I was thinking about how America isn't really one nation but more two, and how this has affected the social fabric and cultural ideas over the 150 years since slavery.
And I got me thinking - if whites were so adamant about not wanting to give blacks equal status, yet were still against slavery and proposal such as returning them to Africa, then were there any attempts to create a nation from African-Americans, as it were? Similar to attempts to place Natives on localized reservations, but instead for the now-free African minority?
There were black communities set up by African Americans in the late 1870s-80s, but they weren't protected by the government like Native American reservations.
The people participating in the communities were called exodusters because of the exodus from the south to states like Kansas. One of the more well known exoduster communities is Nicodemus, Kansas.
African Americans in the south first wanted these communities so they could get away from the persecution of the whites in the south during reconstruction years, where they were still subject to persecution and violence despite their new found freedom.