(gentle music) - [Narrator] Following the Civil War, the Montgomery family of freed men and women operated an early Mississippi farm co-op out of the family plantation of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.

As the federal government abandoned southern institutions and Reconstruction came to an end, Davis was freed from prison and pardoned for his crimes.

He resumed control of the home through southern courts.

Facing eviction, some of the Montgomerys and their neighbors tried lands elsewhere in the Mississippi.

Others took part in the great exodus to Kansas.

One, William Thornton Montgomery, migrated to the Red River Valley in Dakota territory and turned a successful wheat farm and elevator into a small town named after his mother.

- In a May 1967 interview with NBC News, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on what he viewed as a disparity of opportunity on the new frontier following the Civil War.

"America freed the slaves in 1863 "through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, "but gave the slaves no land, "or nothing in reality, as a matter of fact, "to get started on.

"At the same time, America was given away millions of acres "of land in the West and Midwest, "which meant that there was a willingness "to give white peasants from Europe an economic base "and yet it refused to give its Black peasants from Africa, "who came here involuntarily in chains, "and had worked free for 244 years, "any kind of economic base."

In this episode, we'll explore how free men and women set their sights for the Northern Plains and took part in the agricultural revolution that reshaped the landscape in the 19th century.

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public.

Our narrator is Matt Olien.

And this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(gentle music) - [Narrator] After the violence of the Civil War had calmed, the final decades of the 19th century on the Northern Plains were still marked by tumultuous change.

The Indian wars had moved into Dakota Territory, opening the region to further American settlement.

However, this wave of immigrants had been set in motion years earlier by several key legislative acts.

When the slave-holding conservatives among the southern Democrats seceded from the Union in 1861, the radical Republican elements of the northern states consolidated their power in Congress and passed legislation like the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act.

The first of these acts created railroad charters providing corporations huge swaths of federal lands to help fund the construction of transcontinental railroads that would connect America's east and west.

The Union Pacific was the first railroad chartered by this legislation.

The second was the Northern Pacific, which broke ground in Duluth in 1870 and began carrying settlers into Dakota Territory two summers later.

Many of these settlers purchased their land directly from the railroad or federal government, but a significant minority made use of the 1862 Homestead Act, a revolutionary piece of legislation that created federal subsidies for agricultural settlements in the West Though some historians have criticized the program, citing failure rates, fraudulent claims, and other abuses, the Homestead Act succeeded in expediting America's westward expansion and provided new paths of economic mobility for the nation's growing working class.

Unfortunately, as civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. later argued, the program failed to address standing racial inequities and other barriers of entry and few African Americans ever took part.

In Northern Plains communities, African American populations remained low, usually constituting less than 1% of the population and most of these men and women came north with few resources to work in service industries and general labor.

However, a few hundred Black settlers and families still staked their claim on homesteads in the Northern Plains, including William Thornton Montgomery, perhaps the most successful to do so.

Montgomery came north from Davis Bend, Mississippi, where his family had been enslaved by brothers Joseph and Jefferson Davis, wealthy plantation owners influenced by the utopian ideals of Robert Owen.

On the Davis plantation, enslaved men and women were allowed greater freedoms than was typical within the confines of their bondage.

They were educated, relatively well fed, and compensated.

And William's father, Benjamin, was trusted to manage plantation business.

He also developed a reputation as a machinist and engineer.

Yet, when the Union Army marched through Davis Bend in 1862, the Montgomerys joined their ranks to fight against their former owners' Confederacy forces.

After the war, the Montgomerys purchased the Davis Plantation for $300,000.

William also served in public office, one of the first in the Reconstruction south.

By 1881, cotton prices had fallen and Jefferson Davis regained ownership of the plantation, so William moved north to grow wheat as a bonanza farmer.

He arrived in the north with considerably more money, education, and experience than most of his Red River Valley peers.

And as a result, his years in the region were marked by relative wealth, comfort, and social standing.

William landed on 640 acres in Richland County, two miles from the Red River.

The Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul rail line, connecting Fargo and Breckenridge ran through his land.

The additions of a general store and grain elevator in 1888 soon gave form to a small village of Montgomery's neighbors and laborers called Lithia.

His later land purchases and Homestead and Timber Culture Act claims added to a thriving operation of more than 1,000 acres.

At the turn of the 20th century, nearing 60 years of age, William returned to his family in Mississippi.

He died in 1909, having taken one of the most impressive journeys to the north and back.

Some of Montgomery's successes were shared among the other few Black settlers in the Northern Plains who found community at the end of the 19th century.

However, his return to Mississippi also foreshadowed a steady out-migration of the region's Black population that would continue until the 1960s.

New histories will tell their stories.

- Thank you for joining us for a look at the early years of the Black experience in the Northern Plains.

We hope you continue to explore, learn, and even share the many threads of our unique histories.

As Sojourner Truth once said, "Truth is powerful and will prevail."

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public and this has been "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.