Black populism

Short description: Political movement in the United States

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Stereotypes and media depictions

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*   * Category
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Black populism was a broad-based, independent political movement started by Black Americans following the end of the Reconstruction era.[1] The movement began among Black agricultural workers as a response to Jim Crow laws. They sought better pay and labor protections, increased funding for Black schools, criminal justice reform, and increased participation of Black Americans in politics.

## Contents

* 1 Beginnings
* 2 Goals
* 3 Resistance and failure
* 4 References
* 5 Sources

## Beginnings

Between 1886 and 1898 black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian laborers organized their communities to combat the rising tide of Jim Crow laws. As Black Populism asserted itself and grew into a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the white planter and business elite that, through the Democratic Party and its affiliated network of courts, militias, sheriffs, and newspapers, maintained tight control of the region. Violence against black Populism was organized through the Ku Klux Klan, among other white terrorist organizations designed to halt or reverse the advance of black civil and political rights.[2]

## Goals

Despite opposition, black Populists carried out a wide range of activities:

* Establishing farming exchanges
* Raising money for schools
* Publishing newspapers
* Lobbying for better legislation
* Mounting boycotts against agricultural trusts
* Carrying out strikes for better wages
* Protesting the convict-lease system and lynching
* Demanding Black jurors in cases involving black defendants
* Promoting local political reforms and federal supervision of elections
* Running independent and fusion campaigns.

Black Populism found early expression in various agrarian organizations, including the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Colored Farmers' Alliance. However, facing the limitations in attempting to implement their reforms absent of engaging the electoral process, Black Populists helped to launch the People's Party and used the then left-of-center Republican Party in fusion campaigns. (Today though, after the Republican Party moved to the right, and the Democratic Party in the South was abandoned by the White Populist Dixiecrats who had opposed integration in the 1960s, most African Americans who vote cast ballots for Democratic Party candidates).[3]

## Resistance and failure

By the late 1890s, propaganda campaigns warning of a “second Reconstruction” and “Negro rule,” physical intimidation, violence, and assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers led to the movement's downfall. A key figure in the attack on Black Populism was Ben Tillman, the leader of South Carolina's white farmers' movement. Southern Populists knew that they had only two possible alternatives in the fight against the ruling Bourbon Democrats. They must choose between trying to win the Negro vote or working to eliminate it entirely. Tillman and his followers in South Carolina sought the latter method. They were completely reactionary on the Negro question and stood with the Bourbons in disregarding the principles of the Fifteenth Amendment.[citation needed]

Elsewhere, the populists sought to win Negro votes, either through fusion with the Republican minority or through the raising of issues with a broad appeal to the Negro farmers. It was no accident that in the South the third-party movement was strongest in those states where it sought not only black votes but active black support.[4]

The notion that African Americans had somehow betrayed populism[clarification needed] would haunt the Georgia People's Party from the very beginning. Populists had realized the political importance of blacks. Of the state's forty thousand Republicans voters, a considerable majority were former bondsmen. If the white votes were to split, they might decide the outcome of any state election. Populists faced the dilemma of needing to find a way to court the black votes without losing the whites, while also preventing whites from supporting the "negro party." The Party decided that it must accept the risk and court the black vote. This strategy contained a degree of precedent in state politics: in the 1870s and 1880s, democrats and independents had sometimes used the same device when the white votes split. In those days many whites were willing to allow African American men the ballot, especially when it could be sometimes bought for so little.[5]

Black populism was destroyed, marking the end of organized political resistance to the return of white supremacy in the South in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, black populism stood as the largest independent political uprising in the South since the "general strike" during the Civil War, until the modern Civil Rights Movement.[6]

## References

1. ↑ Ali 2008, pp. 74–100
2. ↑ Ali 2010, pp. 113–167.
3. ↑ Ali 2010, pp. 13–77.
4. ↑ Rochester, Anna (1943), The Populist Movement in the United States, New York: International Publishers, p. 59
5. ↑ Barton, C. Shaw (1947), The Wool-Hat Boys – Georgia's Populist Party, Louisiana State University Press, p. 78
6. ↑ Ali 2005, pp. 6–18.

