African Americans filtered into the Great Plains after Southern whites defeated their hopes for owning land in the South. They came to Cherry County to homestead from a variety of places, including Custer County, Omaha, even Canada, to seek land in the Sandhills made available through the Kinkaid Act.
Leroy Gields and his sister Matilda Robinson entered the first claims, in 1902 and 1904. Charles and Hester Meehan, an Irish man and Black woman arrived in 1907 to live in open and undisturbed defiance of Nebraska’s anti-miscegenation law. In all, fifty-eight Black people successfully proved up their claims and gained ownership of nearly thirty thousand acres in the homesteader community of DeWitty.
DeWitty settlers believed strongly in education. They established three school districts in 1908–9, and for at least one year, Black and white schoolchildren sat side by side in class. In 1912 Miles DeWitty set up a combined post office and tiny general store; only a few other structures stood nearby. It was more a rural neighborhood of concentrated homesteading than a town. Despite their large farms, families were connected by kinship ties and by church, schools, and community social events. Residents converted an old sod building into the St. James African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
The community initially prospered, reaching its maximum population of 150 in 1915. DeWitty residents and white ranching families seemed to interact harmoniously at a time when anti-Black prejudice in the nation turned increasingly violent. In 1919 white people in Omaha lynched Will Brown, a Black man, and in 1929, a mob in North Platte drove all Blacks, about two hundred people, out of town. But in the Sandhills, Black and white residents respected each other, and no incidents of hostility or violence against DeWitty residents were recorded.
DeWitty declined in the 1920s as farmers struggled with the nationwide farm depression and drier times locally. Families moved to find more favorable farming conditions, children left to attend high school and college, and some residents moved to cities for work.
Today all that remains of DeWitty is a building foundation, a historical marker, and the memories of those whose ancestors dreamed big and homesteaded in the Sandhills.