The term "populist" is associated with political movements that are considered on the fringe of politics by the mainstream press, while it is rarely correctly defined or explained. People as diverse in outlook as Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Patrick Buchanan, and Lenora Fulani have had the label applied to them. The term "Black Populist" is never or rarely heard. In contemporary, conventional political circles it is  something that is not discussed as a meaningful part of past political movements in the United States. The article below,  Black Populism: From the Colored Farmers' Alliance through the People's Party, 1886-1896 chronicles Black populism during a ten year span in the last century.

All the articles in this section on Black Populism come from the Web site Black Populism in the South 1886- 1896. Omar Ali is the site's publisher. The articles are reprinted here with his permission.

 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will. - Frederick Douglass
West India Emancipation address, August 4, 1857

Black Populism: From the Colored Farmers' Alliance
through the People's Party, 1886-1896 

by Omar Ali

The challenge of writing about any failed movement becomes magnified when writing about the role of Afro-Americans within such a failed movement – such is the case with black populism within late nineteenth-century Populism. Populism was an agrarian movement which sought to redress the economic and political plight of farmers and farm laborers during the 1880s and 1890s. The particular challenge with an investigation into the origins, rise, development, and demise of black populism carries with it the two-fold burden of the subject being heavy on judgement yet light on primary sources with which to analyze the dynamics of the movement. One runs the risk of either being swept away by the main current of scholarship which portrays Afro-Americans as mere pawns within the Southern populist movement, or going against the tide and being tempted into romanticizing its history.

The populist movement has been the subject of scores of full-length studies. However, since the 1920s, when the first scholarly works began to appear on the subject, most of the studies have investigated the white membership of the movement and paid little attention to Afro-Americans either in the Colored Farmers Alliance or the People's Party. With the exception of a single book, a doctoral dissertation, and two master's theses, there are no additional full-length studies on Afro-American populism. Among the shorter works on black populism, there are eight articles in scholarly journals and single chapters in two books. To be sure, an analysis of the extent to which black Southerners participated in and impacted the populist movement remains underdeveloped in New South historiography.

What is the historical significance of black populism? How do we explain the tactical shift of black populists from "self-improvement and economic cooperation" in the Colored Alliance towards independent electoral politics in the People's Party? Given that most black farmers were landless and worked for white farmers (many of whom were populists) could black and white Southerners ever fully unite within the populist movement? Or were the economic conflicts of interest between black and white Southerners irreconcilable? The answers to these and other questions slowly emerge as we grapple with the story of black populism.

Black Populism

Black populism was part of the larger Southern-wide struggle of farmers who collectively organized themselves in the post-Reconstruction period . The Civil War left the South in ruins. Many of the critical gains of Reconstruction had been turned back by the early 1880s and relief was nowhere in sight. Crop prices had been dropping steadily since the Panic of 1873; mounting debt gripped impoverished farmers; there was a lack of credit and access to capital; railroad monopolies gouged prices as farmers needed to move their products to market; and to make matters worse, there were a series of poor harvests. The combination of factors was a disaster for Southern farmers, and especially disastrous for the rural black community. Within these dire circumstances, Afro-Americans began to organize themselves into cooperatives and create social networks geared towards their collective economic advancement.

Black and white Southerners formed the Colored Farmers' Alliance in 1886, launching what would become the largest organization of black farmers and agricultural laborers in the late nineteenth century. While the organization began by espousing a conservative philosophy of self-help and economic cooperation, it began to take more radical measures as it quickly grew and met resistance from local authorities and the segregated Southern Farmers' Alliance. Within five years of its founding, the Colored Alliance spread to every state in the South and maintained an estimated membership of 1,200,000 -- of whom 300,000 were women.

The issue of property lay at the heart of much of the conflict between black and white populists. Most black farmers did not own land while many of their white counterparts did. Black farmers were therefore often in the employ of white populists. This fundamental conflict came to a head in 1891 during the national cotton pickers' strike initiated by the Colored Alliance.

The Colored Alliance began to shake off its more insular self-help approach when it launched a federal lobbying campaign in 1890 to enact a subtreasury plan, a farm commodity price support program originated by the Southern Farmers' Alliance. The following year, the Colored Alliance called for a nationwide cotton pickers' strike, demanding a minimum of one dollar per one hundred pounds. The strike, broken by sharp opposition from the leadership of the Southern Farmers' Alliance in collusion with local planters, made clear the limitations of lobbying and strike tactics in the absence of a broader political strategy.

The Colored Alliance became involved in the development of an independent party to challenge the political stranglehold of the Democratic Party in the South. In 1891, the organization sent national delegates to the founding convention of the People's Party in Cincinnati, Ohio. With the break-up of the cotton pickers' strike that year, the independent electoral road became the clear path to pursue -- but not without a fight. The Colored Alliance had taken a strong stance in the direction of electoral politics when it voted unanimously to endorse the controversial Lodge Bill. The bill, which was finally defeated in the Senate in 1892, proposed federal supervision of elections, which would consequently ensure greater electoral participation of Afro-Americans. Soon thereafter, the rural networks carefully cultivated by Colored Alliance lecturers and organizers since the late 1880s would serve in the recruitment and development of black populists in the People's Party (also known as the Populist Party) in the 1890s.

