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A woman holding a placard that reads “We demand justice and freedom for Archbishop Stepinac and the Croatian People” at a protest against the incarceration of Croatian archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, United States, circa 1946. (FPG / Archive Photos / Getty Images)
“The times are such that it is no longer the tongue which speaks but the blood with its mysterious links with the country,” Aloysius Stepinac, the archbishop of Zagreb and the head of the Croatian Catholic Church, wrote to his bishops on April 28, 1941. “Who can reproach us if we also, as spiritual pastors, add our contribution to the pride and rejoicing of the people, when full of devotion and warm thanks we turn to Almighty God?”
The occasion for Stepinac’s joy was the creation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH), the Independent State of Croatia, installed by the Nazis after their invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia. The NDH regime would soon become infamous for its brutality, even in the eyes of the Nazis themselves. Its persecution of Jews, Roma, and, above all, Orthodox Serbs — for whom the NDH adopted a policy of “convert a third, expel a third, and kill a third” — rivaled the crimes of any fascist regime. The most notorious NDH death camp, Jasenovac, was the third-largest in Europe during the war. More than half a million Serbs, thirty thousand Jews, and sixteen thousand Roma were murdered, while around 250,000 Serbs were expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism. The Waffen-SS, not known for its squeamishness, described the NDH’s atrocities as “bestial.”
The Croatian Catholic Church — led by Stepinac — was deeply entangled with the NDH regime. However, after it was overthrown by the communist partisans in 1945 and Stepinac was imprisoned for treason and wartime collaboration, anti-communists in the United States rebranded him as an innocent and courageous martyr. The US government soon fought for his release and began a wide, long-term campaign across the Western world on behalf of clerical fascism in the Balkans.
Neither Stepinac nor his bishops participated directly in NDH atrocities. Indeed, sometimes they objected to them and gave assistance to their victims. Objections, however, came with caveats. In a 1941 unpublished letter to NDH leader Ante Pavelić about the savagery of the forced conversion campaign in Bosnia (which was part of NDH territory), Stepinac argued that the Serbs provoked the genocidal violence that they suffered and that the real problem with mass murder was that it was “letting slip excellent opportunities which we could use for the good of Croatia and the Holy Catholic cause. From a minority we might become a majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina.” When Stepinac later argued, euphemistically, against “unjust behavior” toward Serbs and Jews in his sermons, he did so in fear that such “behavior” would drive people into the arms of the partisans (a concern that was shared by the Waffen-SS).
As Stella Alexander documents in her relatively sympathetic biography of Stepinac, he always saved his unqualified condemnations for communists; he remained polite and deferential toward Pavelić and never broke with the NDH regime; and he maintained, as late as 1944, when he was well aware of the NDH’s worst crimes against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, that the biggest victims of the war were Croats.
Stepinac was an opportunist who saw in fascism a priceless opportunity to secure his long-held desire for an independent Croatia cleansed of “schismatic Serbs.” The best things that can be said for him are that he wasn’t a murderer, he didn’t condone or take pleasure in violence, and he probably behaved no worse than many would under a fascist regime.
Stepinac was detained by the Communist authorities who took over Yugoslavia in 1945. Their leader, Josip Broz Tito, did not want to make a martyr of Stepinac and was willing to let him go free so long as he left the country. Stepinac — encouraged by the Vatican — instead chose to stay in Yugoslavia and stand trial in 1946, after which he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for treason and collaboration.
Abroad, anti-communists wasted no time in whitewashing Stepinac’s history of fascist collaboration to recast him as a victim a repression. In Ireland, the Count of Thomond, Anthony Henry O’Brien, wrote a short biography of Stepinac in 1947 arguing that he was a Christ-like victim of communist persecution. In the United States, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, embedded O’Brien’s book in the foundation stone of a new Stepinac Institute and sponsored the creation of the Archbishop Stepinac High School, which still provides secondary education in White Plains, New York.
Spellman and his allies in the US Congress began a campaign for Stepinac’s release. Subtly but forcefully, the State Department and the US embassy in Belgrade gave this campaign concrete support.
After Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform in June 1948, American diplomats were reluctant to fight for Stepinac because they were trying to court, rather than antagonize, Tito in order to deepen his break with Joseph Stalin and encourage further disunity in the Eastern Bloc. In February 1949, the US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Cavendish Cannon, warned Secretary of State Dean Acheson that, while “world conscience demands action on behalf [of] Stepinac,” the US government should “choose [the] timing and method” of any campaign for his release carefully in order “to ensure that benefits outweigh probable disadvantages.” Crucially, Cannon advised against linking the Stepinac issue to future aid programs, because this would give the impression to Tito that the United States was trying “to extort political advantages from him” while he was vulnerable and isolated from his former Soviet allies.
Acheson had written to Cannon asking for his opinion on how to respond to a House of Representatives resolution condemning the treatment of Stepinac. The House majority leader, Massachusetts Democrat John McCormack, had personally called Acheson to demand that the resolution be acted upon. While both Acheson and Cannon were initially more circumspect than the House, both the embassy and the State Department soon recognized that congressional hostility toward Yugoslavia could be useful.
In his first conversation with Tito in January 1950, Cannon’s successor as ambassador, George Allen, “took occasion to say, in all frankness, that . . . outright economic aid from US would face serious difficulties” because there was “considerable opposition in US Congress” to “subsidizing” socialistic economic polices abroad. In March and again in June, Acheson instructed Allen to keep reminding Tito that “Congress and public opinion play [an] essential role in US foreign policy” and that “religious liberty” was among their primary concerns with the Yugoslav government.
In November, the Yugoslav ambassador in Washington asked Acheson how Yugoslavia could improve its chances of receiving urgently needed food aid in the aftermath of a disastrous drought. Acheson advised that the continued detention of Stepinac made “it most difficult for many in [the] US, Catholics and non-Catholics, to support aid” to the country.
With Acheson’s cajoling, Congress approved emergency food aid for Yugoslavia in December 1950, but stingily, and only after publicly calling Tito, among other things, “an average, if unusually energetic type, of international thug,” a “declared enemy of everything America stands for,” and “as blackhearted and treacherous a Communist as Stalin himself.” In April 1951, Majority Leader McCormack and the House Speaker, Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn, told Assistant Secretary of State George Perkins that “the time was now ripe for us to proceed actively to try to get some results” on Stepinac. Perkins, in turn, instructed the embassy in Belgrade to tell Yugoslav officials that “we have no assurance that . . . the existence of the Stepinac complication might not make the difference between aid, and no aid for Yugoslavia” in the future.
This message was relayed to Tito himself in July, when George Allen organized a two-hour conference with Tito and Connecticut Democratic senator Brien McMahon. “Speaking frankly,” McMahon “wished to let Tito know that 30 million Catholics in [the] US could not remain indifferent to [the] continued imprisonment of Stepinac.” Tito reminded McMahon that he was willing to let Stepinac free as long as he left Yugoslavia — an offer that Stepinac and the Vatican refused. McMahon said they refused because “acceptance would be admission of guilt.” Tito then said that the “Pope [could] make Stepinac cardinal which [would] certainly not indicate admission of guilt,” before McMahon suggested that Stepinac be released “for residence in [a] monastery inside Yugoslavia.” “Tito said he was ready to grant this,” which, in Allen’s view, represented “distinct progress.”
In November, Allen arranged another meeting between Tito and two members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Wisconsin Democrat Clement J. Zablocki and New York Democrat Edna F. Kelly, a staunch Tito critic. Allen reported that “Zablocki and Kelly pressed Tito vigorously on question of Stepinac, asking why they had not been allowed to visit him.” In response,
Tito said Stepinac [would] be released within a month and [would] be allowed to act as priest if he wished but [not] as bishop or archbishop. While Zablocki appeared to be satisfied with [this] outcome, Mrs. Kelly told me subsequently she [would] reserve any judgement or statement until she had seen Holy Father in Rome.
Although Allen believed that Tito “wish[ed] to avoid appearance of acting under congressional pressure” in freeing Stepinac, he credited “continual representations by various Congressmen” as “primarily responsible for [his] release,” which was finalized on December 5, 1951.
The Stepinac campaign was an early and successful example of American apologia for crimes against humanity in the Balkans; but it was far from the last.
