John Wayne Niles

John Wayne Niles (c. 1842–?) was an American politician, political organizer, an early Kansas pioneer, and civil rights activist. An African American, he founded an all-Black political party, the Indemnity Party, which advocated for reparations in the form of land grants for those formerly enslaved. Niles was one of the founding settlement leaders of Nicodemus, Kansas, a freedmen's town.

Early life John Wayne Niles was born in about 1842 in Mississippi, to a white father and an African American mother.

In 1869, he was incarcerated for murder of a man, but was pardoned before completing the sentencing. In the mid-1878 there was a food shortage in Kansas which caused a struggle to maintain the colony. In 1882, Niles opened a liquor store without a license in Lee County, Arkansas. Less than a month later on November 3, 1883, there was an event called the Danville Massacre in Danville, Virginia; where many Black people died and were injured due to a political disagreement in public with white men. Benjamin Harris Brewster, the U.S. Attorney General had diverted the claims of the Indemnity Party by stating the party's land claims were under the state of Arkansas' jurisdiction, which would need to be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court to be appealed. Niles is one of the subjects addressed in the anthology book, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 (Random House, 2021).