The People's Party made electoral inroads in the 1892 and the 1894 elections, winning offices across the South and enacting legislative reforms that benefitted both black and white farmers. However, in a catastrophic set of decisions in 1896, the party gave up its greatest asset – its political independence as a national entity – and endorsed the divisive and openly racist Democratic Party. Black populists were pushed out of the organization and soon the role of Afro-Americans, at least from the vantage point of the white leadership of the People's Party, became that of obstacle and no longer partner in the advancement of the broader movement. Some of the most vocal white advocates for the inclusion and participation of Afro-Americans in Southern electoral politics, such as Georgia Populist Tom Watson, would later become leading members in the Southern-wide campaign to disenfranchise black people. The demise of Populism was only a matter of time. The white constituency of the Populist movement had been effectively disorganized out of a class politic and into a politic of race superiority. The Populist-Democratic ticket's loss in the presidential election of 1896 foreshadowed the collapse of the movement.

The story of black populism in the late nineteenth century is therefore the story of black farmers first organizing around the principle of self-help and economic cooperation in the 

Colored Alliance; becoming radicalized by lobbying and calling for strikes; carrying-out an independent electoral strategy through the People's Party as they met the limitations of their previous tactics; and finally losing their political independence as the People's Party capitulated to the Democratic Party.
 

The Mixed Legacy of Populism

While the beacon of black agrarian radicalism was temporarily extinguished in the demise of black populism, a new generation of farmers and organizers would rekindle its torchlight. Some thirty years later, black and white farmers organized the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, the most powerful organizations of black farmers in the twentieth century. Ironically though, the independent black agrarian radicalism of the 1930s would also be co-opted by a newly reconstituted "progressive," albeit virulently anti-communist Democratic Party in the New Deal coalition. Shortly afterwards, the legacy of late nineteenth-century Populism began to take on decidedly negative connotations – particularly with the advent of the Cold War and a new school of scholarship which began to highlight the most backward elements of the movement.

While the legacy of the Populist movement includes the successful enactment of the Populist's call for a federal income tax and the direct popular election of U.S. senators in the early twentieth century, the movement was also painted with a thick layer of negative criticism. The fiscal and political reforms originally called for by the Populists were pushed for by progressives and led to the ratification of the 16th and 17th amendments to the U.S. Constitution in 1913. In addition to these amendments, key elements of the Populist's subtreasury plan appeared in New Deal farm policies in the 1930s. This positive legacy, however, has been overshadowed by the far better known legacy of the Populist movement as a movement which pandered to popular prejudices.

Amidst the tumult of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, Richard Hofstadter and a group of scholars (including Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons, and Seymour Martin Lipset) began to analyze past conservative and "radical right" groups in light of contemporary red-baiting. These consensus scholars linked the Populists with Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist populism. Hofstadter's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Reform subsequently became the magnum opus of the consensus school on Populism. Hofstatder, influenced by German social scientist Theodore Adorno's 1950 Authoritarian Personality, explained what he understood to be the pathological impulses of the Populists. He portrays the Populists in The Age of Reform as moved by fears of modernity, nostalgia for an agrarian past, and bigotry. Hofstadter's characterization of Populism as racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic continues to even shape our current notions of the movement and people, then and now, identified as "populist." Historians have since poked gapping holes in his portrait.

C. Vann Woodward criticized Hofstadter and the consensus school for reading the present into the past. For Woodward, the Populists were not the forerunners of McCarthyism. Hofstadter overstated the Populists' nativism and instead gave short shrift to their legitimate and well-developed critique of Gilded Age capitalism. Woodward also contested Hofstdater's claims that the Populists were anti-Semites and racists. Woodward interpreted the Populist leaders' racial tolerance, especially in the earliest phase of Populism, as evidence of their determined effort to win political rights for Afro-Americans. Woodward's 1938 biography of Tom Watson explicitly made this point. Under Watson's leadership, the Populists "called for a reversal of the deeply rooted racial prejudices" in the South. Although Woodward's account of tolerant Populists came under great criticism, it made the important point of needing to more seriously look at the particulars of the movement.

Other scholars, including Jack Abromowitz and Lawrence Goodwyn, have emphasized the constructive alliances between black and white Populists. Goodwyn, perhaps the best-known proponent of the movement, has detailed the "biracial" alliances between black and white populists in Texas. In particular, he found a critical black and white coalition in Grimes County, Texas, where strong Populist officeholders protected Afro-Americans as late as 1900. Although Hofstadter's and Goodwyn's portraits of late nineteenth-century Populism tend to overstate their respective cases, they both agree that the Populist movement had a significant impact on the course of Southern history.

