Millionaire Junius G. Groves came to Kansas at agetwenty with a dollar and twenty-five cents in hispocket. Born a Kentucky slave, the young manwho would become “Potato King” arrived in Kansas City in 1879 amidst a throng of

poor African American “exodusters” from the southern states who had immigrated to Kansas City,Topeka, and other Missouri riverport towns in the “promised land” of Kansas. Seeking land owner-ship, independence, and freedom from the violence and oppression that characterized African Ameri-can life in the post-Civil War South, an estimated twenty-six thousand black southerners migrated toKansas with the Exodust movement of 1879–1880. Like Junius Groves, some individuals and familiessettled on their own; others arrived as members of organized town colonies. All hoped to fare better

Anne P.W. Hawkins is the special events coordinator for the Kansas State Historical Society and a master’s degree student of American history atthe University of Kansas. Her major areas of study are European encounters with colonial America and frontier history.

The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable critique and encouragement of this research by the late Bill Cecil-Fronsman and tothank Virgil W. Dean, Suellen Lathrop, and the reference staff of the Kansas State Historical Society for their help in suggesting and locatingprimary sources. The author also thanks Peter C. Mancall, Naomi B. Patterson, and the December 1998 participants of the Newberry LibraryRural History Seminar, Chicago, for comments offered on earlier versions of this article.

Black Agriculture and theAgrarian Ideal in Kansas,

1880–1920

by Anne P. W. Hawkins

Hoeing TheirOwn Row

200 KANSAS HISTORY

economically in Kansas than the subsistence-levelliving black southerners earned by farming cotton orworking as low-skilled laborers.1

Groves found employment as a farmhand in ruralKansas City after several weeks of searching, earning

what he deemed “almost starvation wages, 40 centsper day, and I was obliged to board myself. This wasbetter than being forced to roam the streets and beg,so I gladly accepted the offer, determined to work my

1. Fred Lincoln Mather, ed., Who’s Who of the Colored Race: A GeneralBiographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (1915; reprint,Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1976), 125–26; Topeka Plaindealer, May 4, 1900;unattributed newspaper article reprinting information published in theBoston Transcript, August 29, 1907, in “Negro Clippings,” vol. 6, 67–69, Li-brary and Archives Division, Kansas State Historical Society; Kansas CityStar, May 17, 1910; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolu-tion, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 104; Robert G. At-hearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence:Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), 180; see also Leon F. Litwack, Been in the

Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).For the estimated population of exoduster immigrants, see Athearn, 167,187, 261; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Re-construction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 184–86. The exact numberof exodusters who reached Kansas is difficult to determine. Painter re-ports that “the Colored Relief Board in St. Louis estimated that 20,000 Ex-odusters reached the city in 1879–80.” Athearn quotes various Kansas of-ficials in 1880 who estimated the numbers of exodusters reaching Kansasranged between fifteen thousand and sixty thousand; he notes, however,that 1880 census figures show an increase of twenty-six thousand blackresidents from 1870 figures. Specifically how many thousands were con-veyed from St. Louis and other ports of call to Kansas is not certain.

Harvesting broom corn on the farm of George Walker, a prominent black farmer of Hugoton, Kansas, late 1920s.

HOEING THEIR OWN ROW 201

way up to better things.”2 Better things for Groves in-cluded land ownership, and he was not alone in hisdetermination to, literally, “hoe his own row.”3 Sinceemancipation, this desire had inspired black south-erners’ quests for land of their own. Cultivating one’sown farm and raising crops to sustain one’s familywas the key to respectability in an agricultural soci-ety, and black southerners believed that a plot of landwas all anyone needed to elevate his or her positionand fortunes. “Gib us our own land and we take careourselves; but widout land, de ole masses can hire usor starve us, as dey please,” lamented one Charlestonman. Yet the vast majority of freedmen lacked the re-

sources to purchase land in their home states, and inthe South they confronted a white power structureunwilling to advance them credit or sell them real es-tate.4

Despite these obstacles, land ownership remaineda fervent aspiration. Many believed they would ac-quire land in the free territories of the open West—inKansas, where black emigration agents such asGeorge Marlowe of Louisiana reported that land andmoney both were ample. “What is raised yields moreprofit than elsewhere, and it is raised at less expense.The weather and the roads enable you to do morework than elsewhere. The climate is mild and pleas-ant,” Marlowe wrote in 1871, after an eight-day visitto Kansas in what must have been a very clement Au-gust. “Money plenty, and what you raise commands agood price.”5 Such favorable, often-exaggerated re-ports of the “Garden of the West” attracted thousandsof black southerners like Junius Groves to Kansas,where good farmland was abundant and more easilyacquired than in the South, and where officialsclaimed neither to prevent nor to induce “any class ofpeople” to settlement. “All who come here are expect-ed to make their own living and be self-supporting,”replied Kansas governor John St. John to one blackKentucky farmer’s letter in 1879, adding that the mostdesirable immigrants to Kansas were simply “menand women who are sober, honest and industriousand willing to work faithfully to better their conditionand become law abiding citizens. In other wordsthose of the colored people who would likely do bestin Kansas are those who are accustomed to farming.”6

Junius Groves was such a person. “By keepingmy eyes open, always attending to duty and doingmore, rather than less, than was required of me, Isoon succeeded in having my wages raised to 75cents per day,” he recalled of his work as a farmhand.“This was considered a very fair price and I felt that Iwas on the road to fortune.”7 He could not have been

202 KANSAS HISTORY

2. Topeka Plaindealer, May 4, 1900.3. Glen Schwendemann, Nicodemus: Negro Haven on the Solomon

(Topeka: State of Kansas Commission on Civil Rights, 1971), 11; first pub-lished in Kansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 1968): 10–31.

4. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 401; Foner, Reconstruction:America’s Unfinished Revolution, 104, 106 (quote on 104).

5. Quote in Thomas C. Cox, Blacks in Topeka, Kansas 1865–1915: A So-cial History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 36.

6. Ibid., 1, 21, 91; Lee Ella Blake, “The Great Exodus of 1879 and 1880to Kansas” (master’s thesis, Kansas State College of Agriculture and Ap-plied Science, 1942), 42.

7. Topeka Plaindealer, May 4, 1900.

Junius G. Groves and his wife, Matilda. Although born a slave, Grovesrose through poverty to become a revered and prosperous farmer in theKansas City area.

8. Mather, Who’s Who of the Colored Race, 125–26; “Negro Clippings,”vol. 6, 67–69.

9. Emporia Gazette, September 8, 1915; U.S. Department of Com-merce, Bureau of the Census, Negro Population 1790–1915 (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 650–51; Historic Sites Survey,Historic Preservation in Kansas, Black Historic Sites: A Beginning Point (Tope-ka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1977), 10.

10. Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Kansas Agriculture: StatehoodCentennial Edition 1861–1961 (Topeka: 1961), 240; Department of Com-merce, Negro Population, 43–45; Pamela Browning, The Decline of BlackFarming in America: A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights(Washington, D.C.: Commission, 1982).

11. W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1976), 95.

12. Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women onthe Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 27.

13. See Historic Sites Survey, Historic Preservation in Kansas; Athearn,In Search of Canaan; Painter, Exodusters; Savage, Blacks in the West; Schwen-demann, Nicodemus.

more accurate. Twenty-eight years later, his accumu-lated wealth was estimated at one million dollars.From his earnings as a Kansas farm laborer, Groveshad been able to sharecrop, then rent, then purchasehis own small acreage just three years after arriving.By 1907 he was reputedly the world’s largest growerof Irish potatoes, and his palatial twenty-two-roombrick home in Edwardsville—complete with electriclights, two telephones, and hot and cold runningwater in all of the bedrooms—was the subject of sev-eral newspaper articles nationwide. At age forty-eight, the “Potato King” owned more than fortysquare miles of land in several Kansas counties,which he farmed together with his wife, Matilda,their twelve children, and their hired laborers, someof whom lived in the seven farmhouses that Groveshad built near the family mansion on his estate.8

A contemporary of Groves, Green Keith ownedjust one of the eighty-eight farms cultivated by blackfarmers of his day near Lawrence, Kansas. When hedied in late summer of 1915, the flag flying outsideLawrence city hall rippled at half mast. City commis-sioners passed resolutions honoring Keith, a promi-nent resident whose death the region mourned. A re-spected politician, treasurer of nearby WesternUniversity, and one of the county’s most successfulfarmers, his influence had extended hundreds ofmiles beyond his farm home. A newspaper two coun-ties away eulogized, “One man like Green Keith in acommunity is a tremendous asset to it.”By the time ofKeith’s death, black farmers tilled Kansas soil in 81 ofthe state’s 105 counties, a living that had occupiedAfrican Americans in the state for more than half acentury.9

Junius Groves, Green Keith, and other AfricanAmerican farmers, however, are virtually invisible inKansas’s historical landscape. The farmer who plowsbehind a team on the state flag and in the historicimagination is of Anglo European descent. The StateBoard of Agriculture, for example, published in its

1961 annual report a “history of the development ofKansas Agriculture thru 100 years of statehood.” Notone minority person was named in the centenary vol-ume. In a section entitled “Immigration,” no mentionwas made of the forty-three thousand African Amer-icans who settled in Kansas between 1860 and 1880.In a report on black farming in America published in1982 by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, blackfarming in Kansas or any western state was omittedaltogether.10 Academic histories are similarly mute,and scholars have advanced different theories to ex-plain the omission of black farmers from historical ac-counts. One historian surmised that agricultural set-tlement in general “has been neglected,” with moreattention paid by scholars and literary writers to “ro-mantic” topics such as the gold rush, the fur trade,and the cattle industry.11 Another historian creditedracism with erasing black involvement from the agri-cultural picture of the West, arguing that “the stereo-typing of black females and males in popular litera-ture and media during the nineteenth centuryobscured the realities of their lives on the prairies andelsewhere. . . . [E]nough black women [and men] ex-isted on the prairie frontier to destroy the notion thatprairie [settlers] were uniformly white.”12 While blackagricultural communities in Kansas, particularly thetown of Nicodemus, have received recent scholarlyattention, most published histories emphasize thefailure of these communities to endure, or stop shortof pursuing the history after 1880 of those blacksouthern migrants who did realize their dreams.13

Historical evidence contradicts the image thatblack Kansas farmers were so rare in num-ber as to be invisible and confined geo-

graphically to small settlements that could not sus-tain an agricultural livelihood. The state’s black

HOEING THEIR OWN ROW 203

population rose from 17,108 in 1870 to 43,107 in 1880.By 1881 twelve agricultural colonies in Kansas hadbeen established by black farmers: Nicodemus(founded in 1877), Hodgeman (1878), Morton City(1878), Dunlap (1878), Kansas City-area colony(1879–1880), Parsons (1879), Wabaunsee (1879), Sum-mit Township (1879), Topeka-area colony (1880),Burlington (1880), Little Coney (1881), and the DanielVotaw colony (1881). Some of these colonies disband-ed after a few years; others remained viable well intothe twentieth century.14 Yet a historiographic empha-sis on the failure of black farming colonies presents alimited view of the wider patterns that took place. Al-though they represented less than 5 percent of thetotal population of Kansas farmers throughout thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thou-