The Irish essayist Hubert Butler, one of the few Western commentators who criticized the myth of Stepinac’s martyrdom from the beginning, warned, in 1956, that fervent anti-communism was morphing into apologia for fascism. Butler observed how NDH head Ante Pavelić, who had mysteriously escaped to Argentina via British-occupied Austria and Rome after the war, had “cashed in very effectively on the Stepinac legend,” transforming his own image in the West from “a monster of iniquity” into something “more respectable, and if he was wanted again in a campaign against Communism in the Balkans it is possible that he and his friends would be used.”
Indeed, NDH revivalists — calling themselves “Ustaše,” in honor of the original organization founded by Pavelić in 1929 — soon began just such a campaign from Australia, where, beginning in 1963, “they established new Ustaša networks which trained new members, financed chapters overseas, launched incursions into Yugoslavia, and waged a terrorism campaign against the Yugoslav migrant community in Australia.” The Australian intelligence services knew about these activities but ignored them because the Ustaše were “good anti-Communists.”
In the United States, members of Congress, emboldened by the successful Stepinac campaign, went on to argue against the extradition to Yugoslavia of the NDH’s former interior minister Andrija Artuković, despite his central role in orchestrating the regime’s genocidal policies. In June 1958, Michigan Republican congressman Victor A. Knox described Artuković as “an exemplary Catholic and a Knight of Columbus, with a Catholic wife and five children,” “one of the most brilliant and patriotic Yugoslavs living,” and someone who “knows so much about Titoism and the horrible massacres and other outrages perpetrated by Tito and his crowd.” For these reasons, “Tito wants to get his hands on Artuković and silence him.” In 1955 and 1958, California Republican congressman James B. Utt introduced bills attempting to give Artuković American citizenship. After a protracted legal battle, Artuković was finally extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986.
When the Cold War ended, and the United States no longer had a strategic interest in Yugoslavia’s survival, the US and Germany supported the secessionist aspirations of the Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, well-known for his “Ustaša nostalgia.” President Tuđman, a revisionist historian of the NDH regime, had described the NDH as “an expression of the historic aspirations of the Croatian people.” Tuđman was not in the same league as Pavelić, but his government ultimately achieved what Pavelić could only dream of: the complete ethnic cleansing of Croatia, when it expelled two hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina region in August 1995. US president Bill Clinton welcomed this news.
The wider Stepinac myth endures today. The man who welcomed a Nazi-installed government as a gift from God was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Stepinac, the pope proclaimed, was “one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church, having endured in his own body and his own spirit the atrocities of the Communist system.” In 2016, a Zagreb court annulled Stepinac’s 1946 convictions for treason and collaboration. And in March this year, the European Parliament hosted an event honoring Stepinac’s legacy of “Faith, Perseverance, and Hope.”
The more diplomatic and sensitive Pope Francis has so far resisted calls for Stepinac to be made a saint. Perhaps worse people have been made saints; certainly, worse people have supported fascist governments. But given the number of truly extraordinary people who suffered so much at the hands of fascism in Yugoslavia, real martyrs and real saints shouldn’t be hard to find.
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House Foreign Affairs Committee votes unanimously to create permanent envoy position, aimed at expanding Abraham Accords and strengthening ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved a bill to create a permanent envoy tasked with strengthening and expanding the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries in 2020.
Introduced by Representatives Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), the bipartisan bill garnered strong support from the committee’s members, two of whom cited the potential for Saudi Arabia to join the accords.
“I think that having a special envoy is a critical step in trying to get Saudi Arabia as part of the Abraham Accords,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). “There’s no doubt that that would be a critical step for the region. I think the Abraham Accords has shown that shared economic interest is the pathway to not just peace in the region, but also bringing down antisemitism.”
The legislation, which was first introduced in February, would create a Special Envoy for the Abraham Accords with the rank of ambassador who would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The envoy would “serve as the primary advisor to, and coordinate efforts across, the United States Government relating to expanding and strengthening the Abraham Accords” and “engage in discussions with nation-state officials lacking official diplomatic relations with Israel.”
The Abraham Accords, which were negotiated by the Trump administration, initially established relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and were later joined by Morocco. Sudan’s steps towards normalization with Israel as part of the accords framework was halted when Sudan’s government was toppled by a military coup in October 2021.
