Ustaine Talley's Research
A Welcome Addition to Kansas Black History
Ustaine Talley grew up in Dunlap, Kansas, a descendent of the African-American settlers who founded the Dunlap Farm Colony in the tallgrass prairie region of Morris County. Here is three-year-old Ustaine in Morris County with family and neighbors:
Today Ms. Talley is President Emerita of Prairie Heritage, Inc., a non-profit which she co-founded in 2001 dedicated to celebrating prairie ecosystems and telling the stories of the peoples who have interacted with the prairie.
Ms. Talley is now on a mission to share the history of Dunlap and similar Black settlements in Kansas.
We were delighted that Ms. Talley chose Bird Runner Wildlife Refuge as her base of operations for several weeks in June 2023. She had returned to Kansas from her current home in Denver, Colorado to gather information, consult archives, and conduct interviews. (Ms. Talley invites anyone with information on Kansas Black history to contact her at ustaine@sbcglobal.net)
We who are working on the Black History Trail of Geary County feel the importance of her research. Geary County adjoins Morris County, and Ms. Talley is uncovering more of the stories of Dunlap residents who contributed to rural life in Geary County. As we mentioned in a previous post, Phase 2 of Geary County’s Trail will highlight the contributions of Harrison Fulghem, who was born and ultimately buried in Dunlap, but who worked and raised his family in the ranching areas of eastern Geary County. The Fulghems lived and worked on McDowell Creek, right next to Bird Runner Wildlife Refuge’s current location.
We are also enthusiastic about her work because it is enlarging the picture of Blacks’ experiences provided by previous historians.
Nell Irvin Painter’s magisterial and richly-sourced book, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction, describes conditions in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee in the 1870s that impelled freedpeople to leave the South and move to Kansas. But her book concludes with Blacks’ arrival in Kansas.1
Thus, Ms. Talley’s research picks up where Painter’s book leaves off.
In addition, the landmark work Historical Atlas of Kansas, by Homer E. Socolofsky and Huber Self, though important and useful, mentions only one Black rural settlement in Kansas—Nicodemus, in Graham County. The authors also state that other Blacks “settled in larger towns, where they could find employment.”2 Ms. Talley is researching over 20 Black settlements, some of them agricultural communities, such as the one she grew up in. She is thus broadening the focus beyond Nicodemus and adding more rural experiences to our understanding of Black history.
This interest in rural life allows Ms. Talley to explore ecology—”land communities”—as they impacted people’s experiences. Here she is, talking about one of the ecological aspects of her ancestors’ experiences:
Ms. Talley’s focus on subjective experiences offers a welcome corrective to tropes sometimes imposed on Black settlers from the outside. One of those tropes is the idea that Blacks saw Kansas as the Promised Land. For example, Socolofsky and Huber refer to 1870-1880 as “the period of the ‘Exodus’ of blacks from the deep South to the promised land of Kansas.”3 “Exodus?” “Promised land?” This use of the Moses trope is double-edged. Painter’s book describes the strong cultural identification of enslaved people of the South with enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, as described in the Book of Exodus. Spirituals such as “Go Down, Moses” and “Camping in Canaan’s Land” are deeply felt expressions of this identification.4 But Painter also makes clear that racists could use a reductionist version of this identification to hide the real reasons Blacks were leaving the South. For example, she quotes Louisiana Congressman J. Floyd King, who maintained that “ignorant” Blacks were being fooled “to seek a new land of Canaan.”5 Such patronizing statements implied that when it came to Blacks, religiosity substituted for intelligence—that they were motivated by dreams of the supernatural rather than everyday concrete experiences.
What racists tried to obscure, Painter’s book makes clear. Painter details the complexity of motives for leaving the South—from the violence unleashed on Blacks who asserted their civil rights to the unfair labor practices that locked Blacks in poverty. She cites newly passed anti-Black laws “that would make and keep nearly all [Blacks] a powerless, immobilized, landless agricultural work force.”6 Especially frustrating to freedpeople were strictures enforced against their voting, forming political organizations, or buying land.
In Kansas, in contrast, all three were possible.
People of any religion or no religion could be motivated by such a contrast!
Painter stresses that the possibility of owning land was an especially strong motivator for people who had worked the land but been robbed of the fruits of their labor.
She writes, “About one fourth of the migrants arriving between the summer and winter of 1879 came with some money, and they took up land immediately.” By 1880, she says, Blacks in Kansas “had bought or entered approximately twenty thousand acres of land.” Many penniless Blacks who did work in cities were hoping to save money to buy land. Indeed, it wasn’t until the twentieth century, that, according to Painter, “the Afro-American quest for land subsided.” Thus, she concludes, Blacks’ moving to Kansas was different from the 20th century Great Migration from South to North. That later migration was rural-to-urban. In contrast, Blacks’ move to Kansas was “rural-to-rural…at least in intent.” But, she says, of Blacks’ lives in Kansas after 1879 ”no more than a hazy picture emerges.”7
This is where Ms. Talley comes in! Not only is she exploring the neglected rural dimensions of Blacks’ experiences in Kansas, she is bringing into focus multiple pictures, of multiple Black communities.
Just as Ms. Talley is enlarging the work of previous historians, she hopes others will build on her work. She is eager to share her discoveries, questions, and leads and invites interested people to contact her, at ustaine@sbcglobal.net.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction, The First Major Migration to the North of Ex-Slaves, with a New Introduction. 2nd Ed. NY: Norton, 1986.
Socolofsky, Homer E. and Huber Self. Historical Atlas of Kansas. 2nd Ed. Norman: U of Ok P, 1988. Map 42.
Ibid.
Painter, 195-196.
Painter, 234.
Painter, “Introduction,” vii.
Painter, “Epilogue,” 256-260.