Photograph Of Nicodemus, Kansas

The Images, Cartoons, and Other Visual Sources That Shaped America
Table of Contents
Photograph Of Nicodemus, Kansas
Overview
About the Artist
Document Image
Context
Explanation and Analysis of the Document

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Abstract

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.

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