"Times Certainly Have Changed": Burlington, Iowa's Black Community on the Mississippi, 1860–1920

In 1921, Bessie Viola Johnson, a well-known poet, artist, composer, and Black rights activist living in Burlington, Iowa, openly expressed her views on race relations in a special exposé, "Has Race Prejudice Increased?" When the White reporter interviewing Johnson asked about the "chances of colored boys and girls today" living in Burlington, Johnson's reply was straightforward and revealing: "Times certainly have changed. I mean the attitude of Burlington toward negroes and what it used to be." The changes she was referring to were not progressive ones. Instead, Johnson saw the opportunities for Black equality declining in the city in recent years. For example, "it used to be that we colored people could rent a house without difficulty, but that time has long ago passed." Further, Johnson's husband, James, Burlington's first Black podiatrist, had been refused an office-space lease everywhere in town before finally finding a space in the corner of a shoe store. She continued by pointing out the widespread discrimination Black citizens faced in employment, public transportation, and equality in the community.¹

Johnson's depiction of race relations in Burlington came at a time when racial animosity and bigotry were increasing in midwestern cities as over six million Black Americans migrated out of the South during the Great Migration.² Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan flourished outside the South, opening new chapters in midwestern cities like Burlington.³ Bessie Johnson's lament was alluding to such conditions as well as to the idea that race relations in Burlington, while not perfect before, were better in years past. By invoking the past, Johnson indicated that Burlington's Black community was not new nor the result only of the current migration. Born in Burlington in 1875, Johnson was mindful of the long legacy of Black migration to the Midwest and the foundation it laid for later migrations.

Examining Black community building in smaller midwestern cities like Burlington disrupts the popular narrative centered around Black migration to large metropolitan midwestern cities during the Great Migration. Historians and midwestern communities themselves have often overlooked the contributions of late-nineteenth-century Black migrants. Further, the historically marginalized position of people of color in Iowa, and the rest of the Midwest, has often led to a whitewashing of the region's past.⁴ Historians recently have sought to correct that misrepresentation by providing crucial examinations of the history of Black midwestern migration, community building, and struggles for equality.⁵ This article adds to this growing historiography by exploring the nuanced circumstances that allowed nineteenth-century Black migrants to create a community within a community in Burlington, a midsized city on the Upper Mississippi River. Understanding the unique circumstances and histories of early Black communities in states like Iowa and other parts of the Midwest provides greater context for understanding the perspective that Black Midwesterners like Johnson developed.⁶ Such studies also help explain the complicated social, political, and economic environments of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century midwestern communities in which Black migrants often found racial conditions improved but equality never fully realized.

Fig. 1.

Bessie V. Johnson with her painting "The Carpenter," in Opportunity: journal of Negro Life 3 (September 1925).

As the one-time territorial capital of the Wisconsin Territory and the first capital of the Iowa Territory, Burlington played an essential role in the Upper Midwest's early development. In many ways, Burlington's settlement was typical of other small towns along the Upper Mississippi. Founded in 1834, Burlington became a crucial transportation and manufacturing hub in the nascent Midwest. Black people were present there from the beginning, helping, like their White neighbors, to build Burlington and the state of Iowa. Burlington's earliest Black inhabitants arrived in the 1830s during the territorial days as both free and enslaved people.⁷ During and after the Civil War, many more came as refugees and newly emancipated people hoping to create a new life for themselves and their families. These early Black Midwesterners faced hardship in...