[23] Other freedmen found their way to this community in later years
and it became so prosperous that it was selected as the site of
Wilberforce University.
This transplantation extended into Michigan. With the help of persons
philanthropically inclined there sprang up a flourishing group of Negroes
in Detroit. Early in the nineteenth century they began to acquire property
and to provide for the education of their children. Their record was such
as to merit the encomiums of their fellow white citizens. In later years
this group in Detroit was increased by the operation of laws hostile to
free Negroes in the South in that life for this class not only became
intolerable but necessitated their expatriation. Because of the Virginia
drastic laws and especially that of 1838 prohibiting the return to that
State of such Negro students as had been accustomed to go North to attend
school, after they were denied this privilege at home, the father of
Richard DeBaptiste and Marie Louis More, the mother of Fannie M. Richards,
led a colony of free Negroes from Fredericksburg to Detroit.[24] And for
about similar reasons the father of Robert A. Pelham conducted others from
Petersburg, Virginia, in 1859.[25] One Saunders, a planter of Cabell
County, West Virginia, liberated his slaves some years later and furnished
them homes among the Negroes settled in Cass County, Michigan, about
ninety miles east of Chicago, and ninety-five miles west of Detroit.
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