Black Populism in the New South

When the recently formed People’s Party organized a parade in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday, September 30^th, 1892, hundreds of people, black and white, lined the dirt road leading to the city’s Brookside Park, some cheering, others watching, still others running alongside the horse-drawn buggies. Populist presidential candidate James B. Weaver rode slowly. Flanking him were 350 men on horseback, 50 of whom were African American.[1]

Seven years ago, when I began investigating the role of African Americans in the Populist movement, I found that the more I read, the more it became evident to me that African Americans had been engaged in a series of interconnected organizations and activities that were distinct from those of their white counterparts. And yet historians – from John Hicks and C. Van Woodward to Lawrence Goodwyn and Gerald Gaither – had essentially taken African Americans, their organizations, activities, and leaders, and subsumed them, categorically, under the white-led Populist movement.[2]

(1) Black Populism was an offshoot of the Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s;

(2) Black Populism was limited to the participation of African Americans in the Colored Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party; and

In other words, when historians speak of “Black Populism” they are referring to African Americans as part of a movement understood to be white in its leadership, composition, organizational orientation – namely, small farmers, not agrarian laborers or sharecroppers – the vast majority of rural southern African Americans.

The question I kept asking was given the actual segregated institutional arrangements in the New South (that is, before the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement – that is, Jim Crow), if black people were going to challenge the authorities who ruled over them, would they not have had to organize themselves independently – as had those who organized the southern black churches, benevolent associations, and fraternal orders out of which Black Populism itself grew?

Rather than try to somehow fit African Americans, their activities and organizations into preconceived categories of what I would call ‘white’ Populism, I began to see “Black Populism” as a regional movement with a social, political, and historical integrity of its own. Was there a case to be made for a new perspective, a new understanding of Black Populism not simply as an “appendage” to (white) Populism (as some have either explicitly stated, and most imply), but as a movement unto itself? [3]

Herbert Aptheker, who I briefly got to know before he passed away, encouraged this direction in my research. He once commented to me that despite the advances made in African-American historical scholarship, the Colored Alliance and the People’s Party continued to be viewed from a distinctly “white” perspective – as if black folks hadn’t really had any say in the matter of their creation and/or development.

As with previous periods in American history in which black agency has had to be reconstructed or brought to light (the numerous slave revolts and conspiracies during the Colonial era and Early Republic; the work of black abolitionists in the nineteenth century; the contributions of black soldiers and civilians during the Civil War), the general perception that with the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Redeemer rule, African Americans were rendered largely inactive, turns out to have been a distortion of the mass mobilization of African Americans by African Americans in the final two decades of the nineteenth century.

From the documentary evidence, I would argue, it appears that between 1886 and 1898, black southerners, along with a number of white southerners, led an independent black movement for economic and political reform that paralleled (white) Populism, but neither mirrored the white-led and white-based movement nor simply derived from it. The black movement, which may be properly called Black Populism (and not to be viewed as simply African Americans who were sympathetic to the People’s Party), instead grew out of the unique experiences of southern African Americans with its own set of organizations, members, leaders, and tactics.

At its height, between 1891 and 1892, the independent black movement grew to number anywhere between several hundred thousand to over one million. An exact figure will undoubtedly never be known due to the covert nature of the organizing process locally.[4] African Americans nevertheless established farming exchanges, raised money for schools, published newspapers, led boycotts and strikes against white-owned businesses, lobbied legislators for political reforms, and ran independent, insurgent, and fusion campaigns.

As it were, the movement – Black Populism – took shape in the mid-1880s with the emergence of a cluster of agrarian and labor organizations: the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and most importantly, the Colored Alliance. In the early 1890s, the movement began to shift away from agrarian organizing per se (for economic reform) towards independent electoral politics (that is, to reform the political process). African Americans worked with white independents, helping to found the People’s Party, and subsequently ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party in different parts of the South to challenge the authority of the Democratic Party.

But by the late 1890s, under fierce political pressure, coupled with the betrayal of (white) Populist and black Republican leaders who had temporarily allied themselves with black independents, Black Populism, which had some success in parts of North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, began to fall apart. In the face of widespread propaganda against black independents, physical intimidation, outright attacks, and the targeted assassination of black leaders, the movement collapsed (as would white Populism, whose leadership soon rejoined the Democrats).

