Exodusters (Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society)

The state historical agency’s own entry, and the source of the only Exoduster numbers the essay states as fact: Kansas’s Black population of 17,108 in 1870 and 43,107 in 1880, with migration heaviest between 1879 and 1881.

Scope of this record, stated plainly. This record deliberately does NOT support the widely repeated “six thousand migrated to Kansas in 1879” figure, and the essay retires that figure on the record: chased to its origin, it is a St. Louis Globe-Democrat count of 6,206 migrants passing through St. Louis in March and April of 1879, a two-month, one-city transit tally that later retellings promoted into a full-year Kansas arrival total. The verification trail is filed in the predictive-history repository (05_SOURCE/VERIFICATION_LEDGER.md, pass 2) and in the essay brief’s Appendix A. If a later draft wants a 1879-specific arrival figure, it goes through Nell Irvin Painter’s Exodusters (1976, pp. 146–147, 184) directly, not through this record.