The failure of Afro-Americans to reorganize Populism towards a more inclusive politic ultimately affected all impoverished farmers in the South, regardless of race. The Populists had given the Democrats the only serious political competition in the South since the end of Reconstruction. The intensity of competition led both the Democrats and the Populists to compete for the vote of Afro-Americans. However, once the Populists were defeated in 1896, the Democrats either amended their state constitutions, or drafted new ones, to include various disfranchising devices – such as literacy tests, property requirements, and poll taxes for voting.
 

The Stigma of Populism

In theatre, it is mostly the case that the audience will notice the least polished actor on stage. Similarly, the tendency is to view the lowest common denominator in the study of Populism -- that is, the least sterling and most base performers in the Populist movement. Thus, the stigma of Populism persists.

The stigma that has been attached to Populism has a fundamental flaw which may inform how we may better understand issues of racism and poverty today. The implicit assumption in the dominant criticism that the Populists were backward-looking, if not all-out reactionaries, denies the overall social and political environment of late nineteenth century United States which was racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. The dominant social, political, and economic institutions of the U.S. have consistently fostered the attitudes and practices that Hofstadter attributes, by implication, solely to the Populists. In isolating one group of people as racist (for instance), there is a failure to acknowledge the total environment and the countless forms of racism which permeate the institutions which make up society.

Like other forms of discrimination, racism is so tightly woven into the social, political, and cultural fabric of American life that short of its most overtly violent manifestations it tends to appear ‘normal.' Hence, as shocking and outrageous as were the murders of young Yusuf Hawkins, the dismemberment of James Byrd, Jr., the assault on Abner Louima, and the forty-one shots fired at Amadou Diallo, these atrocities should not be conflated with the more pernicious forms of everyday structural racism and poverty. Or, as Mark Twain described it: "the unspeakably bitter and awful Terror (of lifelong death from hunger, cold insult, cruelty, and heartbreak) which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness."

The story of black populism may, therefore, also be understood as an interlude in the ongoing failure to fully redress the systemic "Terror" of poverty. The tactical decisions and efforts of black populists to counter the mounting assault on black farmers and agrarian workers in the South – an assault in the post-Reconstruction period which set the stage for the entrenchment of Jim Crow by the turn of the century – guides the subject of this paper.
 

The Rise of Black Populism

Afro-Americans – whether free, enslaved, or somewhere in between freedom and slavery – have throughout U.S. history organized independent social, civic, religious, and political vehicles to advance their particular class and community interests. In the wake of Black Reconstruction in the South, its failure, and the accompanying abandonment of Southern Afro-Americans by the Republican Party, black farmers and farm laborers in the New South regrouped. The Colored Farmers' Alliance and then the People's Party served as organizational vehicles through which black Southerners asserted their political and economic interests between 1886 and 1896. Over this ten-year period black farmers and farm laborers took a series of increasingly radical steps as they grew more prominent within the Populist movement.

Black populists in the mid-1880s first formed Colored Farmers' Alliances, which served as agricultural exchanges and centers for community learning and self-improvement. Within several years, the Colored Alliances began lobbying the federal government for programs, such as the sub-treasury plan, which would address their financial plight. The collapse of cotton prices since the end of the Civil War deepened the plight of farmers across the South. Prices for cotton had dropped from 31 cents a pound to just 9 cents a pound between 1866 and 1886. They dropped again to just 6 cents a pound in 1893. According to the census of 1890, roughly 65 percent of Afro-Americans in the South were farmers or farm labors and the depression that accompanied the fall in prices had a devastating impact on them. W.E.B. Du Bois's study of Georgia at the turn of the century found that only 53 of 271 black families had seen any profit from their labors in 1898. The overwhelming majority were in debt or barely managed to break even at year's end.

By 1890, a schism formed within the Colored Alliance, whose membership had grown to over one million strong. While pooling resources and developing better agricultural techniques helped alleviate some of the economic burdens faced by Afro-Americans, these measures were insufficient. Some black members of the Colored Alliance began calling for more political measures. Whereas the Colored Alliance was officially non-partisan, many of its members began speaking in favor of developing a third party -- which they would help found as the People's Party in 1891. These same members supported the Lodge Bill, which was heavily attacked within the broader white Populist movement. The Lodge Bill, known as the Force Bill among its opponents, would provide federal supervision of national elections and therefore ensure greater black participation in the political process.

A measure of the Colored Alliance's radicalization was the organization's decision to organize the general cotton pickers' strike in 1891. The cotton pickers' strike ultimately failed to fully mobilize its constituency -- due in part to poor communication between its organizers in the cotton belt but primarily because of the collusion between local planters and the leadership of the Southern Farmers' Alliance to defeat it. The failure of the strike, a bold move which ended up alienating many of the black populists from their white "brethren," essentially marked the end of the Colored Alliance as an organization and introduced a new phase in the development of black populism: independent electoral politics. Beginning in 1892, black populists effectively used their networks created over years of Colored Alliance organizing and lecturing to bring the People's Party into the heart and homes of the rural Afro-American community.

