St. Louis Riverfrnnt

In 1879, thousands of impoverished Black men, women, and children, known as Exodusters, passed through St. Louis on their way to Kansas and other Midwestern and Western states in search of a better life. They fled the oppressive political, social, and economic conditions of the post-Reconstruction South, where former slaveholders had regained power and federal protections had been withdrawn. During the 1870s, Black leaders from across the South organized a committee to investigate these conditions and report to the federal government. When their appeals for assistance were ignored, including a request for land grants or funds to migrate to Liberia, a spontaneous mass movement of southern Blacks to the West began in earnest in 1879.