Pronunciations (2)
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/ˈɛksəʊdʌstə/
Pronunciation notes
- Received-Pronunciation
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/ˈɛksoʊˌdʌstəɹ/
Pronunciation notes
- General-American
Noun
An African-American who migrated from a state along the Mississippi River in the Southern United States to Kansas, mostly between 1879 and 1881 during the Reconstruction era.
Usage- US usage
- also
- attributive
- Historical
- Broader terms
- Examples
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More examples (4)
Ingalls [John James Ingalls?] wants congress to appropriate money for the colored exodusters. It strikes us that for a man who is holding on by a strip of his eye-brow, Ingalls is a little too unanimous.
Q [by Zebulon Baird Vance]. Goldsboro is about the center of this movement of the colored people to the West?—A. Yes, sir; a large number of ‘exodusters’ have left my section.
Kansas was diligently searched to find, if possible, some dissatisfied "exoduster," who, for the sake of his witness fees and mileage to Washington, would swear that he was dissatisfied with his new home, and wished himself back in Dixie. Perhaps a half dozen such were found, and their testimony has been paraded before the Senate with tremulous emotion by the Senator from Indiana.
In the spring of 1879 occurred the rush from the South, to which was given the name of the "Exodus," and the "Exoduster" for a time became a prominent figure in Kansas. Great numbers of black people, men, women, and children, arrived by rail at Parsons, from Texas, and on steamboats at Wyandotte and Atchison. The later comers represented the ex-slave population of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. […] In the late fall of 1877, "Exodusters" gathered from Topeka and other points, and founded the town of Nicodemus, in Graham county.
For perhaps ten seconds John contemplated a sudden and complete exodus with himself as the exoduster.
More examples (3)
After the Civil War, Kansas became home to many African-American settlers, who were known as the "black exodust" and were described as having "Kansas fever." These exodusters established the first black settlement in Kansas in 1877 in Nicodemus, which is west of Topeka. This is the last survivor of a dozen all-black Kansas settlements and was declared a national historical landmark in 1974. […] Our heritage of early child education for the exoduster children calls to mind the words of Carl Becker's book "Kansas," published in 1910: […]
Etcheson has written a remarkably thorough social and political history of the Kansas conflict, from the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Exoduster migration in the decades after the war.
Hoping to escape poverty and discrimination, some former slaves moved west. One group, the Exodusters, moved to the Kansas prairie during the mid-1870s. […] Like white farmers, the Exodusters fought with cattlemen.