Black Populism in the New South

Organization of American Historians

Washington, D.C.

April 20, 2006

Panel: “Race and American Citizenship: Civic Identity

and Political Organizing After Reconstruction”

Omar H. Ali

Towson University

Despite the over half century of scholarship since the publication of C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, there remain certain misguided assumptions that shape our popular, collective understanding of rural African Americans in the late 19^th century.  A principal assumption is that following Reconstruction (and not until the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the century that followed), African Americans in the South were largely rendered politically inactive.  Most U.S. history textbooks and educational documentaries tend to discuss “Reconstruction,” followed by “The Gilded Age,” and then skip to Jim Crow in the South, with a very brief (if any) discussion of the Populists.[1]  As the story goes, Republicans (black and white) were removed from office, often by brute force, the Democratic Party took over the region, and African Americans were left with basically two options: (1) either leave the region (as many did with the Exoduster movement to Kansas and other areas out west) or (2) simply adjust to increasing forms of political and economic marginalization by pooling resources more effectively and developing better agricultural techniques (as popularized by Booker T. Washington). 

In terms of the first option, the trickle of westward movement among African Americans (first from countryside to the cities, and then West and North) turned into a steady flow with the Great Black Migration beginning in the 1890s, accelerating dramatically during the First World War, as jobs opened up for African Americans in northern factories.  In terms of the second option – the adjusting to diminishing economic and political conditions – such adjustments were not always as acquiescent as has been portrayed.  After all, Washington himself was engaged in politics and funded legal campaigns against Jim Crow laws.[2]

            Today, most scholars of the New South recognize that African Americans did continue to organize their communities throughout the late 19^th century through the building of churches, benevolent societies, and schools – from elementary-level education to technical institutes (Tuskegee in Alabama and Hampton in Virginia being the most prominent), but when it comes to examining what was the largest political movement in the South in the closing two decades of the nineteenth century – the Populist movement – black people are viewed as an “appendage,” as passive, even foolhardy followers in that movement.[3]

            My own work, building on the scholarship of many others – including Jack Abramowitz, Lawrence Goodwyn, Gerald Gaither, and Stephen Hahn – has been to take what has been written about African Americans and Populism and argue that there was, in fact, a distinct movement of black men and women that came about in the mid-1880s and continued through the late 1890s.  The movement, which may be properly called Black Populism, was not restricted to African Americans involved in the People’s Party, but began through a coming together of various agrarian-based organizations in 1886 and continued in the People’s Party and through fusion campaigns with the Republican Party over the next dozen years.

            I had been inspired to pursue the subject of African Americans in the Populist movement after reading an interview with the now late Herbert Aptheker, whose work on slave rebellions had a significant influence on African American scholarship – either directly or indirectly.  In retrospect, despite some of the limitations of his study, he pioneered a new understanding of black activism throughout North American slavery by documenting scores of slave revolts and conspiracies – hundreds of such cases from the Colonial era to the Civil War.  In the interview, published in the Columbia University journal Race and Reason in 1996, Aptheker noted that there were at least two areas of African-American history that he believed needed further investigating: (1) a history of racism in the Executive Branch of the United States government, and (2) a history of the Colored Farmers Alliance from the perspective of African Americans.  

I was struck by the grandiose nature of his first suggestion in contrast to what seemed like a minor strand (if even a blip) in black history – the Colored Farmers Alliance.  I decided to check out what the Colored Alliance was all about.  Strangely, the more I dug, the less I seemed to find – early on I had come across the most comprehensive statement about the organization: A brief history (five pages brief) of the organization by its General Superintendent Richard M. Humphrey in 1891.  Basically, every thing else I read afterwards (be they sections in books, dissertations, articles, or just footnotes) was a derivative of the basic outline Humphrey presented – including his claim of 1.2 million members in the Colored Alliance (one quarter of whom he said were women).

            The question of why African Americans participated in the Populist Revolt – albeit in separate organizations from the white Farmers Alliances in the early phase of the movement, and then later as voters in the People’s Party – drew me closer in.  It seemed that even if Humphrey had inflated the number of members in the Colored Alliance ten-fold, still, the membership of some 100,000 black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers, warranted serious investigation.  A principal obstacle in documenting the Colored Alliance – a reason that was given to me by several scholars even before I began doing archival work – was the lack of primary sources due to the covert nature of the organizing process among African Americans during the period.  Nevertheless, I decided to pursue the matter and find out for myself.  

