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, and, verbatim, “Large numbers of blacks came between 1879 and 1881.”

Scope of this record, stated plainly. This record does NOT support the widely repeated “six thousand migrated to Kansas in 1879” figure (the National Park Service states “approximately 6,000”). An earlier version said the figure was a St. Louis Globe-Democrat count of 6,206 migrants passing through St. Louis; that attribution rests on the studio’s own research ledger, not on a primary this record carries, and the essay no longer makes it (corrected 2026-10-01). 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.