves. After the Civil War and the emancipation, Singleton returned to Tennessee where he convinced himself to help his people to improve their lives. 

In the late 1860s, he began to organizing an effort to buy up Tennessee farmland for blacks, but failed when the white landowners refused to sell, even at a fair price. According to some sources, African Americans enjoyed rights and privileges as American citizens in the South, but that changed when the federal troops were removed, their rights were no longer secure. The Ku Klux Klan set up a campaign to strike terror and exterminate the blacks who refused to submit their will and the sharecropping system virtually re-enslaved Black tenant farmers.                    

Singleton set his sight on Kansas as he considered that it was famous for Jim Brown’s efforts and it’s struggle against slavery. He also considered the state new Canaan and claimed himself as black Moses. Benjamin Singleton and his partner named Columbus Johnson staked out a black settlement in Cherokee County, but it failed, and a second settlement in Morris County. Singleton spread the words about his settlement as he traveled through the South organizing parties to colonize in Kansas, as well as distributed promotional posters that circulated widely across the south, and he formed a company along with Johnson that helped hundreds of blacks move to Kansas between 1877 and 1979. Nearly 300 African Americans followed Singleton to Kansas, some lived in “Singleton’s colony in Cherokee County, others settled in Wyandotte, in Topeka's Tennessee Town, and in Dunlap Colony near present Emporia. When the blacks headed west, they been described as Exodusters and Benjamin Singleton himself described as the “Father of the Exodus”. More sources claimed that 50,000 blacks fled to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois, but some had been turned back by whites patrolling the rivers and roads. By the year 1879, it became known as the year of the “Great Exodus”. 

In 1880, Benjamin Singleton was called testify at the Congressional hearings about the Exodusters. Singleton began a new phase in his campaign to aid his people, organizing a party called the United Colored Links in the black section of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because so many of that state lived there.  Affiliated with the Greenbacks, a white workers' party that called for fundamental social change in the United States, Singleton's Links party was intended to help African Americans acquire their own factories and start their own industries. Unfortunately, there was not enough capital within the black community to achieve this goal because blacks who migrated to the state had no money nor economic resource as they arrived daily by hundred and struggled economically. The Black communities appealed to the state government for assistance, resulting in the creation of the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association in 1879. The mission of the KFRA was to collect and distribute resources for struggling African Americans in Kansas. Though many African Americans came unprepared, most who remained were able to improve the quality of their lives and made important contributions to the state and the communities in which they lived. 

The first topic for today is noting one very simple truth. Plenty of Black people, facing the prospect of life under the Bourbon Democrats who'd learned nothing and forgiven nothing of their self-inflicted catastrophe in 1865 took the simplest path of them all. They went West, as far away from its as possible. It is due to the Hayes Code and its restrictions on depicting Black people on screen that the West is seen as a lily-white thing, in reality Black people were a vital part of the last phase of American frontier expansion.

Their motives were that amazingly simple reality and combination of refusing to live under oppression. They were one of the various faces of the Gilded Age, and one of the many ways in which US history draws a veil of silence over the parts that don't fit the simpler narratives it prefers to pretend are real.

I saw on my reading list where one blogger did a “What I’m Reading Wednesday” post. Brilliant idea, thinks I. It’s not always possible for me to work up a book review post, but I am constantly reading one book or another — usually nonfiction — and I can certainly post about them. So here it is. 

When I first heard the term Exodusters I thought it was some sort of sci-fi like title: Exo- Dusters.…

Even though home ownership is down, the media outlets report, the housing market is stabilizing. The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Trumball, in his November 14, 2013 story, says:

“Some 64.7 percent of US units were owned, rather than rented, during the period from 2010-12. That represents a meaningful  drop from the level of 66.4 percent that prevailed during the prior three-year period, from 2007-09. “The downward trend isn’t a necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it may be a sign of the housing market normalizing after a period, before the recession…Today, by many measures, the US housing market isin recovery is in recovery mode: Foreclosures are fading, home prices are rising, and low mortgage rates are helping to keep housing relatively affordable by historical standards.”

And, indeed, that may be the case. But it doesn’t feel that way, especially to people of color in this country. It feels like the homes we own aren’t financially worth it, to ourselves and to the greater market. After all, banks disproportionately targeted Latinos and African Americans for subprime home loans (30.9 percent and 41.5 percent, respectively), regardless of our credit ratings and incomes. These communities are also disproportionately  suffering from foreclosures (11.9 percent for Latinos and 9.8 percent for African Americans), and foreclosed-upon homes in these communities are less likely to be maintained or even listed for sale, which further runs down these neighborhoods. My own friends, who got caught in the subprime imbroglio, attest to this through their prickled hurt of seeing their wealth-building dreams through home ownership staying stuck in that briar patch. This, even as some of the media reports that home ownership is still the main way to gain wealth for folks who don’t own stock or other assets and others have soured on the idea.

Having been a renter myself all of my adult life and am currently homeless due to losing my own place from a lack of steady income from freelancing, I, too, believed that renting was the single-and-childless way to pay someone else to worry about the busted water heater or the snow removal. But, to paraphrase the campaign slogan, New York City’s rent is too damn high and, considering the still-bleak housing situation, I’m not even looking forward renting again, let alone to financially swinging a mortgage, which is really paying rent for 30 years to a bank for a home and the homeowner is still stuck with all of the repairs and removals. Considering that two-thirds of US homeowners still have mortgages and that the housing crisis have sobered them up to seriously think about paying off that debt and that, right before the housing-market crisis decimated the finances of women of color, only 33 percent of Black women and 28 percent of Latinas owned their homes…there has to be another way. 

That way, for me, comes in the form of tiny-house living, a response to the McMansions and toward ecological sustainability. My friend Aiesha introduced it to me as a link on Facebook a couple of years ago as I lived in my own 250 square-foot attic studio in Coney Island (from which Superstorm Sandy displaced me). I knew I was capable—I was doing it, after all—and even envisioned mini Tiny House communities for me and my single, progressive homegurls, complete with communal gardens, in the rare empty lots in Brooklyn. As I couch-surfed at a friend’s place a couple of weeks ago, that mere theory blossomed into a practical obsession, to the point I dreamed of building my own from shipping containers, like the one below.

I tripped merrily into full-length and mini-documentaries about the Tiny House Movement—some of my favorites I’ll feature here—and discovered a man who built one in Hawaii on his housekeeper’s salary of $20K/year and a woman who created a studio made of cob and recycled materials for $500! 

I stumbled upon my midlife, life-changing answer.

So, like the Exodusters before me and so many people around our mostly of-color world--estimates say that about half the world lives in a dwelling made of earth--I plan to create my own tiny home built from the very dirt of the land I plan to own, complete with a garden (even on the roof) and solar panels powered by the California sunshine.  I’ll chart my own admittedly radical journey in hopes that more people, especially people of color, might recalibrate the idea that the wealth of a home may not necessarily rest in its large size and future equity but its affordability and manageability—after all, excluding human labor, a cob house can be built for as little as $500, but can run, on average and if its less than 1000 square feet, about $3000-$7000. (My own place will be about 600 square feet.)