This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 by Brent M. S. Campney (review)

This book includes hundreds of quotations from post-Civil War Kansas, and I regret not finding in its text the source of the phrase that serves as the author’s main title: “This is not Dixie.” Presumably these were words of some Kansan protesting the image of the Sunflower State as no better than the South when it came to the fatal mistreatment of African Americans. But the use of the phrase by the author here is strictly ironic. That the Middle West—including Kansas—was a Promised Land for blacks fleeing slavery and Jim Crow violence, says the author, is simply a myth—the “Free State narrative,” which made white Kansans feel better about themselves when it came to race relations.

“The concepts of free labor and racial equality,” writes Campney, “merged into an image of the Midwest as a ‘land of freedom.’ Similarly, the concepts of ‘pastoralism and the Middle West’ converged . . . into a second image of the Midwest as a land of ‘bucolic virtue, of sturdy, thriving agrarians inhabiting a blissful Middle Landscape,’” a region “where social status was fluid, individuals achieved their goals by hard work and innate ability, and the challenges of the frontier left little space for bigotry” (8). And though scholars have testified to violence against blacks in the Middle West, such violence has been depicted as strictly occasional and out of character.

Campney will have none of it, and he is at pains to suggest that the historical South was not as uniquely racist as universally depicted by historians. The record in Kansas of lynching and several other types of antiblack violence copiously testifies otherwise, he says.

In recent years several scholars—notably Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Michael J. Pfeifer, Ken Gonzales-Day, Robert J. Tórrez, Gilles Vandal, and Stephen J. Leonard—have compiled exhaustive listings of deaths by lynching in several states. Campney has followed suit for Kansas, but his data include only murdered blacks, not the even larger number of white victims of lynching.

Campney’s discussion includes more than death by lynching, or “completed” lynching, as he calls it. Covering the years from 1861 to 1927, his Kansas data run for eighteen pages and comprise “threatened lynching”; race riots, both lethal and nonlethal; nonlethal “mobbing”; lethal violence by police; and, finally, “homicide” perpetrated by four or fewer whites, to distinguish it from lynching.

Since Campney dismisses any important distinction between completed lynching in Kansas and the same thing in the South, a reader is tempted to run his Kansas numbers against the numerics for a typical southern state. Let’s take Louisiana. Pfeifer has printed the Louisiana statistics, so that a numerical comparison of African Americans murdered by lynching in the two states over the same period of years is statistically permissible. The results, for the years 1874 through 1927, are: Kansas, 50 completed lynchings; Louisiana, 355 completed lynchings.

Some might object that this comparison of raw numbers, 50 lynchings against 355, misleads because there were so many fewer blacks in Kansas (a minority of 49,710 in 1890) than in Louisiana. But a better proportional hypothesis for Louisiana’s peculiarly savage body count might be that in 1890 the two races in that state stood in startling numerical parity—559,193 blacks to 558,395 whites, with blacks ahead by 798. Coming amid the first stirrings of a multiracial Populist movement, the news of impending “black domination” would propel a renewed effort by whites to maintain their supremacy through a refurbished program of murder and intimidation. Thus, historians may be forgiven for thinking the post-Civil War South a far more dangerous place for African Americans than postwar Kansas.

The author seeks to circumvent any such sharp regional contrast by also enumerating “threatened” lynching, a clever and useful innovation. Probably Vandal’s description of vigilante practice in Louisiana toward a black person accused of...