I spent the next two and a half years pouring through primary and secondary sources that could help me understand the context, and instances in which African Americans were active in the Populist movement.  I tried to keep in mind what Aptheker had said about perspective, and looked for any sources that could tell me about the Colored Alliance from the vantage point of African Americans themselves.  Within the first couple of years of my research it became clear to me that contrary to the ways in which African Americans had been characterized with regard to Populism (which included the “appendage” reference), there was a separate development of black agrarian movement-building that, while paralleling white Populism, was distinct from it.

            This is how I have attempted to re-conceptualize Black Populism as a distinctly black agrarian movement. The re-conceptualization does not necessarily negate previous scholarship on African Americans in the Populist movement but synthesizes and broadens what may be considered part of a separate movement that, at times, intersected what may be considered the white Populist movement.  First in my dissertation, then in journal articles, and now in a book manuscript, I attempt to demonstrate a kind of seamlessness that is not only characteristic of this movement, but perhaps speaks to the development of other social and political movements.  That is to say, there are a multitude of activities, organizations, people, and tactics that comprise movements – this was as true of the Abolitionist movement, as it was of the women’s suffrage and modern civil rights movement.

            So what is Black Populism?

Between 1886 and 1898, African Americans and their white allies, mobilized tens and then hundreds of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers, demanding economic and political justice in the face of economic and political marginalization.  Sharecropping, rising debt, and low wages were making the lives of African Americans increasingly more difficult while black political rights were slowly being eroded.  The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883; Meanwhile the electoral process in the South was increasingly monopolized by the Democratic Party.[4]

African Americans who comprised Black Populism sought higher wages for workers, debt relief for small farmers and sharecroppers, and greater political representation.  The movement had grown out of established networks of black churches, fraternal orders, and mutual-aid societies that served as vibrant centers for the recruitment, education, and leadership-training of African Americans in the years following Reconstruction.  Black Populism, as a broad-based movement, took initial form with the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the Colored Farmers Alliance, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Farmers Union.  Within a few years, the movement turned towards independent political tactics as it became clear that earlier tactics of pooling resources, and carrying out boycotts and strikes had their limitations.  African Americans would soon help to establish, and then grow, the People’s Party. They ran insurgent and independent candidates for local, state, and federal office, and participated in fusion campaigns with the Republican Party.

By the late 1890s, facing paramilitary assaults, intimidation, and a barrage of extra-legal maneuvers orchestrated by the Democratic Party, African Americans were unable to sustain their movement.  Mississippi had moved first to disfranchise African Americans in 1890, followed by South Carolina in 1895 and then the remainder of the old Confederate states in coming years.  Before the turn of the century Black Populism would buckle – as would the white Populist movement – and then collapsed.  Jim Crow – the legalized segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans – took root and would come to dominate for the next half century. 

Within a generation, some of the demands made by black and white Populists were adopted as state or federal policies (the direct election of U.S. Senators, the government subsidization of farmers, the enactment of minimum wage and the eight-hour workday – albeit applied and enforced unevenly).  Americans in the half-century that followed the collapse of black and white Populism would witness periodic efforts to reclaim black voting rights in the South.  But it would take a new generation, and a new movement of African Americans (along with their white allies) – the modern civil rights movement – to dismantle the laws that kept millions of black men and women disenfranchised in the South.

What are some of the basic criticisms of the outline that I present (criticisms raised over the last year, for instance, at the Southern Historical Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, by readers of my manuscript, and other colleagues in the field)?[5]  There are three key points of contention:

1. The Farmers Alliances (black or white) should not be lumped in with the People’s Party, as they were separate movements;
2. Black people were principally following white leadership.  That is, African Americans did not have a movement of their own; they were being politically manipulated to support white Populists; and
3. Fusion notwithstanding, African Americans who voted for Republican candidates were not Black Populists, they were Republicans, period.

            Let me briefly respond to these criticisms.

Regarding the first: The Alliances were separate from the People’s Party.  While it’s technically true that not all “Alliancemen” (as they were called) went the third-party route – many remained Democrats – it’s also the case that more (or almost as many) rural folks voted for the People’s Party in either 1890 or 1892 in states such as Alabama, Kansas, and Louisiana, than there were members of the Alliances – suggesting the possibility of some overlap.  In other states, there were anywhere between 10 to 30 percent turnout rates in comparison to Alliance memberships.  This fact, along with various Alliance leaders (black and white) subsequently heading up or affiliating with local and state chapters of the People’s Party, further points to the continuation of activities from one tactical phase of the movement to the next.

