"Pap" Singleton, the Moses of the Colored exodus
By: Walter L. Fleming
Contributors: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library
Edition: Electronic ed.
Publisher: Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Chapel Hill, N.C.]
Language: eng
Subjects: African Americans; Biography; Freed persons; Social conditions; Migrations; History
Other titles: American journal of sociology.; North American slave narratives.
Description: Born Benjamin Singleton in 1809 in Nashville, Tenn., he was called "Pap" by those who knew him, due to his age. During his life as a slave, "Pap" attempted to run away several times, seeing what the free African Americans had in the North. After the Civil War, "Pap" declared that his "mission" was to urge former slaves to save their money and buy homes or plots of land as a way to collectively improve the status of the race. The southern states discouraged this attempt to gain political and industrial freedom, so "Pap" began to look west. Although an uneducated man, he formed and was president of the Real Estate and Homestead Association and looked to Kansas as the new Canaan. He took on the title of the Moses of the Colored Exodus or Father of the Exodus. Many southern ex-slaves followed him to Kansas, but they were less successful than he had hoped and eventually met resistance from working class whites and European immigrants competing for increasingly scarce jobs. It was at this point that "Pap" decided that blacks would never be able to compete equally and thrive in the U.S. and he began to look to Canada or Liberia. Preferring Liberia, he formed the United Transatlantic Society to look into the return to Africa. Many educated blacks, such as Frederick Douglass, tried to discourge the freedmen from following Singleton and, he, in turn, was contemptuous of them and of education in general as a means to improve the race. He spent all of his money on his "mission" and died with little or no money in 1892.
Notes: Title from electronic caption title (viewed Mar. 8, 2003).

This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digitization project's database, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection North American slave narratives.

Text scanned (OCR) by David Faflik. Text encoded by Elizabeth S. Wright.

Includes bibliographical references.

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Transcribed from: "Pap" Singleton, the Moses of the Colored exodus / Professor Walter L. Fleming, Louisiana State University. p. 61-82. Originally published in The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 15, July 1909. This biography was reprinted by Louisiana State University as a pamphlet in 1909.

Funding from the Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supported the electronic publication of this title.

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