Content area
Full text
The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters. By Bryan M. Jack. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2007. Pp. [xiv], 178. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8262-1772-1.)
The best parts of this book examine newspaper accounts of the 1879 exodus of African Americans through St. Louis to new homes in Kansas. The brutal collapse of Reconstruction in the wake of Rutherford B. Hayes's election to the presidency provoked the migration of the "Exodusters." Between March 17 and May 3, relief workers counted more than five thousand refugees (more than two-thirds of them children) passing through St. Louis. Typically destitute, they benefited greatly from aid provided by the St. Louis African American community. Bryan M. Jack concludes that the St. Louis black community greeted this new migration as a continuation of the wartime stream of refugees...