African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology (review)

African Americans on the Great Plains offers the reader an opportunity to examine the lives of African Americans in a region that is not often acknowledged in the history of civil rights in the United States. Gathered from the journal Great Plains Quarterly, these essays, ranging from accounts of the military experiences of black soldiers and the region’s role in the civil rights struggle to the contributions of artists and musicians from the region, present a vibrant African American history on the Great Plains.

Kansas is central to a number of essays, perhaps because of its historical significance in the abolitionist unrest before the Civil War or because of the persistence of discrimination in the state or simply because the scholars’ interests led them to investigate this state. Analyses range from studies of the frontier fort-town conflicts in Fort Hays and of “Pap” Singleton’s failed Exoduster colony in eastern Kansas to accounts of the civil rights activism in Topeka before 1954 and of the Sit-In Movement in Wichita and Oklahoma that predated similar resistance in the South. Two other Kansas essays focus on the Afro-American Council’s attempts to realize civil rights for African Americans in the segregated state and the relationship between race and homicides in four eastern Kansas counties.

Essays that concentrate on Nebraska, Texas, and Oklahoma round out the discussions of social issues. One essay compares the relatively benign treatment that African American troops enjoyed at Fort Niobrara in Nebraska with the violent response to the troops’ arrival in Texas and another examines the efforts of Canada to prevent the migration of African Americans from Oklahoma. Yet another study highlights the broad inclusion of economic classes in Nebraska’s African American Masonry as opposed to the more restrictive national African American Masonry.

African American cultural contributions to the Great Plains are of importance as well. Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter, her autobiography of her years in rural North Dakota, is examined through the oppositions in her life. An account of Aaron Douglas, an artist of the Harlem Renaissance who grew up in Great Plains towns, focuses on his work in New York and other venues beyond the Great Plains. Finally, music gets its due in two essays: one on Alphonso Trent’s jazz orchestra that enjoyed success in places as disparate as Kansas City and Deadwood, South Dakota, and another one on the development of gospel music in Omaha.

Arranged chronologically, these critical works underscore the importance of the Great Plains as a region that anticipated many of the issues and experiences of African Americans in twentieth-century America. Those familiar, perhaps, with one of these subjects will find their understanding of the Great Plains experience shifting as they take into account other factors that make this region even richer and more interesting. An index makes it easy for readers to follow their own threads through the anthology.