Picture of African Americans Family in an Old Fashioned Homecoming Dinner

A history of African American settlement in Stafford Canton was largely forgotten or ignored for decades. Leadership from unusual places recently helped preserve and elevate that past. Descendants of the Exodusters returned to primal Kansas this past fall for a homecoming weekend to constitute connections with once unknown ancestors. The event proved emotional for both visitors as well as residents trying to come to terms with the good and bad of their local history.

At the start of a worldwide pandemic virtually two years ago, Rene Elmore of Tampa, Florida, fabricated a promise to her great-uncle George Elmore of Tyler, Texas. Elmore, well into his 80s, was despondent because he didn't know where his family was. He was the youngest and had no thought what had become of his 17 siblings, let alone aunts, uncles and cousins.

​​ "I asked him what their names were, and he said, 'Well, I'grand not sure. We have a huge family. But there's Elmores, Youngs and Scotts.' Then, after talking with one of my outset cousins, we decided to do a Deoxyribonucleic acid test. We tested my uncle and my father, Ronald Elmore."

On Beginnings.com, they institute information nigh their family from Alice McMillan Lockridge, who lived across the nation in a suburb near Seattle.

She had roots in central Kansas about forty miles due west of Hutchinson, in Stafford Canton.

And so did the Elmores. Their family members were among the hundreds of African Americans who settled there, members of a mass migration often referred to equally Exodusters, a term derived from the Bible'south recounting of the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt.

Commencement in the mid- to late 1870s, as support for Reconstruction following the Ceremonious War waned, African Americans left the deep South in droves to observe better lives on the Western frontier.

Thousands came to Kansas.

In a phone telephone call, Elmore constitute McMillan Lockridge's family knowledge galvanizing. "She had a lot of names that I was starting to recognize. I was so excited. I thought she was a possible relative."

But no, McMillan Lockridge told Elmore, she wasn't a relative.

She is white. The Elmores are Blackness.

On that kickoff phone call, Elmore remembers exactly what McMillan Lockridge said next:

"She said, 'I'm a tree hugger.' And I asked, 'What is that?'"

It was a reference to genealogy, not environmentalism.

"She said she was from the (Stafford County) area and she researches African Americans and tries to leave their grave sites with dignity."

Elmore's vocalism chokes up in retelling the story.

"I can't thank her plenty."

At the same fourth dimension, Rene Elmore'southward girl, Shelby Ronea, a filmmaker and actor, was besides pursuing her mother's quest. Once anonymous ancestors were starting to be revealed as identifiable human beings.

"When it comes to talking with the descendants of the African American customs, we've all been told the aforementioned story – the information is lost," Ronea says. "Merely the fact that my mom has been able to start off with 40 names at the beginning of 2020 and at present has 3,200 names has changed the way I've looked at my identity and my history."

And for the Elmores, a trivial town in Kansas – St. John, with barely 1,100 residents – held the primal to their past, a draw that would ultimately lead several families back for a unique sort of homecoming.

And information technology isn't just the Elmores who are reclaiming their piece of the past. Afterwards years of confining the boondocks's rich African American history to the shadows, St. John is taking steps to non but admit and preserve that by merely welcome back descendants such every bit the Elmores to celebrate that history with them.

The effort isn't being spurred by traditional leaders. McMillan Lockridge nurtures her several-generations-long familial connection to Stafford County while living afar. Equally a junior loftier educatee, Taylor Clark, who went on to become Miss Kansas 2021, undertook a 4-H project that mobilized local and national efforts to preserve and elevate the community'southward unique African American history.

"I'm envious," says Mark McCormick, director of strategic communications for the ACLU of Kansas and former manager of the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita, and a past columnist for The Wichita Eagle. (McCormick is likewise a columnist for The Periodical.) "I wish this were happening in more places. Mayhap more than any other fourth dimension in our nation's history, we need to be finding narratives that bring us together as opposed to bulldoze us apart. My hope is that information technology grows."

In the process, though, some are struggling to come to terms with troubling aspects of Kansas' history and their families' roles in it, peculiarly the racism that contributed to driving some Black residents away.

With the exception of Nicodemus, 150 miles northwest of St. John and ane of the few remaining African American communities founded subsequently the Civil War, the history of Black settlement in Kansas has been largely ignored.

