Who Benefited from Homesteading legislation?
Precise statistics on which groups in American society benefited most from the original Homestead Act of 1862 do not appear to be available. It is clear from the available research that thousands of blacks and millions of poor whites saw homesteading in the American West as their path toward economic salvation. This path had been paved by the U.S. Government, which through its largess, engaged in one of the most far-reaching wealth distribution programs in history. Concerning blacks in particular, Quintard Taylor, in his book In Search of the Racial Frontier: African-Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (Norton, 1998), p. 152, notes that by 1900 there were 1,782 black-owned farms in Kansas worth around $3.7 million. Kansas, along with Oklahoma, was a primary destination for black homesteaders seeking to claim their own farmland under the Homestead Act. However, overall statistics on the proportion of black homestead claims filers vs. white claimants do not appear to have been tabu
