“A White-and-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted”

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.

Conclusion

The conclusion synthesizes the book’s themes. Substantively, it summarizes racist violence and its temporal and spatial adaptations, exclusion and the growth of sundown towns, Jim Crow restrictions and their expansion, and police and their appropriation of mob violence. It reviews the black response through armed resistance, legal, journalistic, and organizational challenges, and concentration of population in cities. It assesses the role of modernity in facilitating these changes. In terms of methodology, the conclusion highlights a more nuanced assessment of targeted violence against black families. In historiographic terms, it suggests that the fear of interracial sex in the Midwest pre-dated that in the South, that the concentration of blacks motivated more racist violence than did the origin of the white settlers, and that situational suicides by blacks faced with imminent death require more critical interrogation.

Missouri’s Little Dixie, 1899–1921

Focusing on the Little Dixie region of Missouri from 1899 to 1921, this chapter examines the practice of whipping by whites as a means of controlling the black population, a practice with roots in slavery. It also explores the interlocking practice of black expulsion from those places where such whippings occurred. First, the chapter details the actions and motivations of the mob members and their widespread support from law enforcement officials and the white population generally. Second, it examines the various sundown towns found in Little Dixie and the role of whippings in maintaining them. Finally, the chapter speculates on the significance of these findings for the historiography of racist violence and sundown towns.

The Missouri Ozarks and Beyond, 1894–1930

This chapter addresses the use of racist violence by whites in the Missouri Ozarks between 1894 and 1930 to control and expel blacks, to establish and maintain sundown towns, and to satisfy and regulate the need for cheap black labor in the larger cities. Building on an extensive secondary literature, it expands this story in three ways. First, it addresses the often studied most violent years from 1894 to 1906 and the years of consolidation over the next quarter century. Second, the chapter places this story into a larger geographical context by addressing the impact of this violence in the border areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Finally, it considers the implications of its findings for the historiography of racist violence and border studies.

Indiana during Reconstruction

This chapter explores the response of whites in Indiana to the influx of blacks from the South and their concentration within the state during Reconstruction. First, it examines white efforts to subordinate blacks, especially during the surges of racist violence which marked the beginning and end of this period. Second, it explores the motivations for this violence, particularly its overtly political nature during the Exodus of 1879-1880, when a surge of southern blacks threatened, whites feared, to tip the electoral balance between Republicans and Democrats. Third, it analyzes the geographical patterns associated with this violence, including the proliferation of sundown towns. Finally, it assesses the implications of this violence for the history of Indiana and situates it in the historiography of the Midwest generally.

Surmounting Adversities in the Land of Lincoln

The history of New Philadelphia illustrates significant elements of the systemic impacts of racism on citizens and communities in the United States. Similar experiences are presented in the development of other communities that struggled against such adversities. This chapter examines additional case studies of structural racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Illinois. In his study of “sundown towns,” James Loewen found that many Illinois towns engaged in extensive discrimination in this period. Such sundown jurisdictions permitted African Americans access to their terrain as laborers during the day, but not as residents. His research showed that “almost all all-white towns and counties in Illinois were all-white on purpose” by the early twentieth century. In contrast, other communities embodied African-American aspirations. Fennell examines such racial dynamics using examples from archaeological and historical analysis of three more African-American communities in Illinois: Miller Grove, Brooklyn, and the Equal Rights settlement outside of Galena.