14. Department of Commerce, Negro Population, 43–45; Historic SitesSurvey, Historic Preservation in Kansas, 10–13, 18–21. While this source in-cludes the founding in 1873 of a Singleton Colony in Cherokee County,that colony’s establishment is convincingly disputed in Gary R. Entz,“Image and Reality on the Kansas Prairie: ‘Pap’ Singleton’s CherokeeCounty Colony,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 19 (Summer1996): 125–37. Historic Preservation in Kansas also dated the founding ofthe Hodgeman County Colony in 1877, the year of the colony’s incorpo-ration; C. Robert Haywood gave the actual arrival date of settlers asMarch 24, 1878, in “The Hodgeman County Colony,” Kansas History: AJournal of the Central Plains 12 (Winter 1989–1990): 210–21.

sands of African American families whosettled in Kansas realized their dream ofacquiring farms, and many engaged inagricultural operations over succeedinggenerations. By 1900 African Americansowned 3,721 Kansas farms valued in ag-gregate at more than $3.7 million. In 1910the value of black-owned farms had risento nearly $8.5 million, and the number ofacres farmed increased from 173,614 in1900 to 183,453 in 1910. The averageacreage farmed by black Kansans rose 24percent in 1900–1910, compared with a 1percent increase in the average acreagefarmed by white farm operators duringthe same decade.15

Like pioneers of European ancestry, black farmerswere persistent and hard working, prospering in pe-riods of agricultural bounty and, like white farmers,relying on neighbors’ help during drought, insectplagues, and other adverse farming conditions.16

Black-owned farms, however, produced more thanbumper potato crops, choice beef, and hardy goldenwheat; they cultivated a basis for prosperity and vir-tuous living among black Kansans. Farmers wereproudly touted in the black press, and leaders urgedtheir youth to leave the immorality of city life, to getoff the streets and onto farms. African Americanyouth farmed alongside their parents; sons anddaughters inherited homesteads successfully claimedby their ancestors. Black agricultural communitiescontinued to be established into the early twentiethcentury. Farming was anything but an invisible occu-pation for black Kansans in the years following theCivil War.

As black Kansas communities between 1880 and1920 established more stable agricultural bases, pros-

15. Department of Commerce, Negro Population, 514, 588–89,592–93.

16. Craig Miner, West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas,1865–1890 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 84.

204 KANSAS HISTORY

By 1907 Junius Groves was reputedly the world'slargest grower of Irish potatoes, and his wealth is evidentin his twenty-two room brick home in Edwardsville.

corn, cabbage, hay, parsnips, carrots, sorghum mo-lasses, and fruit, was regarded “the wealthiest col-ored man in Kansas.” Among the men acclaimed as“an inspiration to other members of the race” wereBenjamin Vance of Soldier Township, who raised cat-tle, hogs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, and horses; RobertKeith, “the richest colored man in Shawnee county”;and Major John M. Brown of Topeka, who specializedin Irish and sweet potatoes, fruit trees, and hogs. TheMail and Breeze concluded:

Some of the most successful farmers in Kansas arecolored men who came to the state without a dol-lar and who have by industry and frugality accu-mulated small fortunes. They are to be found in al-most every county in eastern Kansas . . . [and] ownfine farms, live in handsome country homes, rideto town in good carriages, are respected by alltheir neighbors, and have all the advantages andcomforts enjoyed by their white neighbors.19

Junius Groves garnered statewide celebrity in1900 when the Topeka State Journal proclaimed him“the wealthiest Negro in Kansas, if not in the entireWest.” The story chronicled Groves’s rags-to-richesrise as a produce farmer in the fertile Kaw Valley ofKansas. The Topeka Plaindealer in May 1900 publishedan interview with Groves in which he explained howthrough “only my hard work and determination tosucceed to depend upon,” and frugal financial man-agement, he made more than one hundred thousanddollars in eighteen years and accumulated a consid-erably larger net worth. In a front-page article, the ed-itor of the Topeka Plaindealer wrote of Groves’s finan-cial success: “He is a confident believer in the futureof the Negro, and in an interesting interview, givessome sage advice to the people of his race.”20

From the earliest efforts to establish AfricanAmerican agriculture in the state, blackKansans proffered sage advice and confident

opinions on the benefits of a farm career over any-thing a city could offer. One Lawrence Daily Journalcommentator wrote in 1879, “Intelligent colored men

19. Mail and Breeze (Topeka), February 2, 1900.20. Topeka Plaindealer, May 4, 1900.

perous black Kansas farmers received regional andnational attention, rural settlers lamented the futureof their youth in more urban Kansas locales, andblack newspapers began to promote farming as thesuperior economic and moral occupation for blackKansans. At the turn of the century agricultural suc-cesses and the concurrent national promotion of in-dustrial trades for African Americans by Booker T.Washington and his supporters converged in Kansasinto a campaign heralding farming as the basis forblack advancement. Ultimately, this campaign crys-tallized into conviction that agriculture was the solu-tion for healing racial divisions. Black Kansans beganin 1902 to champion farming as the key not only toeconomic prosperity but the answer to the “raceproblem.” Agricultural commodities markets did notdiscriminate by race—”A bushel of corn raised by anegro is worth just as much as a bushel of the samegrade raised by a white man,” Junius Groves pointedout.17 Farming came to be seen by black Kansans asthe best avenue for economic and social equality.