Even those working to preserve the history of Nicodemus encounter their history as divide from the Exoduster movement because that customs was an organized town that people were solicited to settle, Angela Bates, executive director of the Nicodemus Historical Society, told Wichita's KMUW public radio station last summertime when the town conducted its 143rd homecoming.

The homecoming attempt in Stafford County is likewise exposing a function of Kansas history that has increasing resonance as the state'southward demographics tendency toward greater diversity.

"There has been to my knowledge very, very little enquiry on Black homesteaders," says Gretchen Eick, an award-winning author and professor of history at Friends University in Wichita. "We know they existed. When I was doing my Ph.D., that was one of the topics I was really interested in. I ended up with the ceremonious rights movement instead, but I call up it but hadn't been really researched. It is a whole area of research that is but very exciting and undeveloped."

Where Their Ancestors Lived

The chat with McMillan Lockridge would wind upward cartoon Elmore and descendants of African American families to St. John and Stafford last October for a homecoming so they could run into for themselves where their ancestors had lived. They came from Florida, Oklahoma and elsewhere in Kansas.

The attendees included three generations of the Gracey family – Julia Gracey Holmes, Marcia Phillips and Alecia Dunigan – who collection from Dover, Oklahoma. Their highlight, 85-twelvemonth-old Julia Gracey Holmes says, was visiting the graves of family.

Some gathered sandy Stafford County soil from their ancestors' homesteads.

Seated at circular tables, they struck upwardly acquaintances over coffee and rolls.

Their render added a new affiliate to the oft less-than-hospitable history African American families have had with towns such as St. John.

The Exodusters, oft poor Black farmers from the South, were drawn to Kansas in role by its Free Land reputation. Many had heard information technology was home of peppery abolitionist John Brown, who was hanged in 1859 for treason later failing to foment a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The state was too home to the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, the start regiment of African Americans raised in a northern state and the first Blackness unit to see gainsay in the Ceremonious War.

In fliers, the leader of the Exoduster move, Benjamin Singleton, better known every bit "Old Pap," promoted Kansas as a promised land.

"Ho for Kansas!," the well-nigh pop flier read. "Brethren, Friends & Fellow Citizens: I feel thankful to inform yous that the REAL ESTATE AND Homestead Clan Will Leave Hither the 15 th of April, 1878, in pursuit of Homes in the Southwestern Lands of America, at Transportation Rates, cheaper than was ever known before."

All told, between xv,000 and xx,000 Exodusters flocked to Kansas, urged on in part past St. John'southward namesake, John P. St. John, Kansas' eighth governor. Originally called Zion Valley, the customs of St. John was renamed to gain favor with the governor and to sway his conclusion in naming information technology the county seat over neighboring Stafford. (Information technology apparently worked. St. John remains the canton seat and Stafford County's largest boondocks.)

John P. St. John too founded a relief system that provided aid to migrants, and was the grouping's board chairman before serving as the country's master executive from 1879 to 1883.

Nearly 30 Black families claimed country in Stafford Canton. By the 1900s, it is estimated that there were every bit many every bit 400 African Americans living in Stafford County. The canton's population and so was well-nigh 9,000 residents.

St. John supported 2 African American churches – a Baptist church building and the African Methodist Episcopal.

But life was never easy. There was drought, endless Kansas winds, sun, grit and secret organizations such equally the Ku Klux Klan. The Black homesteaders persevered equally long equally they could. Of those who survived the perils of racism and nature, nigh moved on.

Past 2021, there were no remaining Exoduster families in Stafford Canton, where the population has dwindled to 4,000 people and is 94% white. Fewer than thirty African Americans alive in that location at present, according to the 2020 demography.

Bo Rader used William R. Gray'southward quondam photo studio to make homecoming portraits of Shelby Ronea and others. "Working in that environment, re-creating portraits of people who were descendants of people he photographed, was kind of special to me," Rader says. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)

A Subconscious History Emerges

Even so connections between the present and the past are nevertheless possible.

In Jan 2021, McMillan Lockridge, the genealogy enthusiast, was researching data for the Stafford Canton Museum and was intrigued by several historic local photographs featuring Black farm families. She comes dorsum to St. John from Seattle twice a year for a few weeks at a time, and can also access the Stafford County Historical Museum's digital archives through the internet.