Between 1892 and 1894 Afro-Americans, many of whom came directly out of the Alliance, actively joined the People's Party. Black populists argued that a third party was now key in helping to advance their communities' political and economic interest. The Republican Party in the South, the "party of liberation," had proven impotent by itself as an electoral vehicle for the advancement of black Southerners. With the end of Reconstruction in 1876-77, the Republicans were swept aside by the Democratic Party's Bourbon strength in the South. The Democratic Party, so argued black populists, could effectively be challenged by a new party – an independent party. Hundreds of Afro-Americans in the three-year period following the founding of the People's Party ran as its candidates; thousands more supported the party's campaigns; and still more (although, never a majority of the Southern black electorate) voted for the third party. They accomplished all of these things, despite repeated campaigns to discourage their independent electoral jaunts by elements of both major parties, local law enforcement, vigilante groups, and the Southern press.

For a brief period of time, black populists achieved modest electoral success. In North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, black independents were elected to dozens of public offices. A key tactic in their success was working in coalition, or "fusing," with the Republican Party in selected states. For instance, the fusion tactic proved instrumental in the 1894 North Carolina Populist victory of the state legislature. Fusion, however, was a double-edged sword. In 1896, despite impassioned and eloquent appeals made by black delegates to the Populist presidential nominating convention against fusion with the Democratic Party, a majority of the party's delegates embraced Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan based on his appeals to the Populists' demands for greater currency flow in the economy. The decision was a catastrophe for the movement.

An anti-black backlash soon followed the doomed Populist-Democratic Party ticket of 1896. The electoral tactic of black populism had been based upon maintaining a certain degree of independence from both major parties. As Populism abandoned its independent edge, so too did it abandon the Afro-American community. Black populism, a shooting star in a very dark sky, would come crashing down like a meteor following the 1896 election. By 1900, Afro-Americans and impoverished whites would become fully disenfranchised. The Bourbons, then victorious in the South, would exert their white supremacist ideology for the next half-century.

Who were the key players within black populism, what did they want, and what did they do? What was the process through which a handful of black Southern farmers and farm laborers were able to organize themselves and their communities into the most successful black farmers' organization and third party in the late 19th century? How did black farmers and laborers see their economic and political interests advanced in the Colored Alliance and then the People's Party? Why did they go from espousing a conservative philosophy of self-help and economic cooperation to pursuing more radical measures? That is, between 1886 and 1896, how did black populism originate, grow, and finally come to and end?
 

Origins of the Colored Alliance

On an unusually cool December day in 1886 at a Texas farm just outside of modern-day Houston, a gathering of mostly black farmers, along with a few local white farmers, formed the Colored Alliance. What they launched was a decisive ten-year period of black Southern agrarian and political agitation. While the Colored Alliance was officially established on December 11, 1886, its origins reach back much further.

The Colored Alliance should be seen as part of the broader history of black agrarian protest in the South. Afro-Americans have had a rich, albeit tragic, history of black resistance to draw upon. From the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina to Nat Turner's revolt in 1831, the radical Abolitionism of the 1840-50s, and black participation in the Civil War, black Southerners have consistently fought for greater political and economic power.

Black farmers and farm laborers in the 1880s either formed or actively participated in a series of agrarian organizations including the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Knights of Labor. During the era of the New South, the emergence of the Colored Alliance was therefore only one example in a wave of agrarian and labor organizations among Afro-Americans. Black farmers and farm laborers were also active in the Greenback Labor Party in several states. The Texas Greenback Party alone reported seventy "Negro clubs" out of a total of 482 represented at its state convention in 1878. At the height of the Knights of Labor in 1886, the union had approximately 60,000 Afro-American members. The Knights of Labor were still recruiting among Afro-Americans in North Carolina when the Colored Alliance first made its way into that state in the late 1880s.

The recruitment of Afro-Americans into the Colored Alliance and cooperation between white and black Alliancemen largely failed to promote widespread biracial insurgency in the South. One black Populist, J.B. Rayner of Texas, argued that the Knights of Labor would be a more effective vehicle for achieving that purpose. Evidence is lacking to measure the success of such efforts, but in some parts of the South, the Knights had for almost a decade recruited black people into an organization that was free of association with the Democratic Party and more attuned to the interests of black laborers and farm workers than possibly either the black or white Alliances.

In Alabama and Tennessee, Afro-Americans maintained chapters of the Agricultural Wheel even after the white organization had consolidated with the Southern Farmers' Alliance in 1888. In Texas, the Colored Alliance was preceded by a number of black agrarian organizations, including a Colored Farmers' Association organized in the mid-seventies and a Colored State Grange in 1880.

The organization that was to become officially known as the Colored National Farmer's Alliance and Co-operative Union (Colored Farmers' Alliance or Colored Alliance for short) was, in fact, not the first Afro-American Alliance formed. The Northern Alliance, under the leadership of Milton George, had organized black Alliances in Arkansas as early as 1882. What made the Colored Alliance unique was its size and influence in the development of Populism in the South.