Beginning with the establishment of black agri-cultural operations in Kansas in the 1880s,African American farmers who had success-

fully settled claims in Kansas were periodically fea-tured in newspapers, eager to share advice and set anexample for other black agriculturists. The Nicode-mus Western Cyclone, for example, reported in June1886, “W.P. Edwards and son have one of the finestfarms in Kansas, have the largest portion of it undercultivation. They know how to make farming pay. Ifyou wish to know how they do it, make a visit to theirfarm, and the broad acres of wheat, rye and corn,with only two hands, and one good team to work onthe farm will show the results.”18

As black farmers became more entrenched in theensuing decade, the press increasingly publicizedtheir efforts. In February 1900 the Topeka Mail andBreeze profiled nine eastern Kansas farmers in an ar-ticle entitled, “Colored Men Who are Growing Richon Kansas Farms.” Junius G. Groves, the Ed-wardsville stockman and grower of potatoes, onions,

17. Kansas City Star, May 17, 1910.18. Western Cyclone (Nicodemus), June 17, 1886.

HOEING THEIR OWN ROW 205

with whom I conversed at Kansas City, Wyandotte,and Nicodemus, express the same opinion; that theyshould be put on to land, given a start, and then letalone to work or starve. If left in towns, they say, theywill become lazy and demoralized, and in a littletime utterly worthless.”21 Settlers worried about thefuture of their youth in more populous areas ofKansas, as rural communities established more stableagricultural bases. The Topeka American Citizenlamented in 1888 that among “the young coloredmen of Topeka, in a general way . . . there seems to bea woeful lack of genuine manhood. They are beingswithout aims or purposes, save frollicking and hav-ing a good time generally. Now we have no objectionto young men occasionally assembling for the pur-pose of amusing themselves, provided that suchamusements tend toward mental and moral im-provement. But a sporting and merry-making thatcontinue from January to January is too much time tobe spent in that way.”22 An editorial in the HistoricTimes, a black newspaper published in Lawrence,was more direct in its concern for the unemploymentand laziness it saw in African American youth not oc-

cupied by rural industry.It published this entreatyto “Our Young Men” in1891:

More care must be givento our boys. The citiesare hot-beds of vice andimmorality; it is lamenta-ble to see such large mul-titudes of young men lol-ling through the streets

and thorough fares of Lawrence. . . . Young men,quit hording on street corners, pull off your silkhats and tooth pick shoes: go to work, learn sometrade, respect your mother and sister and get yourknoledge [sic] box fixed up.23

Suspicion that the city was no place for youngpeople strengthened in 1899 when early reportsclaimed that the 1900 federal census, when pub-lished, would prove “Progress in the Country andPoverty in the Large Cities” for black Americans.Census officials had been collecting data nationwidethat “will show the progress which the colored racehas made in accumulating property, and especiallyfarm property,” and reports predicted that “the cen-sus of 1900 will reverse the showing of 1890, and re-veal the fact that . . . the colored farmer is makingconsiderable progress, while his brother in the largecities is making very little, if any.” A census officialwas quoted in 1899 as saying, “If the race makes itshome among the farms, we may expect something ofthis continued progress. The deterioration of the col-ored man in the large cities seems to be established bythe assessment figures for realty in those cities.”24

21. Quote in U.S. Department of the Interior, Promised Land on theSolomon: Black Settlement at Nicodemus, Kansas (Washington, D.C.: Gov-ernment Printing Office, 1986), 60.

22. American Citizen (Topeka), January 11, 1888.23. Historic Times (Lawrence), July 11, 1891.24. Plaindealer (Topeka), November 10, 1899.

206 KANSAS HISTORY

By 1881 twelve agricultural coloniesin Kansas had been established byblack farmers. Here the John Sumnerfamily poses at its farmstead in Dun-lap, Morris County, 1880s.

In Kansas the success of black farming coupledwith the interpretation of the 1900 census reportmarked a beginning to the serious promotion of blackagriculture. Outspoken black Kansas farmers wereconvinced that agriculture was the key to an eco-nomically prosperous and morally virtuous life forblack Kansans. Junius Groves maintained, “The ne-gro can make more money with the same amount ofwork on the farm than he can in town and he will behappier and better for it.” Based on his own experi-ence as a newcomer to Kansas, Groves argued thatfarming had the added advantage of being a relative-ly easy career to enter.

Any negro who wants to can get out on the farm.All he needs to do is to make the change. . . . If heshows to the farmer and the neighbors that he isindustrious and honest and wants to do some-thing for himself, the way will be easy for him. Hewill have no trouble renting a little piece of land.The farmers will lend him their teams and toolsand advance the seed and take their pay when thecrop is harvested. I know of dozens of negroeswho have done and are doing this. . . . It takes onlya year or two for the negro’s share of the crops tobe sufficient for him to buy his own teams andtools and a little later he can buy a little land of hisown. All the capital any negro needs to get a starton the farm is his hands, a willingness to work anda determination to be honest.25

A willingness and determination to farm, accord-ing to some black Kansans, were the means for re-forming city loafers and frolickers into hard-work-ing, upstanding leaders, a conviction that ThomasJefferson had asserted one century earlier. “The mobsof great cities,” he wrote in 1785, “add just so much tothe support of pure government, as sores do to thestrength of the human body.” Jefferson had idealizedthe American farmer, insisting, “Those who labour inthe earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he hada chosen people. . . . While we have land to labourthen, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied ata workbench, or twirling a distaff.”26