There are multiple layers that need to be analyzed if we are to better understand the scope, depth, and breadth of rural black mass mobilization during the explosive years characterizing the tail-end of the nineteenth century. Questions of gender and the role of women in Black Populism have largely been ignored. However, in the last decade there have been several studies that have paved the way for a more systematic and focused investigation. Studies by Glenda Gilmore, for instance, and our fellow panelist Rebecca Edwards have made significant strides with regard to better understanding women in the closing decades of the nineteenth century even as the dominant narrative of Populism, black or white, remains fundamentally male.[5]

Women’s voices nevertheless do appear, but they are few and far in between. When it comes to women and Populism, a single name stands out: Mary Elizabeth Lease – the fiery orator from Kansas who reputedly (now famously) called on farmers to “raise less corn and more hell!” Most, if not all of us, have heard of her. (Professor Edwards, is, in fact, an expert on Lease.)

Of course there were other white Populist women: Annie Dugger, also from Kansas; Lulu Pearce of Georgia, who served as the People’s Party Paper secretary and bookeeper; L.T. Russell, who edited a local newspaper in Carroll County, Georgia, called the Populist; and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who directed her husband’s political campaigns and was widely respected as a political strategist among her male counterparts (much later, in 1922, she ended up being appointed by the Governor of Georgia for a 24-hour term to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate). Most women, however, were confined to much less visible positions.[6]

But what of African American women? What about women within the Black Populist movement? How many of us have heard of Lutie A. Lytle (a Kansan, like Lease and Dugger)? Or Phoebe Cobb and Fanny “the Queen” Glass of North Carolina? What about Fannie Munn Shuffer of Texas?

According to national figures provided by the Colored Alliance’s General Superintendent in 1891, membership included upwards of 300,000 women out of a total of 1.2 million in the organization.[7] Variations of the number appear in newspaper reports, but derive principally from Richard M. Humphrey – the Superintendent, a skilled white organizer, elected to his position by sixteen African Americans at the founding of the Colored Alliance in Texas to serve as, among other things, the organization’s liaison to the white press.

Most scholars are skeptical of the high membership figures provided by Humphrey (he was a propagandist, after all, looking to bolster the national profile of the Colored Alliance). Scholars pair his numbers down to at least one-fourth to one-fifth of what he claimed. But even if Humphrey had inflated the 300,000 figure of female members in the Colored Alliance ten-fold, we’re still talking about 30,000 black women who were organizing and/or organized in chapters across the South. Thirty-thousand women – an extraordinary number when considering membership figures in Temperance groups and other women’s organizations of the era.

Although black women allegedly comprised one quarter of the total membership of the Colored Alliance – and many, like their male counterparts, worked as farmers and agrarian laborers, and even owned land (such as Mary Ida Hart Pattillo, the wife of North Carolina’s leading Black Populist, the Rev. Walter A. Pattillo), usually in addition to raising children and maintaining their households – we know relatively little about their specific parts in the movement.

(Black women often supported their men-folk engaged in politics, but got little or no public credit: Anna Murray, Frederick Douglass’ first wife, not only raised their four children, but worked in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts to support her husband’s abolitionist organizing.)

If Black Populism is to be understood as a relatively seamless organizing process from the mid-1880s through the late 1890s, an important question to ask is what role did women play in that process? Who were the women of the Colored Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other such groups? Who were the women that appeared at, if not helped to organize, campaign rallies from the Prohibitionist to the People’s parties? Who were the women who supported fusion between the Republican Party and third parties?

When Tom Watson, the white Populist candidate who ran for Congress in 1892, spoke at rallies, black women were reported to have held their children aloft to catch a glimpse of the messianic Watson; some breached southern etiquette by going so far as to shake the candidate’s hand. These were neither meek nor shy women. When the Knights of Labor began organizing in the South several years earlier, black women appeared in leadership positions – such as Phoebe Cobb and Fanny “the Queen” Glass of the all-black Knights of Labor chapter in Greenville, North Carolina; armed sentinels, including a woman named Gale Moon, guarded the entrance to the church where they met.[8] It appears that when the Knights of Labor began to decline, the Colored Alliance absorbed many of its members. And within a few years, the networks created by the Knights, the Colored Alliance, and other agrarian and labor groups, fueled the creation and growth of the People’s Party.

While Mary Elizabeth Lease was compelling farmers in Kansas to declare their political independence, a young Black Populist in the state was simultaneously being groomed in third party politics: Lutie Lytle. Born in Tennessee in 1875, Lytle’s parents, John and “Mollie,” her three siblings, and grandmother had moved to Kansas in 1882 as part of the Exoduster movement. Her father, John, who owned and operated a barber shop in downtown Topeka, was a highly visible member of the community. The Lytle family settled on Monroe Street in Topeka, where Lutie and her brothers attended the city’s high school.

John Lytle was a leader of the anti-Republican progressive Populist Flambeau Club, which he helped to organize in 1893. The club was an arm of the Kansas People’s Party, which served as a vehicle for Populism in the mid-1890s, bringing together disaffected white Democrats and black Republicans. John was nominated for Register of Deeds in Shawnee County by the People’s Party as part of a fusion ticket. But while he never won public office his political activism clearly influenced his daughter.