• Growth of the Alliances

Shortly after its founding in Texas, the Colored Alliance quickly spread throughout the rest of the state and then swept into the remainder of the South. The organization's members were mostly sharecroppers, farm workers, and tenant farmers. Many of its most influential members, however, including local, state, and national leaders were small farm owners. The Alliance obtained a state charter in Texas in February of 1887 and a national charter as a trades-union in March of 1888, retaining the same officers from the Texas Alliance. Just eighteen days after their initial founding in Texas another meeting was held.

The meeting, held at the Good Hope Baptist Church in Weldon, Texas, helped consolidate a sub-alliance with several others that had subsequently formed in and around Houston County. Sixteen black men represented the sub-alliances at this meeting, including J.J. Shuffer, who was elected President, and H.J. Spencer who served as Secretary of the new organization. The name adopted by the group was The Alliance of Colored Farmers of Texas. Robert M. Humphrey, a white Baptist minister who served in the Confederate Army, was elected General Superintendent by the membership and served as the organization's chief spokesman. Humphrey's responsibilities would greatly expand in the following three years to include the entire membership of the Colored Alliance in the South.

The son of immigrants from Northern Ireland, Robert M. Humphrey was born in South Carolina in 1834. He served as a captain of an Alabama Infantry Regiment during the Civil War and moved to Texas after the war ended. In Texas, he taught school, served as an unordained Baptist minister, engaged in dissident politics, and worked as a cotton farmer.

Humphrey had been active in the Union Labor Party. Along with the Non-partisan Convention, the Union Labor Party served as a dissident political party in the period between the Greenback Party and the People's Party. In 1886, Humphrey was a presidential elector from the Second Congressional District at the first Union Labor convention in Fort Worth. Later that year he was nominated for the Second Congressional seat. Three days after his nomination, he published in the Southern Mercury, the Southern Alliance's official Texas organ, a list of sixteen proposed speaking engagements in his district from October 20 to November 3, 1886.

The issue of race arose during the campaign when Humphrey's opponent, the incumbent W. H. Martin, charged that Humphrey "is slipping around at night with lantern in his hand to organize the negroes into alliances, was doing so for mercenary and political ends." Humphrey lost the election, carrying only a single county, one with a large African-American population.

The phenomenal growth of the Colored Alliance in the late 1880s was based, in large part, to its simple message of self-help and economic cooperation – a hopeful message, communal in spirit, which resonated particularly in the South among black farmers and farm laborers.

• Goals of the Colored Alliance

The Colored Alliance began as explicitly non-partisan. It was established as a farmer's association. Like other farm clubs of the late nineteenth century, the Colored Alliance was, in many respects, a conservative organization that urged its members to practice better farming methods, to acquire their homes, and to improve their level of education. In 1886, the Texas Colored Alliance declared that their aims were:

(a) To promote agriculture and horticulture; (b) To educate the agricultural classes in the science of economic government, in a strictly non-partisan spirit, and to bring about a more perfect union of said classes; (c) To develop a better state mentally, morally, socially, and financially; (d) To create a better understanding for sustaining our civil officers in maintaining law and order; (e) To constantly strive to secure entire harmony and good will to all mankind, and brother lover among ourselves; (f) To suppress personal, local sectional, and national prejudices, and all unhealthful rivalry and selfish ambition; (g) To aid its members to become more skillful and efficient workers, promote their general intelligence, elevate their character, protect their individual rights; the raising of funds for the benefit of sick or disabled members, or their distressed families; the forming a closer union among all colored people who may be eligible to membership in this association.

Similarly, the ‘Declaration of Purposes of the Colored Farmer's National Alliance and Cooperative Union of the United States' stated:

The object of this corporation shall be to elevate the colored people of the United States ... to labor more earnestly for the education of themselves and their children, especially in agricultural pursuits ... to be more obedient to the civil law, and withdraw their attention from political [my emphasis] partisanship.

Like many black organizations of that era, the Colored Alliance urged its members to "uplift" themselves by hard work and sacrifice, essentially illustrating the philosophy that Booker T. Washington would soon make famous. Theirs was a fundamentally conservative ideology, focusing on the internal dynamics of the black community. This ideology fit well within the framework of white paternalistic Southern society. As such, it did not pose a threat to the interests of the white community. In 1890 the organization continued to espouse a self-help philosophy grounded in economic cooperation. That year The National Alliance reported that:

[The farmers] have ... organized themselves into councils for the purpose of meeting together, talking together, working together, and in general planning together for their mutual protection and interests. They propose to establish the most friendly relations possible between producers and consumers, farmers and manufacturers, and to bring about a better understanding between the agricultural and business interests of the country.

Structure of the Colored Alliance

The Colored Alliance message of cooperation gained broad support among black farmers and farm laborers. Local chapters of the organization spread throughout the South -- primarily through grassroots organizing. By 1891 Humphrey claimed a membership of approximately 1.2 million. That year he wrote that "The total membership is nearly 1,200,000, of whom 300,000 are females, and 150,000 males under twenty-one years of age, leaving 750,000 adult males."

