Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/79

 "PAP" SINGLETON 6$

see Real Estate and Homestead Association, of which he was president. He was favorably impressed with the country and, returning to Nashville, he took three hundred blacks to the public lands in Cherokee County in the southeastern part of Kansas and there founded "Singleton Colony." ^ Prospects seemed good and Singleton went back to Tennessee to get more emigrants. For this purpose the organization of the Tennessee Real Estate Asso- ciation was continued.^

From this time to 1879 Singleton was actively engaged in developing negro sentiment in Tennessee and Kentucky in favor of emigration or "exodus" to Kansas. The whites approved his policy, he says, aided him in various ways, told him that it "was better than politics," sat in his meetings, and in the Tennessee newspapers they published his notices and wrote up the move- ment for him. Every year with a few negroes he went to Kan- sas. Always upon his return he distributed circulars about "Sunny Kansas." He spent $600 for circulars, he says. All his life Singleton well understood the value of advertising. His literature was given to preachers going into the interior districts, to porters on the railroads, and to employees on the steamboats to be scattered among the negroes farther south. But not until 1876 was there much response to these efforts. In that year the local organizations in Tennessee were active, and Singleton and Columbus Johnson, another shrewd Nashville negro, went to Kansas and looked up more good locations for settlements on the public lands. An arrangement was made by which Johnson was to stay in Topeka and from there direct the newly arriving blacks to the various colonies. A. D. DeFrantz, a Nashville barber, another lieutenant of Singleton's, assisted in working up the parties in Tennessee. Singleton had headquarters in Nash- ville, but traveled back and forth conducting immigrants to Topeka. The steamers from Nashville granted a special rate of $10 to Topeka.^

'Singleton's Scrapbook, pp. 13, 19; Atchison Champion, September, 1879.

1879, in the archives of the Kansas Historical Society.
 * Circulars of Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association, 1873 to

Scrapbook, pp. 12, 17.
 * Harper's Weekly, May 17, 1879; Dunlap Colony circular, 1877; Singleton's