In 1895, at the age of twenty, Lutie reaped the benefits of political patronage through her father’s connection with the People’s Party and was appointed as its assistant enrolling clerk in the Kansas state legislature – a position in which she served for only a brief period of time. She had already been working as a compositor for a local black newspaper in Topeka, which brought her into contact with politicians and other leading members of the community.

To what extend did she use her office to agitate for political reform? How well-known a figure was she among other Black Populists? The answers may surface yet, as research into these questions is underway.

What we do know is that she made a sharp decision to pursue her studies, bought a ticket to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and studied law. Incredibly, the young Lutie would go on to become the first female law professor in the country, teaching at Central Tennessee’s Department of Law in the late 1890s.

After a short career as a law professor, she married and moved to New Paltz, New York, and became active in the Women’s Federation. She eventually remarried and moved to Brooklyn, New York, and became a member of the National Negro Bar Association – the first female to do so. In the early 1920s, Lytle became an active supporter of Marcus Garvey. Eventually she returned to Topeka, where she spent the last years of her life – Black Populism, a fading, if not distant memory for her and, it appears, the black community as a whole.[9]

If traditional histories of the New South place black men in the shadows of Populism, black women were virtually invisible. The careers and contributions of African American female organizers to Black Populism, including Cobb and Glass, remain largely unknown. More questions arise: How did Walter Pattillo’s wife Mary Ida (Hart) Pattillo or Jacob John Shuffer’s wife Fannie Munn Shuffer, and other mothers, daughters, and sisters of known Black Populist male leaders influence them?[10]

As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and other scholars have noted, we know that as southern black men were increasingly excluded from official arenas of politics in the 1890s, black women began to serve as “ambassadors” to white society. In certain key respects, women assumed greater political responsibilities in the closing decade of the century in negotiating with white authorities the shifting terrain that accompanied the spread of Jim Crow. These new gender dynamics undoubtedly enhanced the already active involvement that black women were playing in community mobilization through the black churches (which were predominantly female), schools, and benevolent societies – a political role that black women had initially come to know during Reconstruction in their efforts to spread Union Leagues and chapters of the Republican Party.[11]

Did black women continue to hold their own separate gatherings in the 1890s in the South (as the assemblies of women workers of the Knights of Labor in Virginia, Arkansas, and Florida had during the late 1880s)? To what extent did black women shape the direction of Black Populism – at times impelling their male counterparts to become more militant, and at other times intervening to mitigate against political repercussions because of such militancy? What other tactical roles did women play – despite being denied the right to vote – as the movement shifted towards electoral organizing?

These and many other questions require further consideration and investigation if we are to better understand the full humanity of Populism – black and white.

[1] The North Carolina Raleigh News and Observer reported on September 30, 1892 that James B. Weaver was “escorted to Brookside Park by 300 white men and fifty negroes, all on horseback.”

[2] C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1951, 1971); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

[3] John D. Hicks asserted in 1931 that the Colored Alliance, comprised of African Americans, was “little more than an appendage” to the white Southern Farmers Alliance; The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931), 115. The image persists of the Colored Alliance, and African Americans in general, as “an appendage to the postbellum [sic] southern white Farmers’ Alliance movement,” as Michael B. Ballard writes in Encyclopedia of African American Civil Rights; Charles D. Lowery and John F. Marszalek, eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 120.

[4] African Americans were concerned about raising low wages for seasonal agricultural work; the lack of public funding for education; the convict-lease system, which disproportionately targeted black men; the need for black jurors in cases involving black defendants; the existence of separate-coach laws, and other breaches of civil rights; and undemocratic election laws and practices that discriminated against black voters and candidates.

[5] See Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1886-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Rebecca B. Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[6] John E. Talmadge. Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1960); Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia’s People’s Party (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 177.

[7] Richard M. Humphrey, “History of the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Co‑Operative Union,” in The Farmer’s Alliance History and Agricultural Digest, Nelson A. Dunning, ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Alliance Publishing Co., 1891), 290.

[8] Robert C. McMath, Jr., “Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm Workers: A North Carolina Document,” Labor History, 18 (Winter 1977), 18.

[9] Omar H. Ali, “Lutie A. Lytle,” African American National Biography, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Noreen R. Connolly, “Attorney Lutie A. Lytle: Options and Obstacles of a Legal Pioneer,” Nebraska Lawyer (January 1999): 6-12.

[10] A photograph of Fannie Munn Shuffer taken circa 1938 exists in her grandson George M. Shuffer Jr.’s autobiography My Journey To Betterment (New York: Vantage Press, 1999), 3.

[11] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 462-463.