Black Kansas farmers’ belief, then, that a coun-try life was more virtuous and prosperousthan city living was certainly not a new phi-

losophy. The agricultural historian David Danbomhas argued that the idea of the virtuous yeomanfarmer as model citizen “was well articulated in theancient world,” had taken root in America with theyoung nation’s earliest generation of leaders, and“thrived, drawing intellectual sustenance” from suchpolitical and literary thinkers as Jefferson and HenryDavid Thoreau.27 In the eighteenth century the agrar-ian myth espoused the superiority of the economical-ly and politically independent American farmer overdebauched, aristocratic life in Europe. Writers such asBenjamin Franklin sought to interpret the new inde-pendent society that was evolving in terms of theabundant land in America awaiting settlement. Theselate-eighteenth-century pundits, observed historianHenry Nash Smith, upheld “the doctrines that agri-culture is the only source of real wealth; that everyman has a natural right to land; that labor expendedin cultivating the earth confers a valid title to it; thatthe ownership of land, by making the farmer inde-pendent, gives him social status and dignity, whileconstant contact with nature in the course of hislabors makes him virtuous and happy.”28 A centurylater black Kansas farmers also would subscribe tothese doctrines of land ownership and agriculturalpre-eminence.

Romantic agrarianism turned westward duringthe mid-nineteenth century as Americans embracedthe legend of the vast American West “as an uncom-plicated, untainted Eden of social simplicity andmoral clarity.” To an eastern society unsettled by theadvent of cities, factories, and the social ills of the In-dustrial Revolution, the mythic West represented thegarden they believed America once had been.29 A re-vival of romantic agrarianism resurged at the adventof the twentieth century for reasons, Danbom argued,that “had little to do with rural America and much to

25. “Negro Clippings,” vol. 6, 77–79; Kansas City Star, May 17, 1910.26. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral

Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 124–25.

27. David B. Danbom, “Romantic Agrarianism in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica,” Agricultural History 65 (Fall 1991): 1.

28. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol andMyth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 125–26.

29. Paul S. Boyer et al., eds., The Enduring Vision: A History of the Amer-ican People, vol. 2 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1996), xlv, 565.

HOEING THEIR OWN ROW 207

208 KANSAS HISTORY

Kansas farms, two compatible Amer-ican philosophies—traditional “ro-mantic” agrarianism and the promo-tion of vocational education forAfrican Americans by Booker T.Washington—converged into anagrarian ideal for black Kansans.

A former slave and principal of Al-abama’s Tuskegee Normal and In-dustrial Institute, Washington hadachieved national prominence when,in the fall of 1895, he delivered anopening address at the Cotton Statesand International Exposition in At-lanta. In his “Atlanta Compromise”

Washington proposed to build a new South basedupon agricultural and industrial cooperation be-tween the races, calling upon each African Americanmetaphorically to “cast down your bucket where youare. . . . Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, incommerce, in domestic service, and in the profes-sions,” Washington urged. “No race can prosper till itlearns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field asin writing a poem.”31

Washington supported a variety of industrial vo-cations for African Americans, among which he con-sidered farming and rural land ownership “of funda-mental importance” to the stability and prosperity ofblack society. Washington urged black southerners toremain on rural farms, and he viewed the black mi-gration to cities with alarm, believing that “the Negrowas at his worst” in urban America. Farms bred peo-ple of wealth and recognition, and he encouraged

30. Danbom, “Romantic Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century Ameri-ca,” 2–3.

31. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Carol Pub-lishing Group, University Books, 1993), 218–25.

do with social and economic changes extrinsic toagriculture. . . . When they spoke of what rural lifehad to offer, advocates of a return to the land alwayspointedly contrasted it with urban ills and impliedthat rural living would allow a restoration or recap-ture of a free and natural existence that had beenlost.”30

Within this agrarian context, black farmersstridently desired their own land and theeconomic independence that accompa-

nied it. Their pursuit of an autonomous agrarian liv-ing served to redefine black American agriculturalsociety after the Civil War from the anonymity,poverty, and brutality of an agrarian slave past to anew ideal, one encompassing private ownership,preservation of family, economic security, and inde-pendence. By the late nineteenth century, when morethan thirty-seven hundred black farmers owned

Children of black farmers were encouragedto follow in their parents' agrarian footsteps.As sons and daughters inherited homesteadssuccessfully claimed by their ancestors, blackagricultural communities continued into theearly twentieth century.

fessional work[,] should go to the country[,] buyland or rent it[,] become producers as well as con-sumers—then will come peace, respect, content-ment and happiness for the race.34

Initially other Kansans imitated Booker T. Wash-ington in their promotion of industrial education, en-couraging African Americans to strengthen all blackprofessions in general by learning a trade. “The racecannot have successful Negro bankers, lawyers, mer-chants and its compliment of clerks, unless there arefarmers, blacksmiths and mechanics to furnish aclientage,” read a Plaindealer editorial in January1899. “There is as much honor being a first-classfarmer, carpenter or blacksmith as there is being alawyer, doctor or preacher, and a blamed sight moremoney and independence in either.”35 But by thesummer of 1900 a subtle shift in priorities was evi-dent. African American Kansans began to emphasizeagriculture, elevating first-class farmers above practi-tioners of other occupations. Black business leadersin Topeka proposed the need for an organization,“for its purpose the inducing of intelligent and in-dustrious Negroes to come to Kansas and settle onfarms, and the devising of ways to aid them get astart.”36 Inherent in the desire to organize a localleague of black businessmen was the notion, born ofa fusion between agrarianism and the promotion ofindustrial education, that such an organizationshould persuade African Americans to farm inKansas. A “Negro Commercial Club” was subse-quently organized in Topeka in June 1900, and theTopeka Plaindealer gleefully wrote, “This will be amost excellent opportunity for the Negroes of Kansasto show to the world what we have accomplishedsince the exodusters of 1879 were fed by charity in thebarracks of North Topeka.” A similar Negro BusinessMen’s League was organized in Kansas City with thehelp of Junius Groves, and the black communityproudly proclaimed that Kansas City had organizedits league before Booker T. Washington had coordi-nated his own.37

