Editing The Learning Tree (section)

== Exodusters ==
In 1879, many African Americans migrated to Kansas, and they became known as the "[[Exodusters]]". Among those who traveled were the ancestors of Gordon Parks. His father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a tenant farmer in Kansas. Given that Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, he was the "issue of the second generation of exodusters".<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.stlamerican.com/entertainment/living_it/gordon-parks-slow-blues/article_60d72baa-e9a0-570e-9c82-1f44846df9a5.html|title=Gordon Parks' slow blues|work=St. Louis American|access-date=2017-12-08|language=en}}</ref> His ancestral background played a role in choosing Fort Scott as the filming location for ''The Learning Tree''.

The Exodusters earned their name after nearly 6,000 black Americans migrated to Kansas after the Emancipation. Their exodus was prompted by the 1879 Windom Resolution that encouraged African Americans to leave the southern states where they were still met with much hatred, even though the [[American Civil War]] had ended a little more than a decade earlier.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/exodusters.htm|title=Exodusters - Homestead National Monument of America (U.S. National Park Service)|website=www.nps.gov|language=en|access-date=2017-12-08}}</ref> Kansas promised a fresh start for the Exodusters, who wanted to begin a new life, in a new land, away from the southerners who had once enslaved them.