Homestead Act Former Slaves In Fulton
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Thousands of African-Americans made their way to Kansas and other Western states after Reconstruction. The Homestead Act and other liberal land laws offered blacks (in theory) the opportunity to escape the racism and oppression of the post-war South and become owners of their own tracts of private farmland.
Black Homesteading The 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that African Americans were eligible as well. Black homesteaders used it to build new lives in which they owned the land they worked, provided for their families, and educated their children.
Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976. Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African-Americans in the American West, 1528-1990.
The Southern Homestead Act was initiated to help former slaves gain their own land. It opened up about 46 million acres (18.6 million hectares) of land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.
In the history of the United States, the terms "freedmen" and "freedwomen" refer chiefly to former African slaves emancipated during and after the American Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
So, African American settlers began moving into the plains states. They began in Kansas, and were known as the “Exodusters.” During the early summer of 1879, a small group of exodusters arrived in Lincoln. Others moved to Omaha and Nebraska City.
Homesteaders included citizens, immigrants seeking naturalization, women, men, African Americans, and whites. American Indians, who were not recognized as U.S. citizens, were excluded.
