e fundamental causes of the movement was occasioned by this charge
and succeeded in proving its baselessness.[1]

The real causes of the migration of 1879 were not far to seek.
The economic cause was the agricultural depression in the lower
Mississippi Valley. But by far the most potent factor in effecting
the movement was the treatment received by negroes at the hands of the
South. More specifically, as expressed by the leaders of the movement
and refugees themselves, they were a long series of oppression,
injustice and violence extending over a period of fifteen years; the
convict system by which the courts are permitted to inflict heavy
fines for trivial offenses and the sheriff to hire the convicts to
planters on the basis of peonage; denial of political rights; long
continued persecution for political reasons; a system of cheating by
landlords and storekeepers which rendered it impossible for tenants
to make a living, and the inadequacy of school facilities.[2] Sworn
public documents show that nearly 3,500 persons, most of whom were
negroes, were killed between 1866 and 1879, and their murderers were
never brought to trial or even arrested. Several massacres of
negroes occurred in the parishes of Louisiana. Henry Adams, traveling
throughout the State and taking note of crime committed against
negroes, said that 683 colored men were whipped, maimed or murdered
within eleven years.[3]

In the year 1879, therefore, thousands of negroes from Mississippi,
Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina moved to
Kansas. Henry Adams of Shreveport, Louisiana, an uneducated negro
but a man of extraordinary talent, organized that year a colonization
council. He had been a soldier in the United States Army until 1869
when he returned to his home in Louisiana and found the condition of
negroes intolerable. Together with a number of other negroes he first
formed a committee which in his own words was intended to "look into
affairs and see the true condition of our race, to see whether it was
possible we could stay under a people who held us in bondage or not."
This committee grew to the enormous size of five hundred members. One
hundred and fifty of these members were scattered throughout the South
to live and work among the negroes and report their observations.
These agents quickly reached the conclusion that the treatment the
negroes received was generally unbearable.[4] Some of the conditions
reported were that la