Black Protest and White Leadership: A Note on the Colored Farmers' Alliance

Abstract

T HE RELATIVE importance of class and race as dominant influences in American history (and as organizational concepts in American historiography) has long perplexed scholars, Marxists and non-Marxists alike. The notion that class interests were potentially capable of overriding racial distinctions has been argued by historians as diverse as W.E.B. DuBois and C. Vann Woodward.1 However, recent historians have emphasized continuity and persistence of racism as a factor in American life. They have argued, with compelling evidence, that whites of diverse class and geographic and ideological orientations have believed in racial inferiority of black Americans and that it has been this economic class which has shaped course of race relations in United States.2 More specifically, historians studying Southern agrarianism in late nineteenth century have taken issue with Woodward's sanguine view that in 1890's a rudimentary form of biracial class consciousness infused Southern populism. William Chafe, in a study of black Populists in Kansas, has shown how blacks and whites in Kansas Populist party differed in economic interests as well as in ideology. Both Robert Saunders and Charles Crowe have confronted Woodward more directly in their respective studies of Southern populism and Georgia Populist leader Thomas E. Watson. For both Saunders and Crowe, commitment of white Populists to economic and racial interests of black farmers was tangential at best.3 If historians have successfully questioned applicability of Woodward's thesis for 1890's, they have also taken issue with similar views emphasizing predominance of common class allegiances over racial distinctions among those farmers who joined alliance movements of 1880's and early 1890's. Herbert Shapiro has demonstrated that white Southern Farmers' Alliance and Colored Farmers' Alliance were capable of only most tenuous cooperation, an argument far removed from that of an earlier student of alliances who maintained that together black and white organizations formed the one great mass movement of South which grew out of hopes and aspirations