Entry · catalog no. 3002
Exoduster
/ /ˈɛksəˌdʌstər/ /EK-suh-dus-ter
noun · Kansas / Great Plains · 1870s
✓ Verified
1.
One of roughly twenty thousand Black Southerners — chiefly from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee — who migrated to Kansas and the Great Plains beginning in 1879, leaving the collapse of Reconstruction, Klan violence and sharecropping debt. The name fuses the biblical Exodus with the dust of the plains, and it was self-applied.
“Her people were Exodusters — they came up the Mississippi in seventy-nine and never looked back.”
Origin & Attribution
Black communities of the Mississippi Valley, 1879. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, born enslaved in Nashville, organized the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association and was later called Father of the Exodus. The framing is the migrants'' own: Kansas as Canaan, the journey as deliverance. Correct the standing error: Singleton is often credited as sole cause. The migration was larger than any organizer and much of it moved independently of his associations.
1874
Singleton and associates form the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association in Tennessee
1879
Peak of the Exodus — roughly six thousand migrants reach Kansas in a few months
1977
Nell Irvin Painter publishes Exodusters, establishing the modern scholarly record
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
Kansas / Great Plains · 1870s
Spoken by
Black migrants out of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee; their Kansas descendants
$EXODUSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady98 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
58/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1879
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
1977
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@chitown
Chicago, IL
@detlex
Detroit, MI
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction, Nell Irvin Painter — Alfred A. Knopf · 1977
archive-desk
■
+ Cite a sourceIn Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80, Robert G. Athearn — monograph · 1978
archive-desk
See also