The museum houses a collection of more than 30,000 negatives begun by photographer William R. Grey. The Gray family took photos in Stafford County for 76 years. Almost every family that has ever lived in Stafford Canton is represented in the archive. Gray's girl, Jessie, connected taking photos up until 1981, when the negatives were donated to the Stafford museum.

No ane fully grasped the extent of this annal until museum curator and projection director Michael Hathaway moved the drinking glass plate negatives from the basement of the town's erstwhile bank edifice to the museum'south library in 2004.

Grayness had kept 11 ledgers dutifully logging each of the thirty,000 photos. Amidst them were more than than 100 photographs of Blackness residents with the last names of Gracey, Scott, Bowen, Martin, Rawlins, Robison, Tyler, Depree, Minnis and Micheaux.

"I knew I was close to some hidden history," says McMillan Lockridge, a fifth-generation Stafford Countian. "I always say somebody ought to exercise something and so I said to myself, 'Well, I'one thousand somebody. And I'chiliad going to practise it.'"

She researched the African Americans of Stafford County in old newspaper clippings – including 1 in particular that caught her attending. It was a report of a altogether party for Lela Scott on October. 23, 1921, hosted in her parents' house – the parsonage of the AME church in St. John.

The article published in the St. John News read "Miss Lela Scott served a succulent dinner at her home on Pearl Street final Sunday. Forty-nine guests were present, several from out of boondocks. Her tables were loaded with fried chicken and everything else that was adept to eat, and everybody certainly ate to their satisfaction and listened to sweet music. … Everyone that was present fully decided that Miss Scott is some entertainer. 1 Who Was There."

McMillan Lockridge was intrigued and decided to re-create the event. She would host a centennial birthday political party for the Scott twins – Lela and Elsie Scott.

She says she thought it would be a bully way of celebrating a lilliputian-known aspect of the county's history. And from there, the thought grew to become a homecoming for long disconnected descendants of the customs's Exodusters.

McMillan Lockridge contacted several people in Stafford County explaining she had already invited descendants to come to Stafford Canton, and could meeting spaces in Stafford'south museum and St. John's museum be made available? The spaces were available along with local lath members and volunteers to help, and she non only gave tours but even paid for a dinner.

"I'thousand looking for a reason to celebrate this history and go on it alive and do something for the people who are related to them and give them a reason to come and see us.

"I desire to tell them that not everybody is horrible."

The photographs of their descendants were something much more, a tear-inducing, nigh transcendental opportunity to see the faces of their forebears. Dauntless people. Strong people. Their people. On site that day was Wichita photographer Bo Rader who, in keeping with the arroyo that William R. Gray had used, fabricated costless pictures of the attendees. In another small way to repossess connections lost to the passage of time, McMillan Lockridge had round, cast atomic number 26 grave markers made maxim "Exoduster Pioneer."

"They were pioneers," McMillan Lockridge says. "In that location is a pigsty left in their history. My family didn't move. I can get to my house in St. John and observe generations of things. When yous may take been run off by the Klan, yous don't have stuff with y'all. They didn't have pictures; they didn't have keepsakes."

Preserving an All-Blackness Cemetery

This by October's homecoming was the latest development in a decade-long push to bring the all-but-lost history of Stafford County'southward African American settlers back to low-cal. For much of its 142 years of history, the community of St. John has promoted its history of largely white, prominent and prosperous families.

Simply some of the remnants of African American life were harder to erase and, in fact, accept been preserved.

The Martin Cemetery, an all-Blackness cemetery a few miles west of the intersection of U.Due south. Highways 50 and 281, was researched equally a 4-H project by then junior high schoolhouse student Taylor Clark, beginning in 2012.

It took her 3 years and wound upward with the cemetery being listed on both the Register of Celebrated Kansas Places and the National Register of Historic Places.

Ane of her grandmothers was Ruth Clark, a St. John junior high teacher who taught generations of students to feel passionate most their Kansas history. Her other grandmother, Amy Dudrey, some other multigeneration Stafford Countian, is just as passionate about local history.

"A lot of information technology was just Grandma and me looking through documents, calling people, going through microfilm machines and reading erstwhile news articles," says Clark.

