Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration

The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration

Edwards, Richard
Friefeld, Jacob K.
Bates, Angela

Hardcover

Black American HistoryBlack American StudiesRegional: Midwest

Publisher Price: $36.95

ISBN10: 1496230841
ISBN13: 9781496230843
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: Aug 1 2023
Pages: 508
Weight: 2.10
Height: 1.89 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.06
Language: English
Winner of the Denver Public Library's 2024 Caroline Bancroft History Prize
Winner of the 2024 Nebraska Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Spur Award
Finalist for the 2024 ASALH Book Prize
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Jon Gjerde Prize

The First Migrants recounts the largely unknown story of Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000 acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states. Some created Black homesteader communities such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and DeWitty, Nebraska, while others, including George Washington Carver and Oscar Micheaux, homesteaded alone. All sought a place where they could rise by their own talents and toil, unencumbered by Black codes, repression, and violence. In the words of one Nicodemus descendant, they found a place they could experience real freedom, though in a racist society that freedom could never be complete. Their quest foreshadowed the epic movement of Black people out of the South known as the Great Migration.

In this first account of the full scope of Black homesteading in the Great Plains, Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld weave together two distinct strands: the narrative histories of the six most important Black homesteader communities and the several themes that characterize homesteaders' shared experiences. Using homestead records, diaries and letters, interviews with homesteaders' descendants, and other sources, Edwards and Friefeld illuminate the homesteaders' fierce determination to find freedom--and their greatest achievements and struggles for full equality.

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