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This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927
Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent M. S. Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post–Civil War Kansas. Campney's capacious definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence--property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns--used to intimidate African Americans. As he shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet Campney's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, This Is Not Dixie rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2015
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January 26, 2022
I didn't initially like this book. The introduction started the book with an academic style that put me off. He began defining the difference between lynchings and racial violence, and my eyes began to glaze over. There was no poetry in it, either.
Once I dove into the chapters, however, the writing became riveting. What is amazing is that the author documents everything so clearly. This guy spent so much time and effort looking through old newspaper databases in Kansas! I've gone through some of those databases for my own book project, and access isn't always easy. As the chapters go on, I started highlighting (in ebook format) the parts that I wanted to go back to and remember, and man, I had to hold back because I wanted to highlight everything! What good is a book whose text is all highlighted light red?!
Eventually, the incidents of lynchings and violence began to draw a portrait of what happened during Reconstruction. After 1865, there was euphoria in some quarters, with liberals assuming that the black man would finally be considered as human beings. Time after time, however, they were met with violence. One incident that comes to mind is the case of D. C. Kenneston, a liberal reverend in Douglas County. He was engaged in a discussion with other men who were discussing whether a black might someday be elected president.
"Mr. K. replied that he would vote for a competent colored man as quick as for a white man," reported the Kansas Daily Tribune.
"Immediately," the Tribune reported, "one of the men 'took a tea cup from the table and threw it at Mr. K.'s face; he then seized another cup and hit him with it in the face a number of times.'"
It sounds like a scene from Scorcese's movie Goodfellas.
Good liberals all across Kansas were trying to establish equality, and yet there was a racist base (to use the modern argot) that established a Jim Crow set of manacles by 1877. It's amazing how every era has its people of good will and its racists, and the fight between them establishes a set of freedoms and limits. We have those freedoms and limits even today.
Since I have family in Kansas, I was reading for incidents emanating from my own areas. Sure enough, I ran across lots of incidents that happened through the decades in Hays, which was a sundown town, as well as Wichita, Salina, and Lawrence (although not Emporia and environs).
Hays was notorious. The Hays incidents started in 1867, just after the Civil War, and in 1869, six black Union soldiers stationed at Fort Hays "rioted" and were shot and killed.
"Their bodies were thrown into a well, which by the next morning was sodded over and apparently had never existed," according to the Omaha World Herald.
Next to their names on the roster was written, "DESERTED." A mob then hunted down and lynched two black barbers before expelling the remaining black civilians.
The author documents many other Hays lynchings and killings during the late 19th century. In 1882, white men shot and killed a white soldier, and later that year, authorities beat a black prisoner to death.
By 1909, an observer concluded: "No negro has ever ventured to make Hays a place of residence. An occasional straggler has worked a few days in town, but the history of the place has appealed too strongly to his imagination for him to remain." To this very day, blacks make up only 3% of the population of Hays.
City by city, town by town, the author paints a portrait of these towns as brutal and deadly for the blacks who dared linger. Sexual attack was often the trumped-up charge, or even just the writing of love letters to a white woman. The major incidents are recounted, but also the less well known ones. All of them are shocking. They are something I will never forget.
The author slices his concepts quite thinly. He goes into the reasons why blacks were attacked in the manner that they were, the ways in which those attacks were covered up, the logic that they used to justify the violence, and the movement of populations of color--with fairly exact numbers--out of various towns and cities.
This book gave me a taste for delving more deeply into Kansas racial history. This book's bibliography and footnotes provides a next step for me, and today, I bought one of those books on Amazon. The author's meticulous and clear research provides undeniable proof of how brutal this period was for Kansas. This isn't just the fiction of The Underground Railroad or Roots. This is vivid, documented proof. This author changed the way that I view the black experience in America, and why blacks are so suspicious of white culture to this very day.
Once I dove into the chapters, however, the writing became riveting. What is amazing is that the author documents everything so clearly. This guy spent so much time and effort looking through old newspaper databases in Kansas! I've gone through some of those databases for my own book project, and access isn't always easy. As the chapters go on, I started highlighting (in ebook format) the parts that I wanted to go back to and remember, and man, I had to hold back because I wanted to highlight everything! What good is a book whose text is all highlighted light red?!
Eventually, the incidents of lynchings and violence began to draw a portrait of what happened during Reconstruction. After 1865, there was euphoria in some quarters, with liberals assuming that the black man would finally be considered as human beings. Time after time, however, they were met with violence. One incident that comes to mind is the case of D. C. Kenneston, a liberal reverend in Douglas County. He was engaged in a discussion with other men who were discussing whether a black might someday be elected president.
"Mr. K. replied that he would vote for a competent colored man as quick as for a white man," reported the Kansas Daily Tribune.
"Immediately," the Tribune reported, "one of the men 'took a tea cup from the table and threw it at Mr. K.'s face; he then seized another cup and hit him with it in the face a number of times.'"
It sounds like a scene from Scorcese's movie Goodfellas.
Good liberals all across Kansas were trying to establish equality, and yet there was a racist base (to use the modern argot) that established a Jim Crow set of manacles by 1877. It's amazing how every era has its people of good will and its racists, and the fight between them establishes a set of freedoms and limits. We have those freedoms and limits even today.
Since I have family in Kansas, I was reading for incidents emanating from my own areas. Sure enough, I ran across lots of incidents that happened through the decades in Hays, which was a sundown town, as well as Wichita, Salina, and Lawrence (although not Emporia and environs).
Hays was notorious. The Hays incidents started in 1867, just after the Civil War, and in 1869, six black Union soldiers stationed at Fort Hays "rioted" and were shot and killed.
"Their bodies were thrown into a well, which by the next morning was sodded over and apparently had never existed," according to the Omaha World Herald.
Next to their names on the roster was written, "DESERTED." A mob then hunted down and lynched two black barbers before expelling the remaining black civilians.
The author documents many other Hays lynchings and killings during the late 19th century. In 1882, white men shot and killed a white soldier, and later that year, authorities beat a black prisoner to death.
By 1909, an observer concluded: "No negro has ever ventured to make Hays a place of residence. An occasional straggler has worked a few days in town, but the history of the place has appealed too strongly to his imagination for him to remain." To this very day, blacks make up only 3% of the population of Hays.
City by city, town by town, the author paints a portrait of these towns as brutal and deadly for the blacks who dared linger. Sexual attack was often the trumped-up charge, or even just the writing of love letters to a white woman. The major incidents are recounted, but also the less well known ones. All of them are shocking. They are something I will never forget.
The author slices his concepts quite thinly. He goes into the reasons why blacks were attacked in the manner that they were, the ways in which those attacks were covered up, the logic that they used to justify the violence, and the movement of populations of color--with fairly exact numbers--out of various towns and cities.
This book gave me a taste for delving more deeply into Kansas racial history. This book's bibliography and footnotes provides a next step for me, and today, I bought one of those books on Amazon. The author's meticulous and clear research provides undeniable proof of how brutal this period was for Kansas. This isn't just the fiction of The Underground Railroad or Roots. This is vivid, documented proof. This author changed the way that I view the black experience in America, and why blacks are so suspicious of white culture to this very day.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review