Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1915.
Reed, Harry A.
Hamilton, Kenneth Marvin. Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and
Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1915. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. index. illustrations. Pp.
152, appendices. $29.95 (U.S.).
Professor Hamilton of the Department of History, Southern Methodist
University, has presented an important account of the founding of black
towns in the Trans-Appalachian West. His work, broken into five
chapters, chronicles the development of Nicodemus, Kansas; Mound Bayou,
Mississippi; Langston City, Oklahoma; Boley, Oklahoma; and Allensworth,
California. Hamilton poses a challenge to existing scholarship and its
emphasis on blacks seeking refuge from racial oppression as the major
impetus for establishing all black towns in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. He does not reject the racial haven thesis but does assert
that an essential element is missing. Hamilton reveals that an
entrepreneurial profit motive drove black founders as it did their white
counterparts engaged in the enterprise of town founding.
To illustrate the cogency of his observations, Hamilton relates the
promotional activities of black agents like Edwin McCabe first in Kansas
and later in Oklahoma. In addition, he charts the close ties between
Isaiah Montgomery of Mound Bayou and Booker T. Washington. Beyond
Washington, Montgomery also made use of white industrialists and
philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald both to promote the city and to
increase his own profits. Allen Allensworth of Allensworth, California,
was less successful than Montgomery in attracting the support of
Washington but he made the effort nonetheless. Allensworth's
promotion of the town included running ads in the leading black
newspapers of the time including The New York Age. Economic promotion
was coupled with old fashioned boosterism sometimes reaching proportions
that overstated the actual conditions of the new townsite.
As with speculation in other town-finding ventures in the
Trans-Appalachian West, black towns were also characterized by political
and financial chicanery. Still, Hamilton's research makes clear
that most of the promotional literature for the new towns made a
conscious appeal to well-mannered, industrious middle class types.
Black towns, like their white counterparts, needed natural
advantages like waterways, railroad access, educational facilities, farm
land that was better than marginal, and a population with a pioneering
spirit. Those that were able to develop their natural resources and
attain outside support usually survived. Hamilton also suggests that in
several cases a loose frontier equality existed between whites and
blacks in their entrepreneurial pursuits although not necessarily in
living together. He recounts the adventures of black developers out to
make a fast buck either speculating in land or engaging in politics.
For all its interesting new material, Hamilton's book is a
curiously unbalanced work. Each successive chapter is shorter than its
predecessor and the volume ends with a slight four-page conclusion that
repeats the conclusions already revealed in the separate chapters.
Despite the structural and perhaps conceptual weakness cited above,
readers will find much to treasure in Hamilton's work.
HARRY A. REED
Department of History
Michigan State University
