This photograph from 1877 shows Washington Street in Nicodemus, Kansas. The town was the earliest and most successful Black settlement formed in the Midwest during the Reconstruction period in the years following the Civil War. Continuing to face discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic repression, usually because of the abuses of tenant farming, large numbers of newly freed African Americans migrated from the South to form more than two dozen communities such as Nicodemus in the West and Midwest. These settlers came to be called “Exodusters,” echoing the Exodus of the Old Testament, when the Israelites fled slavery in biblical Egypt. On April 18, 1877, the Nicodemus Town Company was formed by seven residents, one white and six Black. From 1877 to 1879, separate parties of Black colonists arrived primarily from Tennessee and Kentucky, and these people and their children ultimately constituted the entire population of the town, which totaled nearly 600 by 1879.