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Creating the Color Line and Confronting Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Middle America: 1850-1900

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Creating the Color Line and Confronting Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Middle America: 1850-1900 CREATING THE COLOR LINE AND CONFRONTING JIM CROW: CIVIL RIGHTS IN MIDDLE AMERICA: 1850-1900 BY © 2008 David J. Peavler Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Jeffrey P. Moran, Chair ______________________________ Rita Napier ______________________________ Jonathan Earle ______________________________ Kim Warren ______________________________ Shawn Leigh Alexander Date Defended ______________________________ The dissertation committee for David J. Peavler certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: CREATING THE COLOR LINE AND CONFRONTING JIM CROW: CIVIL RIGHTS IN MIDDLE AMERICA: 1850-1900 ______________________________ Jeffrey P. Moran, Chair ______________________________ Rita Napier ______________________________ Jonathan Earle ______________________________ Kim Warren ______________________________ Shawn Leigh Alexander Date Approved ____________________________ ii © by David J. Peavler 2008 All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT CREATING THE COLOR LINE AND CONFRONTING JIM CROW: CIVIL RIGHTS IN MIDDLE AMERICA: 1850-1900 APRIL 2008 DAVID J. PEAVLER B. A. EMPORIA STATE UNIVERSITY M. A. EMPORIA STATE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Directed by: Professor Jeffrey Moran This dissertation examines the creation of the color line and the ways that African American communities confronted it throughout Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. A detailed search of school board minutes, newspapers, court records, manuscripts, census data, and other archival sources in over twenty Midwestern cities and rural communities reveals the existence of mass meetings, boycotts, and legal challenges throughout the 19 th century. As a result, this work challenges the historiography of Post-Reconstruction America as an “era of accommodation” to Jim Crow. This survey also demonstrates that the racial assumptions of Midwestern whites varied little from their Southern contemporaries, yet demographic factors and the activism of black communities limited the creation of the color line in Middle America. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………....….....iv INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………....2 1.EXCLUSION TO SEGREGATION, 1840-1865……………………………….…25 2. RECONSTRUCTION AND THE COLOR LINE, 1865-1879……………….…..99 3. THE EXODUS IN HISTORY AND MEMORY, 1879-1880…………………...193 4. DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE COLOR LINE IN THE 1880s…………………292 5. CONFRONTING THE COLOR LINE IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW…………363 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….459 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….469 1 Introduction One year prior to the Brown v. Board decision, the House Committee on Un- American Activities compelled Langston Hughes to defend himself and his poetry. Hughes told the committee that they should focus on the Midwest instead of Moscow because his poetry was inspired by his childhood experiences in Lawrence, Kansas rather than by Communist ideology. Much has been written about Hughes, Brown v. Board , and Lawrence’s abolitionist heritage, yet the question of how a childhood in the Midwest would inspire Hughes’s compelling lines about race in America remains unexplored. This dissertation seeks to answer this question through an exploration of race relations in the schools and communities of Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska between the Civil War and the turn of the century. In writing the first regional survey of the Great Plains, it is my hope to demonstrate that the study of race in America is incomplete without an investigation of the entire nation. While the South and Urban North have been incorporated into the historiography of American race relations, the West and especially the Middle West has been largely ignored. In addition to the obvious need to survey the entire nation, these regions offer a unique perspective into the way racial barriers were constructed and confronted during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Historians have demonstrated that antebellum traditions of exclusion and segregation continued in the North while statutory requirements mandating Jim Crow emerged in the South. But racial lines were being constructed and confronted for the first time in states like Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska as the nation experienced war and reconciliation. Given 2 the absence of effective legislation regarding race in each of these states, the question of the color line was engaged on a local level by whites and blacks who had recently migrated from both sections. Kansas offers a unique opportunity to study the tension between Northern ideals and Southern practices by investigating communities whose racial demographics were in flux following the Civil War. Northern-born Republicans dominated both the political and economic centers of power in most of the state’s leading communities. But unlike Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York, where whites represented between ninety-seven and ninety-nine percent of the population; black communities in Kansas represented between ten and twenty-five percent of the urban population between 1875 and 1900. Historians have speculated about the sincerity of Northern leaders who called for greater egalitarianism during Reconstruction, yet have largely ignored Atchison, Leavenworth, Lawrence, Topeka, and Kansas City—the only Northern cities whose black populations exceeded ten percent during the 19 th century. As historians have demonstrated that segregation was essentially an urban phenomenon, Kansas is a logical place to study the emergence of Jim Crow. Given the region’s historic conflict regarding slavery during the antebellum period, the study of Kansas and its Northern neighbors offers a particularly intriguing view into the connection between the rejection of chattel slavery and the acceptance or rejection of racial segregation. Black migration to the region during the 1870s and 1880s occurred at a time when white Midwesterners took pride in their states’ 3 egalitarian identities regardless of their own commitment to abolition during Bleeding Kansas. Demographic changes created a unique situation, especially within Kansas, when small towns and leading urban communities were transformed from the nearly all-white demographics of the urban North to a population base that mirrored some of the South’s leading cities. For example, black New Orleans accounted for 27% of the city’s residents in 1880 compared to 26% in Topeka. Blacks represented between twenty and thirty percent of residents in a handful of smaller towns in Kansas such as Galena and Oswego. Southern cities such as Baltimore, Biloxi, Louisville, and Dallas had smaller percentages of black residents, ranging from fifteen to twenty percent during the late 19 th century. While St. Louis possessed a large black community in the 20 th century, only six percent of the city’s residents were black between 1880 and 1900. The total black population of leading cities of the South and urban North were still significantly larger than those of Kansas, yet the racial demographics of emerging cities such as Leavenworth were similar to that of Little Rock in both size and percentage in 1880. In fact, the total black population of Kansas in 1880 was nearly as large as the combined population of four of the five leading Southern cities Howard Rabinowitz surveyed in his study of the Urban South during Reconstruction. 1 A comparison between Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa demonstrates the importance of demographic change. Leading cities in Iowa and Nebraska followed the trend of Northern communities such as Detroit and Chicago in dismantling 1 Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Rabinowitz surveyed Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville, Raleigh, and Richmond. The combined black population of the first four cities was slightly over 46,000 while the black population of Kansas in 1880 was slightly over 43,000. 4 segregated schools after the Civil War. While black protest was the catalyst for integration in Omaha and Des Moines just as it was in Chicago and Detroit, demographics must be taken into consideration. Similar to these Northern metropolises, Iowa and Nebraska’s urban communities were between ninety-six and ninety-nine percent white. Blacks within smaller communities such as Keokuk and Nebraska City also protested against Jim Crow after the Civil War but failed to achieve integration. Largely due to the fact that these towns possessed larger percentages of black residents, integration did not occur until after the demographics of these towns changed. The black population of Kansas, however, grew in both relative and absolute terms between the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction. As a result, many of the smaller cities of Kansas did not integrate their schools until the early 20 th century, when the migration of blacks to larger cities made the operation of two school systems economically inefficient in many Kansas towns. Nearly every city in Kansas that still possessed large black communities after World War II practiced school segregation at the time of Brown v. Board. A number of these communities even practiced de jure segregation after the Brown decision, while de facto segregation reduced the significance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the leading cities of the entire region. Middle America was unique beyond its demographics, as demonstrated by the “delicate” rhetoric that was
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