Walter Lynwood Fleming

Book digitized by Google and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

Born Benjamin Singleton in 1809 in Nashville, Tenn., he was called "Pap" by those who knew him, due to his age. During his life as a slave, "Pap" attempted to run away several times, seeing what the free African Americans had in the North. After the Civil War, "Pap" declared that his "mission" was to urge former slaves to save their money and buy homes or plots of land as a way to collectively improve the status of the race. The southern states discouraged this attempt to gain political and industrial freedom, so "Pap" began to look west. Although an uneducated man, he formed and was president of the Real Estate and Homestead Association and looked to Kansas as the new Canaan. He took on the title of the Moses of the Colored Exodus or Father of the Exodus. Many southern ex-slaves followed him to Kansas, but they were less successful than he had hoped and eventually met resistance from working class whites and European immigrants competing for increasingly scarce jobs. It was at this point that "Pap" decided that blacks would never be able to compete equally and thrive in the U.S. and he began to look to Canada or Liberia. Preferring Liberia, he formed the United Transatlantic Society to look into the return to Africa. Many educated blacks, such as Frederick Douglass, tried to discourge the freedmen from following Singleton and, he, in turn, was contemptuous of them and of education in general as a means to improve the race. He spent all of his money on his "mission" and died with little or no money in 1892.