As one of the wealthiest and most populous Arab states and as one of Israel’s former greatest antagonists, Saudi Arabia has long been viewed as the crown jewel of Arab-Israeli normalization by US and Israeli officials.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly made a secret trip to the kingdom in November 2020, and has explicitly cited expanding the accords to include Saudi Arabia as a goal in readouts of his discussions with the Biden Administration.
Saudi Arabia, however, continues to publicly insist that it is committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which they offered full normalization between the Arab world and Israel in exchange for Israel withdrawing from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights and recognizing a Palestinian state.
During the hearing, Representatives also welcomed reports that former US Ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration Daniel Shapiro is being considered by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the role.
“I can think of no better person than the one being considered, Dan Shapiro,” said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL). “[He] understands the challenges but also fully embraces and appreciates the opportunities to work at there.”
The creation of the envoy roll comes as current US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides is expected to leave his posting in the coming months and as the Biden administration has attempted to navigate turmoil in the relationships for the US both with Israel and with the Gulf Arab states. In March, Israeli politicians criticized Biden for having “crossed a red line” when Biden said that Israel “cannot continue down this road” of proposed judicial reforms that sparked months of protests.
After passage in the Foreign Affairs Committee, the legislation will now need to be voted on by the full House of Representatives and the Senate before it can be signed by President Biden.
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Tenant farmers picking cotton in Mississippi circa 1890. (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Archives and Records Services Division)
When a black man named Oliver Cromwell began organizing local chapters of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance throughout Leflore County, Mississippi, and the surrounding area in 1889, both white planters and black farmers took notice, although for different reasons.
Founded in Houston County, Texas, just three years earlier, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, or “Colored Alliance” as it was more commonly known, quickly blossomed to over one million members across the South and beyond. The group offered self-help programs for black farmers, ran home ownership campaigns, argued for fair pricing, provided education programs on modern farming practices, educated farmers on their cooperative purchasing power, lobbied legislatures, and even launched strikes and boycotts.
In Leflore County, where three-quarters of residents were black, and two-thirds of those worked as sharecroppers, many formerly enslaved, Cromwell and the Colored Alliance offered the hope of upending the ruling planter class in the precarious years between the end of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow.
Cromwell, whose namesake was an African American Revolutionary War hero, had a long history of standing tall in the face of violent threats. He had served in the 5th United States Colored Heavy Artillery regiment in the Civil War, fighting in the Battle of Milliken’s Bend. And he had braved the 1875 Clinton Massacre, where nearly sixty people were slaughtered and another thirty injured, following a rally and picnic for Reconstruction-era black politicians in Mississippi.
Illustration of the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, June 7, 1863, part of the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War in which African American soldiers led the Union to victory. (Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863)
Now, with white elites inflamed at his sharecropper organizing, Cromwell again found himself in peril. Death threats, both verbal and printed, poured in. Backing up Cromwell, seventy-five armed representatives of the Colored Alliance delivered their own message: they would not be intimidated, had power in numbers, and were military trained.
The act of defiance and solidarity was not enough, however. Mobs of white men from throughout the region descended upon the town in search of black farmers, with little attention given to whether the people they were attacking were even members of the Colored Alliance. The governor called in the National Guard, but they quickly dispersed as the mob grew out of control. By the time the deadly attacks came to an end, over twenty black citizens had lost their lives, with some reports claiming the number was closer to two hundred.
Although short-lived and little-known today, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and similar groups in the late 1800s made up the largest black political movement in the South before the modern civil rights movement. Black populism not only helped pave the way for later resistance among black sharecroppers, farmers, and other agrarian workers, but tilled the soil for a sustained mass black politics and the dreams of an alternative to a racist, plutocratic system.
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was established in 1886 in Houston County, Texas, by sixteen black men on the farm of Richard M. Humphrey, a white Baptist minister and former Confederate soldier. Although membership was limited to African Americans, Humphrey was elected a superintendent and spokesperson of the Colored Alliance and was able to address the group’s concerns to white audiences without the same threat of retaliation. Black leaders joining Humphrey at the helm included J. J. Shuffer, president, and H. J. Spencer, secretary.