African Americans to own farmland on which to cul-tivate a basis for commercial entrepreneurial prosper-ity.32 “Agriculture has not infrequently served as anentrance for members of the Negro race into busi-ness,” he wrote in Negro in Business, published in1907. “It is probable that in the present time there isno medium through which a large number of theNegro race can so quickly and easily acquire notmerely economic independence but the capital whichopens the door to business and the larger administra-tive tasks, as in agriculture.” In the first two chaptersof his book, Washington celebrated the achievementsand entrepreneurial spirit of southern farmers, andhe praised Kansas farmer Junius Groves, on whosecareer he devoted an entire chapter, as a model ofblack success.33

Echoing both Booker T. Washington and ThomasJefferson’s writings on yeomanry, Leavenworth,Kansas, attorney and political activist William BoldenTownsend advanced the theory in 1901 that farmingwas the best solution, economically and morally, forhis fellow black Kansans. His message embodied theconvergence of romantic agrarianism and trade edu-cation boosterism.

My observations have taught me that the con-stant drift of our people to the cities is one of thegreatest evils which now threatens the race. Inorder to exist on this continent, we must be landowners and agriculturists, for the land owners re-gardless of space are bound to control and dictatethe destiny of this republic. I do not wish to be un-derstood that the race should confine its vocationsentirely to farming; because I am one of those whobelieve that the Negro should pursue any andevery avocations [sic] that is profitable to any otherman. . . .

[But] unless the majority of us turn our atten-tion to the farm, city life will not only prove acurse to us but will reduce us to a more dependentpeople than we now are. . . .

The young men of the race, particularly thosewho possess no special training for skilled or pro-

32. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideolo-gies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1964), 105.

33. Booker T. Washington, Negro in Business (1907; reprint, NewYork: AMS Press, 1971), 21, 27–28, 299.

34. Topeka Plaindealer, May 17, 1901.35. Plaindealer, January 6, 1899.36. Topeka Plaindealer, June 15, 1900.37. Ibid., June 29, 1900.

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Their efforts were aided in the next year byWilliam R. Carter, principal of the Topeka IndustrialInstitute, nicknamed the “Western Tuskegee.” Whilehis institute offered preparation for a wide variety oftrade vocations, Carter appealed for special fundingto purchase farmland for the institute. “More andmore does the necessity of purchasing a farm becomeevident,” he argued.

This is one of the best agricultural states, and weshould give the boys and girls better opportunitiesto learn scientific farming, horticulture, stock-rais-ing and dairying. This institution should seek togive such training as will result in creating an in-fluence that will keep the masses of the negro racein the rural districts. . . . Think of the many thou-sand acres of fine Kansas soil that await the tillageof the intelligent negro farmer. It is our duty to se-cure a farm and prepare for young men andwomen without delay.38

Having prepared the ground to instill the ideathat farming was the superior economic and moraloccupation for black Kansans, leaders began in 1902to sow the notion that farming was the solution to the“race problem.” An editorial in the Topeka Plaindealeroutlined specifically how Kansas’s “Negro FarmersCan Solve the Problem.”

38. Topeka Daily Capital, November 10, 1901.

39. Topeka Plaindealer, June 27, 1902; Topeka Daily Capital, June 27,1902.

40. Topeka Plaindealer, April 17, 1903.

Suppose we had in Shawnee county ahundred Negro farmers bringing theirproducts into our markets, depositingtheir money in our banks, and pur-chasing their supplies of our dry goodmerchants, grocermen, etc., how longwould it be before a Negro clerkwould be found in every bank, andbusiness house in this city? Not long.Why would they be put there? Be-cause the trade and business of these

Negro farmers would be worth seeking. The whiteman’s love for the mighty dollar will outweigh hisprejudice against a black skin. Through this meansthe Negro farmer will solve the problem. His work[will] open the doors of the factory, the machine-shop, the bank and the business house to theNegro boy and girl. Thus the Negro farmer leavesa heritage to the race, remunerative, enobling, in-spiring.39

Nicodemus-area farmer George W. Jones agreed:“If you want to solve the ‘race question,’ get out of thecities—get on the farms, where you can rear strong,healthy, robust children—where you can own horsesand cattle, bank accounts—become taxpayers, andthe question is solved,” he advised. “Don’t say youhaven’t the money and are unable to come. It will bebut a short while before all the best land will be taken,or it will be so high that you cannot purchase it andwhen you are driven from the cities for want of em-ployment, where will you go? Prosperity is power.”40

Acampaign hailing farming for reform ad-vanced with a crusader’s zeal. Kansas blacknewspapers promulgated the agrarian ideal

in scores of feature articles and editorials over thenext two decades. Headlines routinely proclaimed

210 KANSAS HISTORY

Beginning around 1900, black leaders began pro-moting the idea that farming was the superioreconomic and moral occupation for blackKansans. "If you want to solve the ‘race ques-tion,'" urged Nicodemus farmer George Jones,"get out of the cities, get on the farms."

dation in the soil of our God, thus making the bur-den for the future generation lighter, for it is a fa-miliar principle in political economy that a peopleowning the land they live upon can with difficul-ty be cajoled or forced to leave. . . .

