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four BlackPopulism andthe“NegroParty” There is not enough political independence among colored voters. The fact that a man is colored should not be self-evident that he belongs to any particular party. As a rule the colored people are Republican, the results of which were perfectly natural. But more than a quarter of a century has thrown around him the light of intelligence. . . . The two old parties have not kept pace with the great demands of the common people. . . . Now in my view of the above facts . . . the one and only advantageous political course of the Negro, under present existing a¤airs, is to support the People’s Party.1 P. K. Chase, 1892 African Americans born in the decade before the Civil War, who were old enough to have experienced both the promise of Emancipation and the collapse of Reconstruction, organized a new movement in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform in the 1880s: Black Populism. The independent black movement was parallel to the massive white Populist movement of farmers simultaneously under way. Like their white counterparts , African Americans were “populist” by virtue of their democratic and decentralized opposition to the planter and business elite affiliated with the Democratic Party. Black leaders had responded in various ways to the political and economic plight of their rural communities in the years following Reconstruction . By the late 1870s, the federal government had abandoned its earlier commitment to politically and economically restructure the South along more democratic lines. With few exceptions, the largest and often the most produc- ✓ ✓ You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. tive land was back in the hands of white farmers, while the Southern branch of the Republican Party had been crippled by Democratic assaults. Although thousands of African Americans managed to migrate farther West or to the North in the hope of finding better working and living conditions, even larger numbers of black men and women attempted to collectively reform their existing conditions. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Southern and Midwestern black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian laborers established labor unions and farming associations. They built these organizations out of the networks of existing mutual aid groups, fraternal organizations, and black churches in their regions. By 1890, membership in black Baptist and African Methodist Episcopalian churches and congregations would reach nearly two million.2 At least onethird of those involved were active members.3 Building on the networks and accompanying mutual benefit societies and fraternal orders, Black Populism found early expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee; the Knights of Labor in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia; the Cooperative Workers of America in South Carolina and Georgia; and the Farmers’ Union in Florida and Louisiana. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance would consolidate many of the networks of black farmers and agrarian workers. At its height, through its state-based affiliates, the Colored Alliance counted up to 1.2 million members across the South, one-quarter of whom were female. Among the new movement’s demands were higher wages and better working conditions for black agrarian workers and better prices for their crops and better access to land and credit for black farmers. The development of farmers’ associations and agrarian labor unions in the mid-1880s would, in turn, lay the groundwork for an alliance with white Populists and the formation of the national People’s Party in 1891.4 Black Populism continued where other independent political e¤orts left o¤ in the late 1870s and early 1880s. By the early 1890s, African Americans had not only formed an independent party—soon derided as “the Negro party”— but were working with the Republican Party in places where it remained viable.5 Where the Republican Party was weak or had already been purged of its black leaders by the party’s “lily-whites,” African Americans worked with individual white independents and other third parties, including the Prohibitionist , Greenback, and Union Labor parties.6 In addition to running independent and fusion campaigns, Black Populists carried out a wide range of activities. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agricultural legislation ; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict...

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