The Colored Alliance’s primary mission was to give black farmers the tools to fight not only falling commodity prices, high interest rates, and rising supply costs, but also discriminatory practices by white landowners and business owners. Across the New South, black organizing was being met with mob violence. To protect themselves, the group’s charter specified that they would operate as a secret organization with passwords, much as black fraternal organizations did. They also noted that they would operate separately from the National Farmers’ Alliance, which excluded African Americans from the membership rolls.
A short write up in the Clarion Ledger (MS) on May 2, 1889, notes new branches of the Colored Alliance opening in South Carolina. When the private group did make public announcements, they often specified that their goals were self help and not political, even if in reality the group had intentions of disrupting systems. (Clarion Ledger, May 2, 1889.)
The Colored Alliance trained members in economic and political governance, promoted character-building programs, supported mutual aid in their community, argued for more schools for African American children, agitated for more humane treatment of black convict farm laborers, and taught members about their civil rights. They flexed their collective buying power, operating exchanges in Houston, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and Norfolk, Virginia. The upstart group even started their own newspaper in 1889 to coordinate efforts and communicate across state lines.
Within a few short years — thanks to existing networks of black churches and fraternal organizations, aligned unions like the Colored Agricultural Wheel, and the tenacity of state organizers like Cromwell in Mississippi, Ben Patterson in Tennessee, and Rev. W. A. Pattillo in North Carolina — the Colored Alliance boasted more than one million members, although that figure was likely inflated. While no membership or institutional records remain, Humphrey claimed that Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas all had between ninety thousand and one hundred thousand Colored Alliance members, with other southern states reporting sizable amounts just under that. In Texas alone, fifty-six counties had Colored Alliance charters, with reportedly thousands of subchapters.
While Colored Alliance members and National Farmers’ Alliance members had different and sometimes conflicting goals (many more in the white Farmers’ Alliance, particularly leaders, owned land and employed farmhands), the two at times worked together. White alliance leaders joined the annual convening of delegates of the Colored Alliance in St Louis in 1889 and again in Ocala, Florida, in 1890. North Carolina’s Pattillo noted that members of both alliances helped him clandestinely recruit black farmers to the Colored Alliance.
The Constitution of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union of the United States. (Virginia Virtual Archive)
The groups also worked across racial and state lines to participate in a boycott of jute — which was used to wrap bales of cotton — beginning in 1888. A couple years later in Louisiana, white and black alliance members banded together against the state lottery program, which they saw as a mutual threat to poor farmers enticed by get-rich-quick schemes.
Still, National Farmers’ Alliance leaders refused to budge on their policy of racial exclusion, stating they were “in favor of equal and exact justice to all men, regardless of race, color or previous condition,” but that they wanted “all colored organizations to have their own State and national organizations, as well as their own schools and churches and separate hotels and railroad accommodations.”
As the Colored Farmers’ Alliance gained converts in droves, another agrarian organization with a similar name, the National Colored Alliance, was also flourishing in the South, claiming 250,000 members of its own. The two groups were plagued by disagreements that “divided our churches . . . embittered our communities and created discord in our families.” Although there was brief talk in 1890 of merging the organizations, leadership disagreements about how and when to strike burned any bridge under construction.
In 1891, at the peak of its membership, the Colored Alliance attempted to organize a cotton pickers’ strike to earn better prices for their crops. If landowners could conspire together to keep prices low, sharecroppers reasoned that they, too, could band together and demand one dollar per one hundred pounds of cotton. Although the pending strike was widely publicized, and the union’s membership was reportedly large, when the planned date of September 12 came and went, only Texas saw any action.
By the end of the month, however, violence would erupt again one hundred miles north of Leflore in Lee County, Arkansas. There, in the heat of the Arkansas Delta, a man named Ben Patterson had been organizing black cotton pickers. He managed to organize dozens of men to press for 75 cents per pound. (It is unclear if Patterson had any direct affiliation with the Colored Alliance or the earlier planned strike.)
This newspaper headline notes the details of what is now called the Lee County Massacre. (Arkansas Gazette, October 2, 1891)
Again, those in power responded with violence. Angry white mobs attacked the strikers, with fifteen black lives lost in the attacks and another nine imprisoned. Of the fifteen, nine had been captured by the mob from police custody and lynched. An Arkansas Gazette, headline from October 2, 1891, read, “Nine Negroes Lynched: The Lee County Trouble Settled With Rope.” One white plantation superintendent also died.