Why stay here, crying trade unions, foreignimmigration and race prejudice are against us, anddying like sheep with the rot, when you could justas easily take up your abode upon the fertileplains of old Kansas and there become men amongmen.43

Some black farmers saw agriculture as a welfaremission and actively worked to reform the indigentor imprisoned through work on Kansas farms. OneWyandotte County farmer, H.P. Ewing, launched theKaw Valley Truck Farm Company in 1914 to employhomeless Negroes. “The farm is the place for the peo-ple of my race,” he said. “We aim to come to KansasCity and hire our help. Men who are loafing aroundthe street corners now will be given an opportunityto earn good wages and also will be taught practicalfarming in all its branches. . . . Judge Sims of KansasCity, Kas., has promised that he will parole to ussome of the negroes sentenced for minor offenses sothat we may make better men of them.” By July 1915Ewing and forty black indigents were cultivatingcorn, tomatoes, radishes, melons, and other gardenproduce on 104 acres of Kaw River valley ground,and Ewing estimated the harvest would net twelvethousand dollars.44

Other black Kansans with altruistic and econom-ic aims continued to organize black agricultural com-munities. In 1916 wealthy farmer J.W. Thomas, alongwith other black businessmen, sought to establish asettlement of thirty families on land offered by theSanta Fe railroad in Kearny County, south of theArkansas River. Their plans attracted the interest ofblack farmers as far away as Texas.45 The ColoredPeople’s Home Effort, an organization headquar-tered in Strong City, chartered a black settlement in1921 “to promote the material and moral well-beingof the colored people by encouraging and aiding

43. Topeka Plaindealer, June 15, 1906.44. Kansas City Journal, May 10, 1914, in “Negro Clippings,” vol. 6,

110; Topeka State Journal, July 17, 1915, in ibid., vol. 6, 155.45. Topeka State Journal, November 10, 1915, August 7, 1916.

41. Ibid., April 17, 1903, April 27, 1906, April 21, 1916; unattributednewspaper article, “The Story of Nicodemus,” March 1910, in “NegroClippings,” vol. 5, 202.

42. “Negro Clippings,” vol. 6, 67–69; Kansas City Star, May 17, 1910.

pro-agrarian slogans similar to the 1903 banner as-serting, “The Negro’s Problem Can Only Be Solvedby the Farming Route”; the 1906 front-page headline,“A Fortune Awaits the Man Who Properly Tills HisSoil—Negroes, Get to the Farm”; or the questionprinted under the masthead in 1916, “Are You Goingto Furnish A Lazy Boy to Run the Streets This Sum-mer? Better Let Him ‘Farm’ a Few Vacant Lots.” A bu-colic newspaper report on Nicodemus observed in1910 that “The general healthfulness and contentedlives of these rural people gives strength to the argu-ment that the farm, rather than the city, is the placefor the negro.”41 Black Kansas farm leaders extolledthe ease of entry for African Americans into agricul-ture and condemned the decadence of city living.Farmers’ institutes were organized, and colonizationefforts resumed to settle black southerners on Kansasfarms.

Junius Groves strongly supported this agrarianideal. His clout extended far beyond Edwardsville,and as president of the Kansas Negro Farmers’ Asso-ciation and the State Negro Business League and as amember of Booker T. Washington’s National BusinessLeague, he was routinely sought for advice. Grovescontended that agriculture best offered an egalitarianlivelihood and was fundamental in resolving racialdiscrimination, both in earning power and access toentrepreneurial opportunities. “There is no race prej-udice on the farm,” he explained. “The soil is thereand it is just as easy for the negro to get his livingfrom it as it is for the white man.”42

Groves’s son Charles, a graduate of the KansasState Agricultural College in Manhattan, also was avocal supporter of the agrarian ideal. In an impas-sioned speech before the People’s Forum in KansasCity, Kansas, in 1906, he urged fellow black youth toleave the cities for the morality, the freedom, and themanhood that farming could provide:

My prayer to God is, that while we are yet youngand full of vim and vigor, we will not lose an op-portunity until we have established a solid foun-

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them to engage in farming and agriculture.” Smallfarms and tracts of land for truck gardens were madeavailable “for settlement and purchase by negroesdesiring homes in Kansas. . . . Agriculture, horticul-ture and stock raising will be encouraged.”46

Within the agrarian community, black Kansasfarmers promoted agriculture at farmers’ instituteswhere they made personal contacts, forged businessrelationships, and discussed improvements in farmtechnology and methods. Statewide conventions of“colored farmers,” such as those sponsored by theTopeka Industrial Institute and the Sunflower StateAgricultural Association, enabled black Kansans tocongregate annually to hear presentations and share

expertise. Twenty-eight men and women farmerspresented programs at the December 1914 conven-tion, offering seminars as diverse as “Making Farm-ing Pay,” “Growing a Thousand Acres of Wheat,”and a swine symposium conducted by a six-memberpanel. Later conventions held workshops on pressingissues such as “Holding the Young People to theFarm,” and “Sticking to a Western Kansas Claim.”The conventions were reportedly well attended andimbued a county fair-like atmosphere. Following anannual meeting in 1909, a Topeka newspaper report-ed, “Negro Farmers In Kansas Are Growing Enthusi-astic!” and cheered, “Keep on, Sunflower Agricultur-ist; open the eye of the colored brother in the city;wake him, shake him up.”47