She submitted her book-thick research as a nomination form for the celebrated designations. Funding was institute past both Stafford County and St. John to build a white vinyl fence effectually the cemetery, put upwards signage and proceed it regularly mowed.

"Information technology'due south not your typical 4-H projection," Taylor says. "But it'south affected me greatly and has me really checking histories as to what comes through as true and what stories are peradventure pushed to the back. I call back this is a story that needs to come to the forefront.

"By researching and going more in-depth, information technology tells us more than near the communities in our country."

Clark made a special advent during the homecoming weekend, playing drums for entertainment and talking with the descendants most her research.

The developments present some intriguing possibilities. Although it has some avails, such as the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, the Wetlands Scenic Byway and several unique restaurants, Stafford County isn't exactly a hub for visitors.

Simply the amount of history that's been preserved in the customs is substantial. The Stafford County Museum houses much of the canton's archive of newspapers, rural school records and family files along with the Gray photograph collection.

Could that history be a model that other communities could follow in exploring their ain pasts? Could it even exist a resource for starting more productive dialogues about race relations?

"There are dissimilar types of history," Eick says. "In that location's different emotional sides to this history. Merely the exciting thing is that basically you lot tin can work on uncovering it and documenting it with a chance for reconciliation and allow some healing to have place.

"And who knows, maybe it can make people aware of what's happened there."

The hope is that the homecoming weekend will get an almanac or biennial tradition for Stafford Canton, held on the third weekend of October to accolade and tell the stories of the past – the good and not-and then-adept.

In doing so, the customs could exist joining a broader national movement. According to Tanya Debose, vice president of communications for the Celebrated Black Towns and Settlements Alliance, a national group based in Tuskegee, Alabama, it has always been a custom to host homecoming celebrations in historic Black towns and settlements.

Although most families movement away and many were sometimes forced out, descendants are finding information technology a sense of responsibility and delivery to come up back and commemorate what happened, "good or bad."

It's becoming more common in the aftermath of George Floyd'due south murder in May 2020, according to Nicka Sewell-Smith, a nationally recognized Blackness genealogist who lives nearly Memphis, Tennessee.

Sewell-Smith has roots in Kansas. One of her ancestors was Isaac Rogers, a Cherokee freedman who was a soldier in the 1st Kansas Colored Troops.

"I'1000 non shocked this (St. John) is a Kansas town," Sewell-Smith says. "It is role of the origins of Kansas. It makes complete sense to me that a small boondocks in Kansas would practise this."

Only her advice for St. John and other Kansas communities wanting to better recognize their ain histories with African American settlement is to tell the stories in an equitable fashion,

"I'm saying this tongue-and-cheek just when you are reading Southern history, you may read about a landowner who acquired land and he was a planter and I'm like thinking slaves and not wanting to know about the marble on the fireplace. I want to know who was shining it every day and who was tending to the garden that nevertheless exists and who built the house that stands," Sewell-Smith says. "That's the part of the story that we don't talk about. The biggest bulwark to these sorts of reunions is the fear factor: How volition it exist perceived? Whose story is told? How can we tell a story accurately and honor everyone?"

Stafford County's Ku Klux Klan

The willingness of the Exodusters' descendants to go in search of family histories and the kindness and support to which they were treated at their homecoming nonetheless must be viewed in historical context.

During the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds of white families in Stafford County boasted membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

Stafford itself joined the listing of Kansas towns with sundown laws. Violence from local lynchings and threats were used past white families to foreclose Blacks from truly settling down for generations.

Local newspapers during the offset few decades of the 20th century reported on local KKK meetings, donations from the Klan to local church organizations and upcoming meetings in flat, nonjudgmental prose.

Decades later when some of those memberships came to calorie-free, many families were confounded past the actions of loved ones they thought they knew well.

This writer remembers a visit with my grandmother over a Thanksgiving dinner in 1976 who said, "You know, your grandfather was a member."

His name was James Westward. Tanner, and I adored him. He was a schoolhouse superintendent and had promoted the country's first hot lunch school plan in the Stafford County hamlet of Radium and who, in 1913, was the land secretarial assistant of prohibition.

How could that man, whom I knew as a child and who taught me my love for the written word, do this?

My grandmother said he joined for "social reasons," pregnant he wanted to fit in and to turn down wouldn't accept been looked upon kindly by the organisation's local representatives.

