Black Populism - Resistance and Failure

Resistance and Failure

By the late 1890s, under relentless attack – propaganda campaigns warning of a “second Reconstruction” and “Negro rule,” physical intimidation, violence, and assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers – the movement was crushed. A key figure in the attack on Black Populism was Ben Tillman, the leader of South Carolina's white farmers' movement. As realistic politicians, the Southern Populist knew that they had only two possible alternatives in the fight against the ruling Bourbon Democrats. They must choose between trying to win the Negro votes or working to eliminate it entirely. The Tillman group in South Carolina sought the latter method. They were completely reactionary on the Negro question and stood with the Bourbons in disregarding the principles of the Fifteenth Amendment. Elsewhere the populists sought to win Negro votes, either through fusion with the Republican minority or through the raising of issues with a broad appeal to the Negro farmers.It was no accident that in the South the third-party movement was strongest in those states where it sought not only Negro votes but active Negro support.

The notion that the black man had somehow betrayed Populism would constantly haunt the Georgia People's Party from the very beginning Populists had realized the political importance of blacks. Of the state's forty thousand Republicans voters, a considerable majority were former bondsmen. If the white votes were to split, they might decide the outcome of any state election. But therein lay a predicament. How were Populists to court the black votes without losing the whites? How were they to keep whites form thinking of them the "nigger party," The party willing to truckle to the former slaves? Clearly, however, an attempt had to be made to win over blacks. It was dangerous scheme, but it contained a degree of precedent of in state politics. In the 1870s and 1880s, democrats and independents had sometimes used the same device when the white votes splits. In those days many whites where willing to allow the black man the ballot, specially when it could be sometimes bought for as little as a dime or a mouthful of whiskey.

Black Populism was destroyed, marking the end of organized political resistance to the return of White supremacy in the South in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, Black Populism stands as the largest independent political uprising in the South until the modern Civil Rights movement.