Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was a former bondsman who, later in his life, became known for leading African American migrations from the post-Reconstruction South into Kansas. African Americans feared that the end of federally enforced Reconstruction would mark the return of overt racial violence and discrimination in the South. These fears motivated a mass African American migration away from the former Confederacy and into sparsely populated Kansas, a state already iconic for its antebellum struggle for Free Soil.