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following the Civil War. 43 The Lonestar state was home to hundreds of freedom colonies
between 1870 and 1890. Most failed to become organized towns. One motivation of
this fact could be the distrust of local authority within the African American community
due to racial profiling and disinterest from Texas authorities who aimed to maintain the
racial status quo of Black subservience. 44 Texas freedmen found it difficult to acquire
fertile land legally. In fact, southern Black landownership reached a little over one
percent by 1870. 45
A number of factors made racial violence possible throughout the Deep South.
Texas, for example comprised Confederate sympathizers or White supremacists
throughout the region, and the state’s size made it difficult for underfunded federal
officials to patrol throughout its sparsely populated rural areas. 46 As a result of such
danger, thousands of freedmen in rural Texas fled to more urban areas like San
Antonio, Waco, and Austin. Nonetheless, most Black Texans remained in Texas’ rural
areas. This made two ways in which Texas Blacks settled: in urban cities like Houston
or rural areas forming “freedom colonies.” 47 Nonetheless, employment was as important
as land to Black Texans. The inability to find steady work drove many to Kansas in
1875. 48 By 1879, this eventual mass movement of African Americans from Texas
alarmed Whites throughout the state. Texas news articles warned of the effects mass
Black migration would have on the state’s agricultural sector largely composed of
43
Thad Sitton & James Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the
Time of Jim Crow (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 1.
44
Sitton & Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 3; Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to
Kansas after Reconstruction, (New York: W.W. Norton 1976), 83.
45
Sitton & Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 2-3.
46
James Smallwood, Barry Crouch, and Larry Peacock, Murder and Mayhem: The War
of Reconstruction in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 3.
Michelle M. Mears, And Grace Will Lead Me Home: African American Freedmen
Communities of Austin, Texas, 1865-1928 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press,
2009), 10-11.
47
Mears And Grace, 11 & 65.
48
George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: a Composite Autobiography vol. 4 (Texas
Narratives Parts 1 & 2) (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1973), 2; Mears,
And Grace, 64.