The year prior, Humphrey had claimed the following membership by state:

Alabama / 100,000 North Carolina / 55,000 Georgia / 84,000 Tennessee / 60,000 South Carolina / 90,000 Kentucky / 25,000 Mississippi / 90,000 Virginia / 50,000 Texas / 90,000 Louisiana / 50,000 Arkansas / 20,000


The Colored Alliances developed differently from one state to the other. Three different Afro-American Alliances, in fact, grew independently of each other in Texas between 1886 and 1887. The first was called the Grand State Colored Alliance and was organized in Caldwell County in October, 1886. Local white leaders of the Southern Farmers' Alliance were reported to be present at the initial meeting and assisted in establishing the new Alliance. Although little is known about the Grand Alliance, more is known about the second black Alliance formed in Texas. The Consolidated Alliance (as it was to be known after 1889) began in Lee County, Texas and was active enough to begin sending organizers to other states as early as 1887. Andrew J. Carothers, a white Alliance member, acted as the leader of the Consolidated Alliance. Carothers' organization was especially active in Louisiana and was independent of other Alliances until its merger with the Colored National Alliance in 1890. This merger resulted in the adoption of the final and full name of the Colored Farmers' Alliance – the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Co-operative Union.
 

Black Populist Leaders

Little detail is known about individual black populists. More detail can be culled from the historical record of its leaders. For instance, it is known that J.J. Shuffer was elected President and H.J. Spencer, Secretary in the Texas Colored Alliance. Thirty-year old cotton pickers' strike leader Ben Patterson of Tennessee may also be counted among the organization's leaders. During the 1891 cotton strike he traveled to Lee County, Arkansas, to organize the pickers. A few white farmers were also in key leadership positions of the organization, including General Superintendent Robert M. Humphrey.

There are some records on the work of black lecturers, such as Walter Patillo, who had been a Republican candidate for Register of Deeds in Oxford County, North Carolina, in 1886 and John B. Rayner of Texas. Rayner was a preacher, teacher, and politician from Robertson County. Born a slave in North Carolina, he was the son of a U.S. Congressman, Kenneth Rayner. Rayner later joined the People's Party. He had a classical education at North Carolina colleges and years of experience in black Southern politics. By 1894 the state press of Texas reported that Rayner was traveling throughout the state speaking at picnics, political meetings, county conventions, and Populist encampments. In his announcements for speaking engagements, he invited "all who favor justice, liberty, a higher price for labor, and a better price for products ..." Billed as the "silver tongued orator of the colored race," Rayner crisscrossed the eastern half of the state in April, May, and June of 1894, leaving in his wake a sprinkling of black Populist clubs. Those clubs were created off of the work of the Colored Alliance in previous years.

Rayner's career reads almost like that of an evangelist crusader. His enthusiasm and ability to endure hardship was widely respected. His salary as a lecturer of the Alliance was minimal, often non-existent; at one point he was so destitute that he did not have money enough to buy postage stamps. Rayner was later credited with converting at least 25,000 Afro-Americans to Texas Populism, and was subsequently appointed to the state Executive Committee in 1895.
 

Activities of the Colored Alliance

The Colored Alliance established exchanges in the ports of Norfolk, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans and Houston, through which members bought goods at reduced prices and obtained loans to pay off their mortgages. In some areas the Colored Alliance raised funds to provide longer public school terms and in early 1889 it began publishing its own weekly newspaper, The National Alliance, which reached "many thousand colored families." Through the Alliance program, The National Alliance claimed in 1890, "The colored race" had been educated and elevated; they had saved millions in money, and had been trained to look forward to homes of their own and independence and happiness around their own firesides.

The Colored Alliance was plagued by many of the same difficulties that their white counterparts, the Southern Farmers' Alliance, faced. Given the extreme poverty of black farm workers, these difficulties were only exacerbated within the Colored Alliance. Colored Alliance Exchanges relied on a fee of two dollars for every male member of the Alliance within the territory that it served. It could hardly have been easy for black farmers and sharecroppers to provide this cash capital for the exchanges. In April, 1891, The National Economist, the official paper of the Southern Farmers' Alliance, reprinted statements from The National Alliance urging Colored Alliance members to stop "buying [Alliance] badges and regalia and all that kind of thing" and instead to pay their dues in full and support the newspaper with subscriptions. The sentiment suggests that the Colored Alliance was financially dependent on its membership which often proved to be an unreliable source of revenue.

Despite the Colored Alliance's claim that it would "bring the entire colored race together as a unit" it never fully captured the full support of the black South, which had been divided by geographic distance and political opposition both from within and outside the black community. What the Alliance did do was touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In the process, the Alliance created a broad base of support with the potential of being organized into new forms of activism – something black populists soon seized upon with the shift toward independent electoral politics.

Dozens of black Colored Alliance lecturers traveled from one plantation to the next creating new chapters and sharing the work of farmers in other parts of the South. These inspiring lecture tours were the most important organizing tools in recruiting new members to the Alliance and helping to consolidate its existing membership. Within a few years, many of these same black lecturers used their networks and relationships to the black community to build the People's Party.