The Colored Alliance never recovered.
Around the same time, a union for white farmers called the Agricultural Wheel again raised hope of interracial cooperation.
Organized near Des Arc, Arkansas, in 1882, the group’s mission resembled many other farmers’ aid organizations at the time, including the Colored Alliance. It supported cooperative buying and selling, breaking up monopolies, establishing a railroad commission, and the education of the masses.
Acceptance of black farmers into the Wheel’s ranks varied from location to location. Black Wheelers had success organizing in St Francis County, Arkansas, despite violent retaliation, and in Tennessee and elsewhere black farmers started an entirely independent offshoot of their own called the Colored Agricultural Wheel.
Elsewhere, bigotry prevailed over class politics: Wheelers from states like Arkansas and Kentucky fought vehemently against the removal of the word “white” from the Agricultural Wheel’s requirements and bylaws that same year. In 1887, the Wheel merged with an organization called Brothers of Freedom that barred black farmers from membership and announced plans for a consolidation meeting with the Southern Alliance, which limited membership to “white persons over sixteen years old engaged in agriculture and related pursuits.”
This preamble to the Constitution for the Grand Agricultural Wheel of the State of Alabama lays out the largely white organization’s mission and vision for a united laboring class. (Southern Tenant Farmers’ Museum)
While any hope of organizational cooperation dissipated, in Arkansas, white Agricultural Wheel members (mostly former Democrats) and Colored Agricultural Wheel leaders (all erstwhile Republican Party supporters) joined forces to attack the Democratic ruling class with the short-lived Arkansas Union Labor Party. Although they only participated in two election cycles, in 1888 and 1890, the labor party’s victories marked the only time the state’s Democratic-dominated system faced serious opposition at the polls. Baptist minister G. W. Lowe, president of the Arkansas State Colored Agricultural Wheel, served in the state legislature in 1891, as did many other African Americans at the local level.
Ruling-class Democrats had seen enough. They passed laws to disfranchise Arkansas’s poor black and white voters in 1891, and in 1892, a new state poll tax sealed the deal. Southern elites elsewhere used the same formula. They were terrified of the organizing progress that the masses had made, even if on slightly separate and somewhat segregated trajectories.
In a bid to decisively stamp out class politics and any whiff of cross-racial solidarity, those in power enacted Jim Crow laws to stifle any challenge to the plutocratic order. When laws were not enough, violence and intimidation at the polls and elsewhere helped keep poor workers divided and white supremacy strong.
Although violence against African Americans had been mounting in the years after Reconstruction, the 1890s saw new levels of racist terror and political oppression. Between 1890 and 1905, every single state in the South approved literacy and poll tax laws and officially segregated its public facilities. Lynchings became nightmarishly common. And organizing workers grew harder and harder.
Colored Alliance members were just one group of Southern black laborers who endured violence in those post-Reconstruction years. A group in South Carolina called the Co-operative Workers of America, which sought to eliminate the dependence of rural black workers on rural merchants and company stores, was hit with ferocious attacks in 1887. That same year, a strike organized by the Knights of Labor and black sugar plantation workers in Louisiana was met with deadly violence, with over sixty losing their lives in what would become known as the Thibodaux Massacre.
Women are shown cutting sugarcane in Louisiana around the same time period as the Thibodaux Massacre. (Library of Congress)
These violent acts were a brutal response to the economic, political, and social power that black citizens had managed to accumulate. Between Reconstruction and 1890, the total amount of land owned by African Americans tripled. Literacy and school enrollment expanded dramatically, and black Republicans won and held political seats across the South thanks in part to black voters.
Groups like the Colored Alliance and other black farmers’ collectives, while perhaps unsuccessful in their immediate goals, helped build opposition to plantation Democrats via third-party politics, chipped away at the oppressive agrarian economy, and served as a practice run for future moments of black and interracial farmer resistance, including the 1930s Southern Tenant Farmers Union.
Black populism may have been written out of the history books. But in its day, it was a mighty force.
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