## Sources

* Adam, Anthony J. (2004), Black Populism in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography, Westport, CT: Praeger, ISBN 0-313-32439-5 .
* Ali, Omar H. (2010), In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 978-1-60473-778-3 .
* Ali, Omar H. (2008), In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third Party Movements in the United States, Athens: Ohio University Press, ISBN 978-0-8214-1806-2, https://archive.org/details/inbalanceofpower0000alio or 978-0-8214-1807-9.
* Ali, Omar H. (July 2006), "Standing Guard at the Door of Liberty: Black Populism in South Carolina, 1886–1895", The South Carolina Historical Magazine 107 (3): 190–203 .
* Ali, Omar H. (Spring 2005), "Independent Black Voices from the late 19th century: Black Populists and the Struggle Against the Southern Democracy", Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 7 (2): 4–18, doi:10.1080/10999940390936197 .
* Ali, Omar H. (2003), Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1898, Columbia University , Ph.D. dissertation, UMI Number 3104783.
* Du Bois, W. E. B. [1935] 1992. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Atheneum. (ISBN 0-689-70820-3)
* Gaither, Gerald H. 1977. Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the 'New South'. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. (ISBN 0-689-70820-3)
* Goodwyn, Lawrence 1976. Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Hahn, Steven. 2003. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (ISBN 0-674-01169-4 or ISBN 0-674-01765-X)
* Kantrowitz, Stephen. 2000. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. (ISBN 0-8078-2530-1 and ISBN 0-8078-4839-5)
* Trelease, Allen. W. 1995. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. (ISBN 0-8071-1953-9)
* Wood, Forest G. 1970. Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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African American topics

History|

* Abolitionism in the United States
* Afrocentrism
* Atlantic slave trade
* Black Power movement
* Brown v. Board of Education
* Dred Scott v. Sanford
* Free negro
* Free people of color
* History by state
* Jim Crow laws
* Lynching in the United States
* Maafa
* Military history of African Americans
* Nadir of American race relations
* Negro Motorist's Green Book
* Partus sequitur ventrem
* Plessy v. Ferguson
* Politicians during the Reconstruction Era
* Reconstruction amendments
* Reconstruction era
* Slavery in the United States
* Treatment of slaves in the United States
* Great Migration
* Redlining
* Civil rights movement 1865–1896 / 1896–1954 / 1954–1968
* Second Great Migration
* New Great Migration
* Post–civil rights era
* Inauguration of Barack Obama 2009 / Inauguration of Barack Obama 2013
* Black Lives Matter
* Plantations

Culture|

* Art
* Afrofuturism
* Black mecca
* Dance
* Film
* Harlem Renaissance
* New Negro
* Juneteenth
* Kwanzaa
* LGBT community
* Literature
* Music
* Musical theater
* Names
* Neighborhoods
* Soul food
* Stereotypes

People (national figures)|

* African Americans in Congress
* Crispus Attucks
* Julian Bond
* James Bradley
* George Washington Carver
* Frederick Douglass
* W. E. B. DuBois
* Henry Highland Garnet
* Jesse Jackson
* Michael Jackson
* Martin Luther King Jr.
* Barack Obama
* Rosa Parks
* Gabriel Prosser
* A. Philip Randolph
* Al Sharpton
* Spingarn Medal winners
* Emmett Till
* Sojourner Truth
* Harriet Tubman
* Nat Turner
* Denmark Vesey
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* Booker T. Washington
* Oprah Winfrey
* Malcolm X

Education, science
and technology|

* Black schools
* Black colleges and universities
* Museums
* African-American studies
* Inventors and scientists
* Women
* in computer science
* in medicine
* in STEM fields

Religion|

* Azusa Street Revival
* Black church
* Black theology
* Doctrine of Father Divine
* American Society of Muslims
* Nation of Islam
* Black Hebrew Israelites

Political movements|

* Pan-Africanism
* Self-determination
* Nationalism
* Black Power
* Black fist
* Anarchism
* Capitalism
* Conservatism
* Populism
* Leftism
* Garveyism
* Back-to-Africa movement

Civic and economic
groups

* National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
* Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
* Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
* Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
* Black Panther Party
* National Urban League (NUL)
* Rights organizations
* Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)
* Thurgood Marshall College Fund
* United Negro College Fund (UNCF)
* National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC)
* National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC)
* National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)

Sports|

* Negro league baseball
* Baseball color line
* Black players in professional American football
* Black quarterbacks
* list
* African Americans in the Canadian Football League
* Black players in ice hockey
* list

Athletic associations
and conferences

* Central (CIAA)
* Southern (SIAC)
* Mid-Eastern (MEAC)
* Southwestern (SWAC)

Ethnic subdivisions|

* Black Indians
* Black Seminoles
* Gullah
* Fula
* Igbo
* Louisiana Creole
* of color
* Melungeon
* Yoruba

Demographics|

* Neighborhoods
* list
* U.S. cities with large populations
* 2000 majorities
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* Metropolitan areas

Languages|

* English
* American English
* African-American English
* African-American Vernacular English
* Gullah
* Louisiana Creole

By state/city|

* Alabama
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* Illinois (Chicago)
* Iowa (Davenport)
* Louisiana
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* Massachusetts (Boston)
* Michigan (Detroit)
* Mississippi
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* New York
* New York City
* North Carolina
* Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
* Puerto Rico
* South Carolina
* Tennessee
* Texas
* Dallas-Fort Worth
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* Utah

Diaspora|

| To Africa|

* Gambia
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* Back-to-Africa movement

|

To the Americas|

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