Singleton, Benjamin "Pap"

Impact on the world

Known as the “Father of the Black Exodus,” Singleton organized one of the largest Black-led land-acquisition movements in American history, founding the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association in Nashville in 1874 with minister Columbus M. Johnson to steer formerly enslaved Southerners toward Homestead Act farmland in Kansas; his Singleton Colony (1873) and Dunlap Colony (1878) became organized farming settlements, and his promotional handbills and organizing efforts helped catalyze the broader 1879 “Great Exodus,” in which an estimated 20,000-40,000 African Americans migrated from the South to Kansas seeking land ownership and an escape from sharecropping and racial terror. Called to testify before the U.S. Senate in 1880 on the causes of the mass migration, he successfully defended the Exodusters' right to seek land and self-determination in the West, and in 2002 was named among scholar Molefi Kete Asante's “100 Greatest African Americans.”

Life & background

Born enslaved in Davidson County, Tennessee, around 1809, the son of an enslaved mother and a white father, Singleton trained as a cabinetmaker and was sold multiple times before escaping to Canada via Detroit in 1846; he worked there as a boardinghouse keeper sheltering fugitive freedom-seekers before returning to Nashville during the Civil War, where he built coffins for Black victims of racial violence — an experience that convinced him Black Americans would never achieve equality in the white-dominated South. In the late 1860s he began organizing Black land purchases in Tennessee, and when high prices and white resistance blocked that effort, he turned west, scouting Kansas in 1873 and leading roughly 300 settlers to found Singleton Colony in Cherokee County that year, followed by the larger Dunlap Colony in 1878. After testifying before Congress in 1880, he relocated to Kansas City, founded the Colored United Links to pool Black economic resources, and later turned to Pan-Africanist organizing through the United Transatlantic Society (1885-87), which promoted Back-to-Africa emigration but never sent settlers abroad; in 1889, in poor health, he made a final public appeal for a portion of the newly opened Oklahoma Territory to be reserved as an all-Black state. He died February 17, 1900, in Kansas City, Missouri, and is buried in an unmarked grave at Union Cemetery.

Sources

1. History.com; Legends of America; Library of Congress (African American Mosaic exhibition); Kansas Historical Society