The Exodusters: A Picture Of Black America’s Hope After Slavery

The portrait reveals a young Black woman in the late 18th century, posing with a slight smile. Her mere presence hinted at her circumstance, that she had access to a photography studio, suggesting a station not afforded many.

But, she was not the only one. There’s the couple with the wife leaning into her husband. The small child guarded by an enormous dog. All of their photos have been on exhibit at the Black Archives Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. The photographer is unknown, but the photographs were taken in Leavenworth, Kansas and tell the story of families who fled Jim Crow, settling in the Midwest. A white photographer named Mary Everhard purchased the negatives in the 1920s. Decades later a Chicago collector bought the negatives and started selling them to museums including The Amon Carter Museum of American Art which loaned the photos to the Black Archives.

According to the exhibit, the subjects referred to themselves as  “exodusters” — African Americans who left the South after the Civil War to settle in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. The name comes from the exodus from Egypt during Biblical times. Most left states lining the Mississippi River and arrived by steamboats, settling in the river cities of Wyandotte, Atchison, and Kansas City. It was the first mass migration after the Civil War, and an estimated 26,000 moved to Kansas. 

The photos aren’t daguerreotypes which were the earliest photographic process popularized in the United States. According to Afropunk, one of the Black photographers whose “technical roots” were traced to daguerreotypes was J.P. Ball. Ball photographed Henry H. Garnet and abolitionist Frederic Douglass. Although the photographic eye that chronicled the courageous African Americans in Leavenworth is still unknown, the lens preserved the pictorial history of a people determined to live beyond the limited reality prescribed for them.