The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld
• Dwain Coleman

The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration. By Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. Pp. xxii, 458. $36.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-3084-3.)

The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration, by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld, provides readers with a fascinating glimpse into the largely unknown and understudied history of early Black migration to the [End Page 634] western plains of America. With this monograph, Edwards and Friefeld seek to disrupt and enrich the conventional story of the settlement of the Great Plains by reinserting Black homesteaders into their rightful place in the story of westward expansion. In addition, by examining the creation of colonies and communities as well as individual Black homesteaders, The First Migrants asserts the important strategic role homesteading played in Black Americans’ struggle for citizenship rights before the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.

As members of the Black Homesteader Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Edwards and Friefeld have gathered the latest and greatest research on Black homesteaders of the Great Plains. As such, The First Migrants utilizes various source materials like state and local archival records, newspaper articles, homestead claims, and census records to assist them in telling the story of Black homesteaders. In particular, the authors’ use of the remembrances, family photos, and oral histories of the descendants of Black homesteaders allows the reader a window into the lived experience of Black Americans on the Great Plains from 1877 to 1920. Through these intimate sources, readers explore the struggles of Black homesteaders, the close-knit families and communities they built on the rural plains, and the continued significance these colonies and individual homesteads play in the lives of the descendants of Black homesteaders today.

The First Migrants makes several major assertions. First, Black migrants did indeed participate in the post-Reconstruction settlement of the West and utilized the Homestead Act to their benefit. Second, these early post- Reconstruction southern Black migrants were fleeing racial injustice and violence in the hopes of creating new lives and communities on the Great Plains. In the West, they hoped to experience true freedom and independence through the ownership of land and the exercise of citizenship rights. Third, this post- Reconstruction migration out of the South preceded and heralded an even larger relocation of Black southerners during the Great Migration. Like the post- Reconstruction Great Plains migrants, Black participants in the Great Migration left the South to escape the violence of Jim Crow and in search of new opportunities in northern cities. In addition, Edwards and Friefeld push back against assertions that the Black homesteading experience failed due to the demise of Black colonies and of most Black homesteads in the region by 1930. In contrast, they argue that homesteads were transitional spaces that provided post-Reconstruction Black migrants a stepping-stone to achieve their true goals of securing peace and opportunity, and of equipping their descendants for future success.

In making these arguments, Edwards and Friefeld build on the works of historians like Quintard Taylor and Nell Irvin Painter, whose pioneering studies have helped reinsert Black migrants into the history of the West and have demonstrated the important contributions of the Black western experience. In addition, by expanding the focus from one Black homesteading town or colony to several communities and unaffiliated farms, The First Migrants demonstrates the important opportunity that the homesteading experience provided Black migrants and subsequent generations. [End Page 635]

It is, of course, no easy task to write a full scope examination of the Great Plains Black homesteading experience and to keep it under four hundred pages. Edwards and Friefeld are to be commended for their efforts to accomplish this monumental task and to do so while still making it accessible to a general audience. One element that makes this achievement possible is the narrative approach that the authors utilize in...