The First Migrants expands the historical narrative of American history and the role played by citizens of African descent. This book heralds the story of the African American homesteaders who helped settle America’s Great Plains and is informative, comprehensive, and very personal. It shouts, “We were there.”
– Catherine Meehan Blount, descendant of Black homesteaders in Nebraska
As a child, I learned only a bit of my family’s homesteading story. The First Migrants weaves it together with the stories of other Black families, turning sparse records and anecdotes into a living history.
– Elizabeth Burden, Black homesteader descendant and Tucson artist
The First Migrants discusses the wide and wide-ranging experiences of black homesteaders. This amazingly researched study will make a meaningful and needed contribution to African American history, as well as to our understanding of how non-indigenous Americans, black and white, settled the Great Plains.
– Kenneth Hamilton, author of Booker T. Washington in American Memory and Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1917; Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies, Southern Methodist University
Finally, a spotlight shines on Black homesteaders in the Great Plains and in the West. Finally, these courageous Americans are remembered and honored. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Edwards and Friefeld’s exceptional book is a deeply-moving, sensitive portrait of individuals and communities that shaped the country and decades of descendants. Impossible to put down, The First Migrants achieves what few books do: it enriches and changes the conversation about the American experience.
– Ann Weisgarber, novelist, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
Wow! Edwards and Friefeld have done it again! They have illustrated an epic event in our Nation’s history that is often missed, overlooked or misunderstood, the story of our Nation’s Black Homesteaders. Through personal, gripping stories illustrated in this book we learn that “Black Homesteading was just not a curious historical phenomenon, over and now done with, but rather a historical process that continues to have impact and importance” on our Nation and the World! It will reveal the path these American Citizens traveled, from being “owned to owning” and through this journey achieving the American Dream!
– Mark Engler, former Superintendent, Homestead National Park
African Americans…have been absent in the annals of western history. Their history is rich and diverse, and speaks of the tenacity, strength, and determination of people… Their lives are written in the soils of the Great Plains…The winds that sweep its prairies no longer silence their voices… This work tells these unique stories. As a descendant of Nicodemus’s first settlers, I am honored to be a part of this still unfolding story.
– Angela Bates, Nicodemus descendant and historian