During the years after the Civil War, Benjamin "Pap" Singleton led hundreds of African Americans out of the South and into Kansas, to a region known as "Singleton's Colony."

Singleton's efforts were part of the Great Exodus of 1879, when thousands of black people left the South after Reconstruction had ended.

African Americans went to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois, in search of freedom and equality.

Pap Singleton was born in 1809 in Nashville, Tennessee, where several times he was sold to slave owners and several times he escaped. Eventually, he fled to Canada, then settled in Detroit, where he ran a boardinghouse.