The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration recounts the largely unknown story of the first Black migrants who left the South to seek opportunity by going west to homestead. Amid danger, toil, and hardship, they also found joy, self-worth, and freedom. Their historic achievements speak to today’s ongoing struggle for equality.
In this first account of the full scope of Black homesteading in the Great
Plains, Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld illuminate the homesteaders’
fierce determination to find freedom—and their greatest achievements and struggles for full equality.
The First Migrants expands the historical narrative of American history and the role played by citizens of African descent. This book heralds the story of the African American homesteaders who helped settle America’s Great Plains and is informative, comprehensive, and very personal. It shouts, “We were there.”
–Catherine Meehan Blount, descendant of Black homesteaders in Nebraska
The First Migrants discusses the wide and wide-ranging experiences of black homesteaders. This amazingly researched study will make a meaningful and needed contribution to African American history, as well as to our understanding of how non-indigenous Americans, black and white, settled the Great Plains.
–Kenneth Hamilton, author of Booker T. Washington in American Memory and Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1917; Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies, Southern Methodist University
As a child, I learned only a bit of my family’s homesteading story. The First Migrants weaves it together with the stories of other Black families, turning sparse records and anecdotes into a living history.
– Elizabeth Burden, Black homesteader descendant and Tucson artist
Wow! Edwards and Friefeld have done it again! They have illustrated an epic event in our Nation’s history that is often missed, overlooked or misunderstood, the story of our Nation’s Black Homesteaders. Through personal, gripping stories illustrated in this book we learn that “Black Homesteading was just not a curious historical phenomenon, over and now done with, but rather a historical process that continues to have impact and importance” on our Nation and the World! It will reveal the path these American Citizens traveled, from being “owned to owning” and through this journey achieving the American Dream!
– Mark Engler, former Superintendent, Homestead National Park