As explained in the first installment of this series on populism, historical populism in the U.S. was a progressive, left-wing movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a reaction to the rising monopoly capitalist class, the titans of big business, and big banks who were rapidly taking over the world. The movement was based especially among farmers in the South and West but included alliances with industrial workers and even small shopkeepers.
Although populism was overwhelmingly anti-racist, a fundamental weakness of the movement was that it remained mostly white. The populist movement was not able to create the big, multiracial alliance that was needed to take on the rich successfully.
But to leave the story at that would be misleading. In fact, there was a significant Black populist movement that had its own dynamics. What they achieved was impressive, especially considering the extreme racist violence that characterized this period.
When the populist movement was in full swing in the 1890s, the Southern ruling class’ shock troops were carrying out over 100 lynchings annually, rolling back the many political, economic, and social gains made by Black people after the Civil War.
The Black populists organized and fought back during the height of this post-Reconstruction Klan terror, leaving a legacy that influenced movements going forward.
Roots of populism
Discussing the Black populists requires us to account for the origins of populism in general. The first installment of the series began right in the middle of things, describing populism at its height in the 1890s, centered around the People’s Party. But that party came out of a big wave of agrarian movements in the 1870s and 1880s. Mirroring the growth of industrial unions in the same period, farm workers and farm owners organized alliances. These alliances were the basis of the People’s Party and, thus, of populism.
Multiple factors drove these agricultural communities to organize. As capitalism entered its monopoly-imperialist phase, those making their living in agriculture were affected in specific ways, notably by being burdened with debt.
With the crop-lien system introduced in the South after the Civil War, sharecroppers and much poorer tenant farmers were trapped in endless cycles of debt to rich landowners, making them indentured servants. Both rural white and Black workers were trapped in these cycles, with Black workers experiencing some of the worst exploitation.
In addition, the banks, which increasingly controlled the economy, dictated that farmers in the South grow cotton, the cash crop. Through repeated cycles of overproduction (growing more cotton than the market could absorb), cotton prices tended to fall, so those working the fields got less and less for their work. On the other hand, big capitalist players like cotton warehouse owners, banks, and shippers continued to profit. This bred righteous class anger.
Agricultural crisis struck the Midwest and the Plains in the 1880s. Masses of people had moved West in the preceding years, lured deliberately by the railroad companies that were making a fortune. Railroad bosses wanted settlers in the new economic outposts. The federal government was providing these privately owned railroad companies with subsidies and giving them public land for the tracks – land that had been stolen from Indigenous peoples.
It was in 1886 that some 200,000 workers participated in the Great Southwest railroad strike, taking on the likes of robber baron Jay Gould, the owner of the Union Pacific rail company. These striking workers were not agricultural laborers, but the fact that this strike occurred at the same time that farmers were forming their alliances, and directing their ire against the rail companies, is hardly incidental.
The Knights of Labor, the biggest labor union federation in the country at the time, organized the strike. The agricultural alliances endorsed it. This support for the labor movement’s goals was not a one-off. The Farmers’ Alliance championed the eight-hour workday and called for public ownership of the railroads, which had been paid for by the people anyway.
In 1887, severe drought came to the West. Crops failed and inflated land prices fell, breaking the speculative bubble. The settlers who had moved to states like Kansas and Oklahoma were left high and dry as the Wall Street investors pulled out.
These are just some of the immediate factors that drove the establishment of the great agricultural alliances.
The Colored Alliance
One of the primary organizations of the movement was the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Co-Operative Union (hereafter the Colored Farmers’ Alliance). It was founded on Dec. 11, 1886, in Houston County, Texas, by 16 delegates identified as either “Negro” or “mulatto,” plus one white farmer.
According to historian Omar H. Ali:
“Hundreds of grassroots organizers tapped into preexisting networks of Black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers affiliated with Black churches, the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, and the Colored Farmers’ Union. Within two years of its founding, the Colored Alliance consolidated various Black agrarian organizations scattered across the South into a cohesive movement encompassing hundreds of thousands of African Americans.” (“In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900”)
Around the same time in Texas, a different organization called the National Colored Alliance formed. Within three years, the group claimed a membership of 250,000. There were chapters in every Southern state. The two alliances merged into a single organization: The Colored Alliance.
