People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [173]
A People’s party nominating convention in Omaha in July of 1892 nominated James Weaver, an Iowa Populist and former general in the Union army, for President. The Populist movement was now tied to the voting system. Their spokesman Polk had said they could “link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people.” Weaver got over a million votes, but lost.
A new political party had the job of uniting diverse groups—northern Republicans and southern Democrats, urban workers and country farmers, black and white. A Colored Farmers National Alliance grew in the South and had perhaps a million members, but it was organized and led by whites. There were also black organizers, but it was not easy for them to persuade black farmers that, even if economic reforms were won, blacks would have equal access to them. Blacks had tied themselves to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and civil rights laws. The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation. As Goodwyn puts it, “in an era of transcendent white prejudice, the curbing of ‘vicious corporate monopoly’ did not carry for black farmers the ring of salvation it had for white agrarians.”
There were whites who saw the need for racial unity. One Alabama newspaper wrote:
The white and colored Alliance are united in their war against trusts, and in the promotion of the doctrine that farmers should establish cooperative stores, and manufactures, and publish their own newspapers, conduct their own schools, and have a hand in everything else that concerns them as citizens or affects them personally or collectively.
The official newspaper of the Alabama Knights of Labor, the Alabama Sentinel, wrote: “The Bourbon Democracy are trying to down the Alliance with the old cry ‘nigger’. It won’t work though.”
Some Alliance blacks made similar calls for unity. A leader of the Florida Colored Alliance said: “We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man’s interests and the laboring white man’s interest are one and the same.”
When the Texas People’s party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial, and radical. There was blunt and vigorous debate among whites and blacks. A black delegate, active in the Knights of Labor, dissatisfied with vague statements about “equality,” said:
If we are equal, why does not the sheriff summon Negroes on juries? And why hang up the sign “Negro”, in passenger cars. I want to tell my people what the People’s Party is going to do. I want to tell them if it is going to work a black and white horse in the same field.
A white leader responded by urging there be a black delegate from every district in the state. “They are in the ditch just like we are.” When someone suggested there be separate white and black Populist clubs which would “confer together,” R. M. Humphrey, the white leader of the Colored Alliance, objected: “This will not do. The colored people are part of the people and they must be recognized as such.” Two blacks were then elected to the state executive committee of the party.
Blacks and whites were in different situations. The blacks were mostly field hands, hired laborers; most white Alliance people were farm owners. When the Colored Alliance declared a strike in the cotton fields in 1891 for a dollar a day wages for cotton pickers, Leonidas Polk, head of the white Alliance, denounced it as hurting the Alliance farmer who would have to pay that wage. In Arkansas, a thirty-year-old black cotton picker named Ben Patterson led the strike, traveling from plantation to plantation to get support, his band growing, engaging in gun battles with a white posse. A plantation manager was killed, a cotton gin burned. Patterson and his band were caught, and fifteen of them were shot to death.
There was some black-white unity at the ballot box in the South—resulting in a few blacks