While the numbers do not bear out in the same way when it comes to African Americans as when we look at white Populists, there was a core of black voters in most southern states willing to either vote directly for the People’s Party or vote for the Republican Party in fusion bids with the People’s Party.  A correlation between Colored Alliance members and black votes for the People’s Party is next to impossible to ascertain, since membership numbers at the state level are so sketchy, but anecdotal evidence suggests a thread of black political independence – defined as a vote for a People’s Party candidate or one for a fusion candidate via the Republican Party.

In Georgia, where the vote for the People’s Party jumped from 19% to 44% between 1892 and 1894, newspapers made note of significant black political support for the third party.  In almost every county in which it was reported that the People’s Party had won, African Americans were credited with providing its margin of victory:  In Butts County “Negroes voted solidly for the populist [sic] candidate”; in Pike County “Three-fifths of the third party vote [came from] negroes…”; in Laurens County “the negroes … secured a populist [sic] victory”; and in Gwinnet County “Negroes… held the balance of power and voted with the Populists.”[6]  On October 5, 1894 the Atlanta Constitution went so far as to announce: “The Negroes Voted Solidly with the Third Party.” And, again, while it is not possible to verify specific black voter turnout for the People’s Party, newspaper reports from predominantly black counties suggest that a majority of African Americans supported the third party; whether or not their votes were legally counted is another issue.

            Regarding the second criticism – that African Americans were principally following white leadership – it’s true that the General Superintendent of the Colored Alliance was white.  But it’s also the case that it was a group of sixteen African Americans who elected Humphrey to the position in the first place. Why?  Because he had a created a strong connection to the black community as a Baptist missionary and fellow cotton farmer and he could serve as a bridge-builder to the white community in ways African-American leaders in the South clearly could not at the time.  Humphrey interfaced with the white press, he lobbied Senators in D.C. for agrarian reforms on behalf of the Colored Alliance, and he helped to lead the boldest tactic coming out of the black organization: the region-wide Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891.  Similarly, while the white organizer Hiram Hover in South Carolina had served as the founder the Cooperative Workers of America (another black organization that fed into the Black Populist movement), it was African Americans who did the practical local expansion of the organization.  As the CWA’s historian Bruce Baker clearly states, it was “a handful of local black organizers who did the legwork of establishing CWA locals.”[7] 

At the same time, there were a number of key African-American leaders in the movement.  I have documented over 130 such leaders across the South beginning in 1886 and continuing through the turn of the century: The Rev. Walter A. Pattillo of North Carolina (lecturer of the Colored Alliance who initiated the third party tactic), George Washington Murray of South Carolina (also a lecturer of the Colored Alliance, and who went on to win a seat in Congress), and John B. Rayner of Texas (elected to the statewide executive committee of the People’s Party).  These were among the most prominent Black Populist leaders, each of whom commanded a sizable following and rose to national (or substantial state) prominence.

            In terms of the third criticism – that African Americans who voted Republican can not be considered Black Populist because they were Republican – depending upon local political circumstances, African Americans largely chose the Republican Party over independent parties given their particular connection to that party and that the Republican Party served to undermine Democratic authority.  Black voters may have chosen Republican candidates in most areas, but I would argue that it did not necessarily mean that they were less populist for doing so – especially in circumstances that involved fusion. But even in cases that did not involve fusion, the Republican Party served Black Populism. This is made clear with the leader of the movement to counter disfranchisement in South Carolina, George Washington Murray, elected to Congress as a Republican in 1893, and then again 1895 (after a heated legal and political dispute).  Murray listed western white Populists as his allies and spoke on behalf of the rural black poor’s rights as citizens – with all the voting privileges and responsibilities that come with it.

In conclusion, “Black Populism” is an evolving term.  What it encompassed remains debatable, but if we allow our definitions of who Black Populists were to include white organizers such as Humphrey (based on their activity, not their “race” as such), it stands to reason that black organizers who decided not to go the People’s Party route, such as Murray, but advocated on issues of critical concern to the rural black poor, should also be considered part of the mix that comprised Black Populism.  At the end of the day, the task, it seems, is to demonstrate how the movement was created by African Americans between the collapse of Reconstruction and during the consolidation of Jim Crow.  That there was a movement of African Americans during the period is historically undeniable.  I call it Black Populism, others may not want to use the term.  But certainly trying to understand the Colored Alliance from the perspective of African Americans prompts us to look at Populism itself in new ways.

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