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

The images of freedom and opportunity associated with the land of John Brown did not match up with reality for African Americans. Yet, while scholars are aware of this fact, by comparing Kansas with the “true” racists of the South they have tended to support a form of Kansas’s “free state” narrative. For Brent Campney, however, comparing Kansas to the South obscures the centrality of white racism to Kansas’s history. By examining the state’s race relations “on its own terms” and by holding Kansas’s history of racist violence up to the standard of its “Free State mythology” (rather than to the standards of the South), Campney argues that white racism was at the core of Kansas’s historical development (211). Even white Kansans whose words seem to indicate sympathy for blacks are complicit in Campney’s narrative; their unwillingness to root out racist violence and their increasingly conservative stances on racial issues over the last few decades of the nineteenth century allowed them to benefit from the structures of white supremacy that racist violence helped to create.

To make his case Campney uses Kansas newspapers from the 1860s through the 1920s to document and describe incidents and interpretations of racist violence. He divides the documented violence into two categories: sensational violence (including lynching, race riot, mobbing, killing-by-police, and homicide) and threatened violence. Campney also charts and analyzes efforts to prevent racist violence, thereby giving blacks agency in the story. Two appendixes are included which detail every incident of racist violence and defense against racist violence uncovered by Campney, an indispensable resource for researchers and historians interested in similar topics.

Campney’s research is undoubtedly impressive, but two flaws stand out in the narrative. First is his penchant for using direct quotations from other scholars to make his points, which diminishes the authority of Campney’s voice. Second is the problem of relying so heavily on newspaper sources. Campney acknowledges that newspapers “must be evaluated cautiously” (16). In his narrative presentation, however, Campney provides few details on the editors, journalists, and correspondents who wrote the words that he so often quotes.

But even if Campney could have done more to contextualize the primary sources he uses, the sheer weight of his evidence is impossible to ignore. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of Kansas or of race relations in the Great Plains, as well as for scholars of racial violence and the black freedom struggle in the United States.