The Colored Alliance carried out mutual aid and self-help activities, raising funds to help members in a society almost completely lacking a social safety net, especially for rural Black farmers and sharecroppers. They planned and carried out cooperative farming activities, and conducted educational presentations on farm techniques and more. The Alliance also published multiple newspapers.
Any organization of Black people was suspect, whether overtly “political” or not; the Colored Alliance, therefore, operated in the beginning as a largely clandestine organization – modeled on secret societies – and centered in Black churches.
However, the Alliance also engaged in more militant struggles, coming into direct confrontation with the racist white ruling class by “boycotting goods where price gouging was taking place, demanding higher wages for cotton picking, and calling for an immediate end to the convict-lease system,” in the words of Ali. He goes on to explain:
“The convict-lease system was both a means of control and a particularly cruel profit-making business in the South. It gave planters, railroad bosses, and other employers who faced labor shortages, free rein to purchase labor from the state (at a small fine and court cost). The labor often came from those convicted of petty crimes and disproportionately marked Black men, many of whom were physically and mentally abused in a system with little legal recourse; county officials notoriously looked the other way to abuses of authority, even when deaths were the result. The Colored Alliance’s opposition to the system therefore targeted a critical point of contention for African Americans.”
Ali argues for the importance of assessing Black populism on its own terms. It was not simply an appendage of a general – or, more accurately, majority white – movement. Rather, it developed from the internal dynamics of the Black community, including other political and labor organizations of the time, as well as fraternal and religious groups. As a counter to the rising tide of Jim Crow, Black populism made unique contributions and left a legacy that reverberated through the radical sharecroppers’ movement of the 1930s, the Civil Rights, and Black Power struggles down to the present day.
Movement segregation
From their inception, Black populist organizations like the Colored Alliance were not the driving force of a segregated movement. On the contrary, it was existing segregation in white farmers’ organizations that, at least in part, necessitated the establishment of the Colored Alliance.
The biggest agrarian organization was the Farmers’ Alliance, founded in central Texas in 1876. Later, it became the backbone of the People’s Party. The Farmers’ Alliance denied membership to Black people, six years before the Colored Alliance was founded. This was in keeping with the political trend of post-Reconstruction reaction. Such white chauvinism was a boon to the ruling class and a detriment to sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and poor farm owners, both Black and white.
Despite the organizational segregation, the Black and white Alliances joined forces on multiple campaigns. These included opposing the privately owned Louisiana State Lottery Company and tax hikes on cottonseed oil, which was an important source of income for Black tenant farmers.
There were class contradictions at play here, however. This agrarian movement had made strange bedfellows, with some of the poorest people, like sharecroppers, in an alliance with wealthy farm owners. The white Farmers’ Alliance, especially, included big landowners who employed sharecroppers. For these wealthy farmers, opposition to the inclusion of Black members was not just racism in the abstract. It had implications for their bottom line.
Crucially, a split occurred over voting rights. In 1890, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Henry Cabot Lodge, introduced the Federal Elections Bill, which aimed to curb voter suppression in the South by establishing federal oversight. At that time, the Democratic Party was the party of segregation and the whole political apparatus of the South conspired to disenfranchise Republican – especially Black – voters. The bill was endorsed by Republican President Benjamin Harrison. The white Farmers’ Alliance opposed the bill, siding with racist Southern Democrats who made it the main presidential election issue in the South in 1892.
Cotton-pickers strike
The Colored Alliance called for a general strike of Black cotton pickers in 1891, demanding higher pay. These laborers were only getting 50 cents for 100 pounds of cotton. Strike organizers called for a raise to $1 per 100 pounds. As with the voter bill, the white Farmers Alliance balked at the demands and opposed the strike.
The Georgia chapter of the Colored Alliance included wealthier Black farmers who employed sharecroppers themselves, and this chapter also opposed the strike.
The planned September strike did not break out anywhere except for Lee County, Arkansas. A Black labor organizer from Memphis, Tennessee, Ben Patterson, went there and recruited around 25 pickers to strike.
Workers began striking on a farm owned by Colonel H.P. Rodgers. Unfortunately, the strike did not spread across the county, and these strikers remained isolated. The sheriff organized a posse and chased the strikers to an island near Horseshoe Lake on Sept. 29. Patterson escaped but was recaptured and shot. The sheriff allowed masked lynchers to murder the nine prisoners taken by his posse.
