Alliance, Divided

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re spending the hour today exploring the history of populism in America.

Now, if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supposedly carry the torch for modern day populism, as Chuck Todd of Meet the Press declared this summer–

CHUCK TODD: They are surging in the polls thanks to two very different strains of a classical American political movement– populism.

ED: The two candidates also carry the torch for a particular aspect of populism.

MALE SPEAKER: Sanders’ supporters are likely to be white. Trump’s supporters are also more likely to be white.

ED: This is a longstanding trend, and most Americans today who know anything about 19th century populism probably think of it as a white movement. But historian Omar Ali says that African Americans had their own populist movement– the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Black populism developed in the South after the failure of reconstruction. And when black farmers and sharecroppers later joined forces with poor whites, they created a movement that almost upended Southern politics.

MALE SPEAKER: It was an independent black political movement that lasts over the course of basically 1886 to about 1900. What they did is they basically built off of institutions that were created during Reconstruction– the black church, mutual aid organizations, fraternal orders. So they basically want to teach better farming techniques, better household maintenance.

ED: So they’re helping themselves rather than asking or demanding something from white people.

OMAR ALI: That’s right. That’s right. They’re helping themselves. And in some ways, they were very self-conscious and deliberate in not being demanding of anybody except themselves, because at a basic level, it was a way of keeping themselves protected from attacks. Just the fact black people coming together as an independent grouping could be seen– and was seen, at times– as a threat.

ED: So the populism both of white and black takes a long time to marinate, grows up in the South in the 1870s and 1880s, as you’re telling us. But then they realize as they’re going to accomplish some of the things they want to accomplish, they’re going to have to enter the political world, right?

OMAR ALI: That’s right. By 1890, it becomes clear that this self-help strategy can only take you so far. There’s only so much that we can do, black people are saying, cooperatively within our own communities. They said, OK, let’s work with these white populace and see if we can challenge the Democratic Party in the South.

The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln. It was the party that African Americans mostly affiliated with. So in some ways, there were these fusions that took place– African Americans working in the Republican Party in alliance with the People’s Party. And that’s what happens in North Carolina, is they basically are able to take over government, which was extraordinary.

The state legislature in 1894 and then the governors in 1896, they try to institute some things– funding for public education. They get rid of or they try to get rid of certain obstacles in terms of the voting process. But it’s a really short period that they’re really in power.

ED: Who opposed that? That sounds great.

OMAR ALI: The Democratic Party. It was the party of white supremacy, but it was the party of the upper class’s interests. And so poor and working class white people joined for this very brief moment with African Americans to oppose that politic.

ED: So they do this remarkable thing– they fuse, they unify, they win. And then what happens?

OMAR ALI: So they take over, and this was seen as an incredible threat to the status quo, and the white establishment would not allow this to be repeated. So soon thereafter, there’s a coup d’etat, essentially, in 1898. The local government in Wilmington, North Carolina has a violent overthrow of the government there. They basically intimidated and threatened elected officials to either resign or they just killed them.

It was called a riot, the Wilmington Riot of 1898, but really, it was a massacre and an attack on the black community. And it signals the end of block populism in North Carolina, although black populism continues in other places, like in Texas, for a couple more years. But basically, the story is all but over in North Carolina in 1898.

ED: So what you’re saying is it’s not that populism had this streak of intolerance or intrinsic failure as much as it was a threat to the people who ran things. And they were just determined that you wouldn’t have an alliance of poor people across racial lines.

OMAR ALI: That’s right. That’s right. I think what we learn by studying this period is that history can go in different directions. And there are these very moving moments of African Americans working with poor white people who were Confederate soldiers, and they respected each other to some degree on the ground.

And those efforts to try to bring poor people together across the racial divide were killed off by propaganda, by violence. And I think that it’s helpful to think of these movements as part of deep underground wells of democracy, if you will, that every once in awhile come out of the ground. And this was one of those moments. And it would continue in the South. It wasn’t completely killed off.

ED: And I think that these are some of the tributaries that flow into the Civil Rights Movement, which is also if you try to think of things that seem unlikely in American history– that the people who had the least political power and had been at the brunt of all this violence somehow find it within themselves to mobilize for the greatest moral revolution in American history. I think there’s a direct connection to the civil rights struggle.

OMAR ALI: This is what you see. Jim Crow, the concept of legal disfranchisement and segregation of African Americans, is a direct response to populism. It’s really, in some ways, trying to make sure that never again will we have black people and white people come together in the political arena. And so I think that there’s more opportunities to learn about possibilities by looking at these failed movements.

This was a movement that clearly failed at that moment, and there was a lot of fear, and so it went really underground.

ED: Omar Ali is a historian at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and author of In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886 to 1900.