<p>Placard 1 Benjamin "Pap" Singleton (1809-1892), a former slave born in Nashville, Tennessee, became the leader of the "Exoduster Movement" of 1879, and in later years he was accorded the title "Father of the Exodus." In the late 1860s, Singleton and his associates urged blacks to acquire farmland in Tennessee, but whites would not sell productive land to them. As an alternative Singleton began scouting land in Kansas in the early 1870s. Soon several black families migrated from Nashville. By 1874, Singleton and his associates had formed the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association in Tennessee, which steered more than 20,000 black migrants to Kansas between 1877 and 1879. In 1880 Singleton claimed to be "the whole cause of the Kansas immigration," in testimony before a U.S. committee on the "exodus to Kansas." </p><p>Nell Irvin Painter Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After the Reconstruction, p. 100 New York: Knopf, 1977</p>