We can learn a great deal from the bravery of these strikers. Their fate is also emblematic of the extreme, terroristic violence of the racist planter class and its lackeys. This kind of repression was endemic and has to be taken into consideration when assessing Black populism and the populist movement generally. This is what they were up against.
At the same time, we would be right to wonder how much more effective this strike call, and other efforts, might have been if the white Farmers’ Alliance had thrown its weight behind it rather than caving to racist scare tactics and prioritizing the interests of its wealthier land-owning members. We can also wonder whether the situation might have been altered if the Georgia chapter of the Colored Alliance had not sown dissension on behalf of its wealthier members.
The Agricultural Wheel
There were other farmers’ alliances that were integrated or quasi-integrated. One example is the Agricultural Wheel, a farmer’s union founded in the Arkansas Delta in 1882. It expanded to 10 other states, mostly in the South, but even reached Wisconsin. In 1888, they joined forces with the Knights of Labor to form the Union Labor Party of Arkansas and ran candidates. At its peak in 1888, the Wheel had 75,000 members, making it a real force.
Early on, the Wheel dropped whiteness as a requirement for membership and began admitting Black members into separate Black Wheel formations. In 1887, an unrelated Black farmer’s union, The Sons of the Agricultural Star, merged with The Wheel.
These concrete developments toward uniting rural Black and white people on a class basis were a real advance. This progress on race – or the national question, as Lenin called it – came undone in 1889 when the Wheel merged with an organization called the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union of America. One of the terms of the agreement was the denial of membership to Black farmers. This meant excluding half of all Southern farmers, who were Black. (The Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
The Wilmington Massacre
This article has dealt mainly with the pre-history of populism prior to the founding of the People’s Party in 1892. In those years, the Agricultural Alliance attempted to work with both of the two ruling parties, that is, with the Democrats in the South and the Republicans in the North, with limited success. These failures, in part, inspired the formation of the People’s Party. The Party was not simply a reformulation of the Alliance but involved some fusion with the industrial workers’ movement, namely the Knights of Labor. The new party drew from the ranks of both organizations.
If we fast forward to 1898 – a year representing the height and culmination of populism – the tremendous significance of the Black movement within populism becomes apparent.
In Wilmington, North Carolina, Black populists made a major stand against the rising tide of Jim Crow. This majority-Black Southern city was the largest in the state and had a biracial government, with Black citizens serving as aldermen, coroners, and more. This was not the case everywhere in the state, and the openly white supremacist Democratic Party that had retaken the state legislature with the overthrow of Reconstruction attempted to curtail home rule in the towns; they had their sights on Wilmington.
The government in Wilmington was “fusionist,” meaning that it resulted from an alliance between the Republican Party, on the one hand, and the Populist or People’s Party, on the other. The Wilmington Republican Party itself was biracial.
Statewide, the Populist and Republican Parties formed a fusion coalition from 1894 to 1900. They combatted the Democrats and championed progressive policies such as equal voting rights and free public education. (Both voting rights and public education are under attack in 2024).
In addition to Black people holding power in the city government, many were successful in local trade and business. They made up some 30% of the skilled trade workforce.
Most of the progress in Wilmington came to a halt in 1898 when white supremacist mobs carried out a sustained campaign of violence.
It is clear that this was not a spontaneous eruption. Rather, the Democratic Party – particularly a Wilmington grouping known as “the Secret Nine” – plotted a coup to drive Black people out of political life and better-paying jobs.
Like Donald Trump, these ruling-class leaders used the press and rallies to foment racist hysteria, affecting enough of the white population that around 2,000 went on to participate in the massacre. They relied on old lies about Black men sexually assaulting white women, while also tapping into economic and other anxieties – not so different from today’s anti-trans and anti-immigrant panic.
This was not a totally disorganized mob, though. The Red Shirts were a terrorist organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan in Wilmington, and they led much of the violence. In short, these paramilitary organizations played a role similar to that of the Brown Shirts during Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
This basic logic of fascism is apparent here. In an attempt to preserve its rule and reverse gains won by the people, the ruling class terrorizes the population with violence. But then as now, people fought back. The next installment in this series will explore these events in Wilmington in greater detail.