That same year, I remember going into the Ida Long Goodman Library in St. John for research on a higher term paper about the KKK in Kansas and finding a box with a satin robe, local membership rolls and a KKK song volume.

The box has since disappeared from the library.

I'grand not the simply person from Stafford County to find out about the darker elements of their family's past.

Rachelle Keeley, now of Independence, recalls the time she discovered a KKK membership card in the back of her grandparents' closet.

"I can't even tell you what I was looking for, but I was down there, going through stuff and establish a folder. I flipped it open up, and I detect this paper with this fancy script, and it had this KKK on information technology. I tin't even tell you whose proper noun was on it. I was so shocked and incensed by it. I never pictured our family being involved in something like that," Keeley says.

Will They Return?

While it might exist tempting for some to talk about the joyous reunions of homecoming weekend without talking nearly the Klan's history, it'due south a difficult topic to avoid.

I of Elmore's relatives who homesteaded in St. John was the Rev. John Arthur Scott, who was an elected official during Reconstruction. He had been threatened by the Klan, fled Louisiana and eventually came to Kansas.

"I hope from this homecoming that I will be able to meet my family unit, considering I don't know who they are," Elmore says. "I hope that I will be able to gain information on what they did, where they lived, what some of them looked like. I've only been able to see a few pictures, but I desire to know how they maneuvered through the world and what they experienced."

Indeed, coming to terms with such history and what information technology means for today tin be hard for both the descendants of homesteaders and of the townspeople who remain. McCormick, the former museum managing director, recalls a recent Zoom meeting in which historian Martha Jones talked almost having compassion for people, primarily white Americans who are having to come to grips with a feeling that their country isn't exactly what they've been told.

"And so you have to extend some grace and understanding to people who are really wrestling with the fact that their notion of this state has been turned upside downwards and inside out. Nosotros accept to listen and acquire from each other," McCormick says.

Revisiting the past certainly makes real the painful realities of living as a Black person in Kansas a century or more than agone. But there's power in being reconnected to ane'south ancestors and the stories of their lives.

Since Elmore and her daughter, Shelby Ronea, began researching their ancestry, they have designed a family crest for the Elmore, Scott, Young and Jackson family with the words "Altruism, Peak and Valor" emblazoned on it.

Among some of their potential relatives are the Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel and pioneering filmmaker and producer Oscar Chiliad icheaux, who has direct ties to Stafford County.

Ronea, in her early 20s, recently graduated from DePaul Academy in Chicago. She wants to make a documentary on her family's search for relatives.

"This has empowered me and has become part of the legacy I desire to leave behind," Ronea says. "It's made me prouder of who I am and where I come up from. It is an amazing privilege to have that cognition."

Ronea was in awe as she went about the county, coming together some electric current county residents – some of whom fifty-fifty recalled members of her family. 1 was a neighbor of Elsie Scott's and told of mowing grass for her as a young man and later buying her house and the AME church building later she died in the early 1980s.

"I did not understand until now, being fastened to an actual land and having history and knowing that somebody y'all are related to once lived hither … I tear up. I didn't think fourth dimension travel was possible until I came here – but, yeah, now I am a time traveler."

Ronea said she is gathering collections of soil from her family's roots – in Stafford Canton and Eros, Louisiana, to someday place in her ain home.

The fall 2021 homecoming was significant simply minor. The number of descendants numbered most a dozen.

It's not clear notwithstanding whether they'll come dorsum. Some Stafford County residents are hopeful they will and are contemplating steps that might encourage a return.

The Lucille M. Hall Museum board in St. John is currently because a name alter. One idea is to change the name to the St. John Homecoming Hall and Museum and create more exhibits and research on all cultures who have settled in the county – Native American, white, Blackness, Hispanic and Asian.

The board will make that determination within a few months.

For at present, in that location is hope in encouraging a homecoming every yr or two years.

"That sounds like the perfect proper name because everybody yearns to come up back home. They are coming home," says board member Wendy Mawhirter of St. John. "They are all coming dwelling."

A version of this article appears in the Winter 2022 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Eye. To larn more nigh KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Shop or subscribe to the impress edition.

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Source: https://klcjournal.com/kansas-history-exoduster-homecoming/