The Colored Alliance played a critical role within the Alliance movement. At the national level, the Colored Alliance held conventions concurrent with the Southern Alliance in St. Louis in December of 1889, Ocala, Florida in December of 1890, Cincinnati in May of 1891, and was present at the conference in Washington in January of 1891 which met to form the Confederation of Industrial Organizations. Relationships between the Alliances at the conventions were generally positive. Delegations from each group were formed to meet with the other organizations represented, even though the Colored and Southern Alliances met separately.

When the Alliances held their conventions at Ocala, the Colored Alliance proposed that the organizations form a confederation "for purposes of mutual protection, co-operation, and assistance." This plan was well received by the Southern Alliance and "heartily endorsed" by all. As late as 1888, the Colored Alliance had affirmed its independent identity, resolving, "that white organizations shall positively prohibit the admission of colored men to membership, and colored organizations shall prohibit the admission of white men to membership." Nevertheless, white men continued to be chosen to head up various state organizations of the Colored Alliance. Another example of the differences between the Alliances developed at the same Ocala conference. While the two Alliances agreed to confederate, they split over the issue of the Lodge election bill, which would provide federal protection of black voting rights. Nowhere would this conflict of interest between black and white Southerners become more apparent than in the Leflore County in 1889.

• The Leflore County Massacre

In the summer of 1889, black Colored Alliance organizer Oliver Cromwell in Leflore County, Mississippi, encouraged black farmers to trade with the Southern Farmers' Alliance in Durant instead of with local merchants. That the Durant store accepted their business is an example of the type of cooperation between the organizations. Cromwell's activities in 1889 however threatened to break the economic hold local whites had on the majority black population in the county, and trouble soon arose.

After an armed group of Colored Alliance members demonstrated in solidarity with Cromwell, a white posse was formed and a violent attack ensued killing untold numbers of local Afro-Americans, including Colored Alliance leaders Adolph Horton, Scott Morris, Jack Dial and J.M. Dial, though Cromwell is believed to have escaped. After the outbreak of violence, the Alliance store was instructed to abstain from any further business with the Colored Alliance. This, along with the murder of several black leaders, destroyed the organization in Leflore County. And while the outbreak of this level of violence may have been unusual, this episode is indicative of the devastating effects white racism, inside and out of the white Alliance, had on the Colored Alliance. Despite such extreme setbacks, the Colored Alliance continued organizing. In time, even more radical Colored Alliance actions would follow, such as the Cotton Picker's Strike of 1891. However, the build-up to the national strike was preceded by lobbying efforts to sway the federal government to support the Alliance's sub-treasury plan. The person who would lead this lobbying effort was the Colored Alliance General Superintendent, Robert M. Humphrey.

• Federal Lobbying by the Colored Alliance

Robert M. Humphrey, a cotton farmer by profession, emerged as the single most important messenger of the Colored Alliance. A Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry in 1890 reveals some of who Humphrey was, how he thought of himself, and what he thought of black people. He had been sent to Washington, D.C., by the Colored Alliance to lobby members of the Senate for the much-needed subtreasury plan. In the middle of the proceedings, Humphrey declared , "I am a white man, a Southern man, and have not been very friendly always toward the colored people, I am proud to see them succeed. I want them to have justice." He identified with black farmers, saying to the same Senate Committee, "I have worked in the field day after day [with black farmers]; I have ploughed by their side; I have known them ever since I was born." Yet, he also distanced himself from black people when he came under scrutiny of being, for all intents and purposes, too much of a "nigger lover." In one section of the Senate proceeding, Humphrey is questioned about his assertions that black people were of equal intelligence as white people because of their skills in being able to discern between various grades of cotton. His response to the Committee: "I do not consider it superior intelligence in the dog that he smells better than a human being."

The more pertinant question, however, is what did black members of the Colored Alliance think of Humphrey as the head of their organization? While there are no specific statements which shed light on this, presumably most thought highly enough of Humphrey to re-elect him repeatedly to the organization's highest position. As a white man with organizing skills, Humphrey served a valuable role in the development of the Alliance. Being white gave him an entree into both the press and the broader Populist movement.

• People's Party Convention of 1896

The Populist presidential nominating convention took place during the same year of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, where the Supreme Court upheld state segregation laws. The year prior saw the lynching of some 113 African-Americans, a riot in New Orleans involving a mob attacking black workers which left six Afro-Americans dead, and Booker T. Washington's famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. On September 18, 1895, Washington spoke at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition where he stated that the "Negro problem" would be solved by a policy of gradualism and accommodation. He asserted that vocational education, which would give black people an opportunity for economic security, was more valuable than social advantages or political office. In one sentence he summarizes his concept: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." These peripheral events gave shape to the tone and context of the nominating convention.

