The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration recounts the largely unknown story of the first Black migrants who left the South to seek opportunity by going west to homestead. Amid danger, toil, and hardship, they also found joy, self-worth, and freedom. Their historic achievements speak to today’s ongoing struggle for equality.
Some created Black homesteader communities such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and DeWitty, Nebraska, while others, including George Washington Carver and Oscar Micheaux, homesteaded alone. All sought a place where, in the words of one Nicodemus descendant, “they could experience real freedom.” Their quest foreshadowed the epic movement of Black people out of the South known as the Great Migration.
In this first account of the full scope of Black homesteading in the Great
Plains, Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld illuminate the homesteaders’
fierce determination to find freedom—and their greatest achievements and
struggles for full equality.
