African Americans on the Great Plains
An Anthology
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-
We received considerable help in preparing and publishing this book, and for that assistance we wish to thank a number of people. We are grateful for the cooperation of the fourteen authors whose studies are featured here. Without their scholarship and abilities, of course, this book would not have been feasible. We acknowledge members...
Introduction
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pp. 1-23
Prior to the late twentieth century, the predominant histories of the West and the Great Plains included little evidence of the presence of African Americans. Nevertheless, African Americans have a long history of living in the West and evidence of this could be found in the works of two pioneering historians: Kenneth...
1. Black Soldiers at Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867–1869: A Study in Civilian and Military Violence
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pp. 24-46
Historians of the western army contend with many romanticized myths. Few of those myths, in recent years, have held the popular consciousness as has that of the army’s first black regulars, known as “buffalo soldiers.” By now, the origins of the segregated regiments are quite familiar. In 1866, with the nation’s...
2. “Pap” Singleton’s Dunlap Colony: Relief Agencies and the Failure of a Black Settlement in Eastern Kansas
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pp. 47-70
So wrote the Topeka Daily Capital on October 19, 1882, describing the Dunlap Colony, one of more than a dozen “exoduster” settlements that blacks established in Kansas following the collapse of Reconstruction. In the 1880s the Dunlap Colony may have represented one of the best chances for blacks to succeed as yeoman...
3. Vengeance without Justice, Injustice without Retribution: The Afro-American Council’s Struggle against Racial Violence
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pp. 71-102
"The Negro’s friend has dwindled to a Smith & Wesson pistol, a Repeating Rifle, 50 rounds of ammunition for each, a good, strong nerve, a lesson in good marksmanship, and then use.” That was the call from the editors of the Wichita Searchlight on January 19, 1901, just one week after the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas...
4. Prelude to Brownsville: The Twenty-Fifth Infantry at Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, 1902–1906
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pp. 103-123
Around midnight on August 13, 1906, gunshots suddenly rang out on the deserted streets of Brownsville, Texas. Unknown parties indiscriminately fired at a number of private residences, severely wounding a police officer, and into a nearby saloon, killing a bartender and slightly wounding a patron. Apparently all...
5. Black Enclaves of Violence: Race and Homicide in Great Plains Cities, 1890–1920
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pp. 124-143
These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the “tenderloin” district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the...
6. A Socioeconomic Portrait of Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska, 1900–1920
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pp. 144-161
On March 6, 1775, a British military lodge of Freemasons initiated Prince Hall (his name, not a title) and fourteen other African Americans after the white colonial lodge at Boston had rejected their petition. Independence did not alter the attitude of white American Masons; thus, a separate black Masons organization evolved. Hall secured...
7. Diplomatic Racism: Canadian Government and Black Migration from Oklahoma, 1905–1912
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pp. 162-183
From the turn of the century until World War I, hundreds of thousands of American farmers migrated to western Canada. Not all of them were welcomed. Between 1905 and 1912, more than one thousand black men, women, and children joined the trek. They came mainly from Oklahoma, and they settled in Saskatchewan and...
8. “This Strange White World”: Race and Place in Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter
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pp. 184-203
Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography American Daughter (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: “Suddenly there was snow-miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray...
9. The New Negro Arts and Letters Movement among Black University Students in the Midwest, 1914–1940
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pp. 204-232
The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were an exciting time for black artists and writers in the United States. Much of the historical literature highlights the so-called Harlem Renaissance or its successor, the Black Chicago Renaissance. Few studies, however, document the influence of these artistic movements outside major urban cities such...
10. Great Plains Pragmatist: Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest
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pp. 233-255
Like most of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, its leading visual artist, Aaron Douglas, was not himself a product of Harlem. Although Winold Reiss and Alain Locke were to guide Douglas in the development of his artistic vision once he arrived in Harlem, his early years in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska gave rise...
11. Frompin’ in the Great Plains: Listening and Dancing to the Jazz Orchestras of Alphonso Trent, 1925–1944
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pp. 256-272
During the 1920s and 1930s, dozens of African American dance bands of various sizes crisscrossed the Midwest and Southwest United States. These organizations are called “territory bands” by jazz historians because they typically maintained a city such as Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Omaha, or Tulsa as a home base, from which they...
12. Early Civil Rights Activism in Topeka, Kansas, Prior to the 1954 Brown Case
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pp. 273-301
On an early spring day in the city of Topeka, Kansas, a father walked his child to their neighborhood school. His child was refused admission and was instructed to attend one reserved for “colored children.” The parent filed a lawsuit and sued the Topeka Board of Education, demanding that his child be received and instructed...
13. The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958–1960
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pp. 302-319
In 1960 black youths conducted a “sit-in” in Greensboro, North Carolina, to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the “first” sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: “There were not a few...
14. The Omaha Gospel Complex in Historical Perspective
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pp. 320-338
In this article, I document the introduction and development of gospel music within the African-American Christian community of Omaha, Nebraska. The 116 predominantly black congregations in Omaha represent twenty-five percent of the churches in a city where African-Americans comprise thirteen percent of the overall...
Source Acknowledgments
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pp. 339-340
Selected Bibliography
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pp. 341-373
Contributors
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pp. 375-378
Index
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pp. 379-395
E-ISBN-13: 9780803226890
E-ISBN-10: 0803226896
Publication Year: 2009