The Populist convention of 1896 bitterly debated the idea of merging with the Democratic Party behind the candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Reporter Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote that "The most eloquent speeches were those of whites and blacks explaining to the convention what the rule of Democrats meant in the South. A delegate from Georgia, a coal black Negro, told how the People's Party alone gave full fellowship to his race when it had been abandoned by the Republicans and cheated and betrayed by the Democrats." Not even the most vocal protestations by the black delegates were able to sway the majority of the convention's delegates from abandoning its political independence. Soon these black delegate's voices would be muted.

The delegate, it is believed, may have been S. D. Walton who seconded Tom Watson's nomination for Vice President. Tom Watson who said that "Your are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the financial despotism which enslaves you both" latter launched a vitriolic attack on the black community and became an advocate for black disenfranchisement.

• The Demise of Black Populism

The defeat of the Populists led to systematic repression of the South's black population. Many of the white Populists, such as Tom Watson, turned on black people with a fury. Watson blamed Afro-Americans for Populist defeats and backed every effort to deprive them of the right to vote. Watson stayed on in politics, using his bigotry to attract the votes of fellow white Georgians. His hate campaign was extended to Catholics and Jews. Early in the twentieth century, Watson was calling Catholic priests "murderers" and cheering the action of a Georgia mob which had lynched an innocent Jewish man. By the time Watson died in 1922, he was a bitter racist and a U.S. Senator from Georgia. The Ku Klux Klan sent an eight-foot cross of roses to his funeral.

Dire economic conditions coupled with the Republican party's abandonment of Afro-Americans after the end of Reconstruction led black farmers and laborers to regroup and begin organizing within their communities. They first organized themselves around self-improvement in agrarian cooperatives and exchanges – the Colored Alliances. When their tactics of lobbying and strikes ran their course, Afro-Americans organized political support outside of the two major parties – the People's Party. In the broadest sense, the story of black populism may be understood as part of the ongoing story of Afro-Americans organizing independent vehicles through which they could fully gain their inalienable rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Conclusion

There were clear differences of opinion among contemporary black leaders as to the benefits of Afro-Americans joining forces with white populists. W.E.B. Du Bois, while initially not impressed by the Populists, stated in 1896, "I began now to believe (Populism) ... was a third party movement of deep significance." Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, who maintained his loyalty to the Republican Party until his death, was unwilling to lend his support to the People's Party. Shortly before passing away in 1895 he wrote: "We have a chance of getting a better man from the Republicans than from the Democrats or Populists." While Booker T. Washington made clear his position on Afro-Americans and politics – that the two do not mix – it would be interesting to note what lesser-known leaders thought of the movement. For instance, what did Ida B. Wells think of the Populists? This raises the question, to what extent was black populism known to the black community in the North, or overseas? A generation later, did black socialist Claude McKay or black nationalist Marcus Garvey comment on black populism? The answers to these questions might shed light on the movement's impact on the broader black community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The subject of black populism is still under debate. In part, the issue is due to the lack of primary documentation of Afro-Americans within the movement. Most of what we know today about populism in the late nineteenth century comes through the writings, speeches, diaries, and newspaper articles of white populists. However, there is another issue. Our commonly-understood view of the failure of Populism, no doubt, has shaped the willingness of so few scholars to pursue the story of black populism.

Herbert Aptheker suggested to the journal Race and Reason that a revisionist treatment of the populist movement from the perspective of the Colored Alliance is one of two key areas in Afro-American history which needs further exploration (the other being a multi-volume study of racism and the U.S. Presidency). Moreover, Charles Dew in his "Critical Essay on Recent Works" in the 1995 edition of C. Van Woodward's Origins of the New South, acknowledges the dearth of literature on the subject and states that the Colored Alliance has been "almost totally neglected." He concludes that the participation of Afro-Americans in the populist movement is "obviously in need of primary investigation."

What have we learned from the experiences of the black populists? Black and white populists occupied conflicting positions within the Southern economy. White populist leaders were ultimately more concerned about reforming the credit system, even if it meant joining the Democratic Party, than helping to create new electoral options by maintaining their political independence. Throughout the period, Afro-Americans – most of whom were landless, like many white populists who were not in official leadership positions – faced the additional pressure of structural racism. Black populists were often subject to physical or political reprisal when they acted on interests that did not coincide with those of the white community – which often included white populists. These conflicts were apparent in the Leflore County Massacre of 1889; in the diametrically opposing positions taken on the Lodge Bill by the Colored Alliance and the Southern Farmers' Alliance in 1891; in the conflict over the national cotton pickers' strike, also in 1891; and in the forfeit of the People's Party to the Democratic Party by the white delegates to the presidential nominating convention in 1896 over the protests of black delegates.

Within the increasingly hostile environment of the South, with few exceptions, Afro-Americans grew more concerned with the immediate security of their lives than securing their political rights through the development of an independent political party. The period between 1886 and 1896 witnessed the organization of hundreds of thousands of Southern Afro-Americans in the Colored Alliance and then the People's Party. However, at the end of the day, it appears that the fundamentally unequal arrangements between black and white populists, which included the ever-present threat of violence against Afro-Americans, politically shaped what black and white Southerners could, or would, do together.

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