Colored Farmers Alliance and Populism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Nathan posted the following from
<http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/4275/part1.html>:
>Preliminary research for writing a history of the
>Colored Farmers Alliance in the Populist movement: 1886-1896
>
>By Omar Ali
>May 11, 1998
>Department of History
>Columbia University
<snip>
>Despite the mutual support of various goals of the Colored Farmers Alliance
>and the Southern Farmers Alliance, William F. Holmes (see below) warns that
>it would be a mistake to consider the Colored Farmers Alliance an adjunct of
>the Southern Alliance. Sometimes their positions differed sharply, as they
>revealed in a clash over the Lodge Election Bill, known by the Democratic
>and Republican Parties as the "Force Bill." This bill proposed federal
>protection to safeguard voting rights of African-Americans in the South. The
>Southern Alliance unanimously condemned the Lodge Bill, but the Colored
>Farmers Alliance strongly endorsed it, knowing full well that Federal
>intervention could only help, not hurt them.
>
>The two Alliances sometimes took different positions on economic issues: in
>1891 officials of the Colored Farmers Alliance called for a cotton pickers
>strike, which the Southern Alliance denounced. But it was on issues where
>whites used their power to keep Blacks in economic and political subjugation
>that a deep division appeared between the two alliances. Ultimately,
>conflicts stemming from such issues contributed not only to the demise of
>the Colored Farmers Alliance but, arguably, the entire Populist movement.
<snip>

And on the next page:
*****   Racism and its Consequences

While Black and white farmers shared many of the same economic burdens,
systemic racism, and its consequences, however, distinguished the
experience of all Black farmers from all white farmers.

With upwards of ninety percent of the African-American population at the
end of the 19th century living in the South, Black men, now with suffrage
guaranteed under the 14th and 15th Amendments, were sought out for their
vote. The Republican Party had come to expect African-American votes, given
the Democratic Party's openly racist appeals to the white community. Being
part of a minor party, white Populists, seeing an opportunity to enhance
their votes, naturally embraced the African-American vote.

However, the segregated nature of the Colored Farmers Alliance from the
Southern and Northern Alliance may have helped to exacerbate the already
fundamental racial divisions within that Southern society -- which
explains, in part, how former white sympathizers (from Tom Watson on down)
turned against the African-American community. Those pre-existing divisions
were, moreover, further deepened through the legal disenfranchisement of
African-American men. Thus, it can be easily argued that the Populist
movement's inability to transcend their own racism may have been one of the
fundamental reasons why it did not succeed.   *****

Omar Ali's paper provides evidence that white populists' inability to fully
embrace and fight for racial equality is one of the important causes that
doomed their struggles.  Further, I think that an effective anti-racist
struggle requires a communist movement, in that as long as workers suffer
from the necessity to compete in the labor market, without seeing a
possibility to end such competition for jobs, it is probably impossible to
prevent competition from being seen as a racial one.  Communism is a
necessary though not sufficient condition for the abolition of racism.

Yoshie