While the total farm acreage owned by blackKansans increased between 1900 and 1920, the num-ber of individual farms owned by black Kansans de-clined each decade between 1900 and 1930. In 1900African Americans operated 1,782 Kansas farms; by1930 black ownership had dropped to 941 farms.48

Total acreage farmed remained fairly stable through-out the early nineteenth century but decreased by1930:

TOTAL ACREAGEFARMED BY BLACK KANSANS49

1900 173,614 acres1910 183,4531920 176,6571930 146,745

Despite the concerted efforts of black Kansas farmersto recruit more of their own and following nearlythirty years of media prescriptives promoting theagrarian ideal, it appears that fewer black farmerswere able to continue viable agricultural operationsinto the 1930s, and those who could required addi-

212 KANSAS HISTORY

46. Ibid., June 16, 1921.

47. Ibid., December 9, 1914; Topeka Daily Capital, December 8, 1915;Topeka Plaindealer, January 22, 1909.

48. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negroes inthe United States 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1935), 570; Department of Commerce, Negro Population, 514, 589, 592–93.

49. Department of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 570; ibid.,Negro Population, 514, 589, 592–93.

In 1900 African Americans operated 1,782 Kansas farms, but by1930 black ownership had dropped to 941. Although the Great De-pression of the 1930s witnessed a further decline in black popula-tions, black-owned farms in Kansas continue to the present day, someoperated by descendants of their founders.

tional acreage. More research is needed to interpretthe decrease in black farm ownership in context withthe promotion of an agricultural ideal among blackKansans in the early twentieth century. Certainly thestruggle to protect agricultural livelihoods from nat-ural disasters, tumultuous markets, and a shift fromrural to urban residences prior to the Great Depres-sion of the 1930s continued for farmers of all ethnicextractions. Initially it appears, however, that by ad-vising black Kansans to remain in rural areas and en-gage in farming, well-intentioned spokesmen maynot have foreseen that a growing reliance on more so-phisticated methods and expensive farm machineryplaced poorer black farmers at an even greater disad-vantage to compete, particularly so in a depressedeconomy. They also may have failed to recognize thatcities, with varied economic opportunities and in-comparable social, cultural, and intellectual advan-tages, were perhaps more attractive to many blackKansans than an idealistic agrarian life.50

Kansas newspapers in the 1930s decreasedtheir promotion of agriculture as an econom-ic and social panacea, as farm failures and

rural economic depression dealt blows to black andwhite farmers alike. Articles such as the 1934 Concor-dia Kansan reminiscence “When Nicodemus Was [A]Thriving Village,” spoke of success in retrospect andlamented the “faded glory” of black farming commu-nities.51 Henry Clay Wilson of Topeka, like other suc-cessful black Kansans in the 1930s, once had been afarmer but had “retired” from agriculture in the earlyyears of the Great Depression, leaving his truck farmin eastern Shawnee County to better his fortunes incommerce. In 1937 the Topeka Daily Capital applaudedhis philanthropy and entrepreneurial achievementsin the railroad hospitality industry; his earlier tradesas a Topeka barber and a farmer each merited onlyone sentence.52 A 1935 U.S. census report on agricul-ture confirmed, “The data . . . conclusively show thatas farm owners, tenants, and managers, Negroes con-

stitute an appreciable but diminishing national asset.While Negro farmers, like those of most racialgroups, materially decreased in number during thedecade 1920–1930, their fields of operation have beenwidely extended throughout the States.”53

Although black population in Kansas declinedduring the depression and continued to constitute aminority percentage of farm ownership, some blackagricultural operations nevertheless endured. Black-owned farms continue to the present day, some oper-ated by descendants of their founders. The Bradshawfamily of Hodgeman County farmed its homesteadclaim for more than one hundred years, and rem-nants of the original dugout are still visible near Jet-more.54 Tales of early Nicodemus pioneers’ grit andtenacity were passed down with family farms toyounger generations. Versella Bates, a Nicodemusfarmer, recalled in 1993, “When I was growing up,there were still those dugouts and sod houses all overthe prairie. My grandparents thought that living in ahole in the ground was all right because it was awhole lot better than being in those places wherethey were slaves.” A neighbor, Ora Switzer ofNicodemus, remarked, “See that field over there? Iwas born in a sod house out in that field [in 1903]. Iraised six good kids and a husband out here on thisprairie. We farmed forty acres, raised corn, cattle,hogs, chickens. I made my own lard and could can600 quarts of beets for the winter. We were never hun-gry a day. Life was fun. Still is.”55

Through the 1920s the agrarian ideal was be-lieved to offer the best answer to racial injustices inemployment and opportunity for black Kansans. Themedia, local agricultural leaders, farmers’ institutes,and colonization organizations vigorously cam-paigned in support of agriculture. While this idealmay have been primarily prescriptive rather than de-scriptive, it served to celebrate the gains blackKansans achieved in agriculture and the enduringfarm operations they cultivated in the history of thestate.

50. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Free-dom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,1994), 276.

51. Concordia Kansan, June 28, 1934.52. Topeka Daily Capital, May 30, 1937.

53. Department of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 570.54. Historic Sites Survey, Historic Preservation in Kansas, 12.55. Daniel Chu and Bill Shaw, Going Home to Nicodemus (Morris-

town, N.J.: J. Messner, 1994), 39, 68.

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