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The Populist movement was a revolt by farmers in the South and Midwest against the Democratic and Republican Parties for ignoring their interests and difficulties. For over a decade, farmers were suffering from crop failures, falling prices, poor marketing, and lack of credit facilities. Many farmers were in debt due to a drought that affected the Midwest in the 1880s. At the same time, prices for Southern cotton dropped. These disasters, combined with resentment against railroads, money-lenders, grain-elevator owners, and others with whom farmers did business, led farmers to organize.
As a result, two organizations came into existence during this period: the segregated National Farmers' Alliance and the Colored Farmers' Alliance. Although they came to win some significant regional victories, the alliances achieved little influence on a national scale. By the 1890s, agrarian reformers refocused their energies and organized the new Populist, or People's Party. The Party called upon the federal government to buffer economic depressions, regulate banks and corporations, and help farmers who were suffering hard times.
In 1892 the Populist presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, won more than 1,000,000 popular votes. The party elected several members to Congress, three governors, and hundreds of minor officials and legislators, nearly all in the Midwest. In the South, they challenged white supremacy by forming coalitions with black farmers in common cause. The coalitions won a number of elections in certain areas and captured the state of North Carolina in 1896 under the leadership of Marion Butler.
In Georgia, Tom Watson led the Populist revolt against the Democratic Party. Watson appealed to rural black voters by promising to respect their political and civil rights. Watson organized picnics, barbecues, and camp meetings and formed political clubs for blacks. But political cooperation did not mean socializing; blacks and whites sat separately when together. Yet that did not prevent them from cheering wildly when Watson spoke of their common plight: "You are made to hate each other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded because you do not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars you both. The colored tenant is in the same boat as the white tenant, the colored laborer with the white laborer and that the accident of color can make no difference in the interests of farmers, croppers and laborers."
Using fraud and violence, and rallying support by appealing to white supremacy, the Democrats held on to their power in Georgia and other Southern states. Many Democrats refused to endanger white supremacy by voting against the Democratic Party. In 1896 the Populists fused into the Democratic Party. With the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and with the Democrats successfully launching white unity campaigns in the South, the Populists gradually disappeared as a political force.
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Populist Party | PBS
Between the collapse of Reconstruction and the consolidation of Jim Crow, African American farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers across the South created a movement of their own: Black Populism. It was the largest independent black political movement in the South until the rise of the modern civil rights movement. Among its leaders were Walter A. Pattillo of North Carolina, Henry S. Doyle of Georgia, John B. Rayner of Texas, Lutie A. Lytle of Kansas, and George Washington Murray of South Carolina. The movement’s two principal organizations were the Colored Farmers Alliance (1886-1891) and the People’s Party (1891-1900).
Black Populism in the New South - Global and Comparative African Diaspora HistoryGlobal and Comparative African Diaspora History
The Colored Farmers Alliance, while being segregated from the broader Southern and Northern Alliances, was integrally related to the farmer-led movement which came to be known as the Populist movement.
African-American and white farmers had come to realize that independent political action was necessary to achieve their economic ends. As Black farmers grew increasingly disillusioned with the Colored Farmers Alliance program of self-help, the consideration of politics as a more viable solution developed amongst the rank and file of the organization and the African-American leadership of the Colored Farmers Alliance expressed at both state and nationally held conventions.
Together with a number of industrial and agrarian-based organizations, including the Southern and Northern Alliances, the Colored Farmers Alliance formed the independent People's Party in 1891. The Party actually won a number of state governments in the South between 1892 and 1896. There were, however, precedents that helped create an awareness of such electoral political action as a potent reform force for Black and white farmers -- notably the Agricultural Wheel, the Louisiana's Farmers Union, and the Greenback-Labor campaigns of the 1870's and 1880's. That is, the formation of an independent third party was not a sudden aberration but the culmination of a pattern of agrarian protest which had existed since the days of Reconstruction.3
Colored Farmers Alliance Populists
Francis Simkins, writing on the deteriorating conditions of the late 1890s, put it well in his 1947 History of the South: “Populist principles . . . proved less fundamental to Southern farmers than their inherited aversion to Negro rule.” Though few black Alliancemen were involved in the Reconstructionist Republican legislatures referred to, they nonetheless bore the brunt of a white conservative backlash against blacks asserting their new freedoms in any way, shape or form. Black Alliancemen (really, African-Americans in general) were forced to operate within an untenable set of conditions. On one side they had the Democrats: who had only just begun their tyrannical campaign to re-establish white supremacy via any means necessary. On the other side they had the Populists: who were abandoning the black farmers in droves on the general stereotypical charge that it was manipulation of Negro votes that had lost them every election since 1890. That Southern Democrats, having fully utilized said manipulation of black voters in order to help defeat Populism only to then strip blacks and poor whites via the cultural tragedy of Jim Crow, is of course a hypocritical record with few equals in our history. Yet it’s an equal let-down that Southern Populists were implicit in this societal reversal. The late ‘80s / early ‘90s, when most any measure of systemic reform seemed possible—when political rights for black farmers was desirable, the Colored Alliance a worthy ally at the polls—was on the eve of 1896 a thing of the past. Into the void poured the natural inclination towards white-on-black bigotry inherent of the day. . . . . It’s the promise that Populism once advanced having simply collapsed on such primal hatred and fear that makes many want to disregard the movement in its entirety. It’s not hard to see why many historians allowed reactions, however well-supported intellectually, to write off the early record of Populism in lieu of the widespread “Jew-baiting,” “xenophobia,” and later “Negrophobia,” that would create a withered hate-filled corpse of the movement by 1900.
The Rise & Fall of Southern Populism / Part III: 1893-1896
