Of Interest
- African American Museum of Iowa Information on their exhibits, events, collections, educational programs, and more.
- African Americans in Iowa: 2020 From T H E S T A T E D A T A C E N T E R O F I O W A A N D T H E I O W A C O M M I S S I O N O N T H E S T A T U S O F A F R I C A N - A M E R I C A N S
- Black Farmers in Iowa & Fayette County From Iowa Public Radio, Dec 202
- Buxton, Iowa (1895-1927), from Black Past Remembered From Black Past Remembered, a web-based organization that has produced "the largest free and unrestricted website on African American history currently on the Internet. Founded on February 1, 2007 in Seattle, Washington, the site now has over 10,000 pages of information."
- The Case of Ralph (first Iowa Supreme Court case and decision, 1839) From The Palimpsest, 1926
- Endless Possibilities Permanent exhibit from the African American Museum of Iowa
- Iowa Bystander, 1894-1916: Newspaper Digitized copies from the Library of Congress
- Iowa Bystander: Digitized issues, 1894-1916 From Library of Congress's Chronicling America. View calendar for available dates; click an available date to view newspaper images
- The Life and Legacy of Jack Trice From The Annals of Iowa, 2010
- Project Des Moines: The Iowa Bystander Founding and history of the Bystander newspaper
Books of Interest
African Americans of Des Moines and Polk County by
Although African American pioneers arrived in Des Moines, Iowa, in the early 1860s, the population exploded in the 1880s due to the surrounding coal mines. In the 1860s, the Burns Methodist Episcopal Church was the first African American church built in Des Moines, and its only address was "East Side of the River." From 1900 to the 1960s, African Americans across the United States called Center Street "the coolest place in the country." The likes of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and many others graced the hotels and clubs there. In Des Moines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, young African Americans discarded the term Negro and demanded to be referred to as Afro-American or black, as black pride swelled in their chests.
Call Number: Currently on order 7.1.21ISBN: 9780738582962Publication Date: 2011-09-26
Black Pioneers: An Untold Story by
Out of a past little noted in history texts comes this tale of African American pioneers in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. These pathfinders were slaves, poets, runaways, missionaries, farmers, teachers, and soldiers. For these African Americans, the frontier meant freedom, and from the earliest times, some seized liberty by joining Indian nations.As Southern slaveholders tried to pass laws to make slavery legal in the West and territorial legislatures wrote "Black Laws" that limited basic rights to white settlers, African American pioneers became freedom fighters. From Ohio to Kansas they battled slavehunters and developed Underground Railroad stations. Black families built their own schools and churches and created unique forms of protest to ensure their advancement.Historian William Loren Katz reveals a frontier saga that has often been buried, glossed over, or lost.
Call Number: Available at Ames Public Library: J 978 KATISBN: 0689814100Publication Date: 1999-05-01
Breathing the Freedom's Air: The African American Struggle for Equal Citizenship in Iowa, 1830-1900 by
This dissertation explores a seventy-year period of community growth and activism among African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa, showing how citizenship was defined, contested, expanded and confined. Antebellum black migrants lived on the margins of a hostile society and struggled for equal citizenship using their labor, their community institutions, the legal system, and the forum of public discourse. This sometimes meant forming client-patron relations with powerful whites, while at other times it focused on a rights-based appeal. On the eve of the Civil War, though, Iowa's racial dynamics remained fundamentally unchanged.
The war, however, brought new opportunities through migration and military service. African Americans used their wartime loyalty as political capital and integrated the ballot box and the schoolroom, although most blacks remained confined to menial jobs, while their still-small numbers prevented the election of black officials. Iowa's black communities continued to grow in later years, and community activists employed the traditional tactics through lawsuits, petitions, public celebrations, and other venues.
Finally, a sea change occurred in the 1890s. Community leadership was assumed by a younger generation that had grown up free in Iowa after the war, attended integrated schools, and sought to address more contemporary problems while still honoring the past. Despite increasing racial hostility in Iowa and nationally, African Americans achieved two milestone institutional victories with the state's first black elected officials and viable black newspaper. Finally, in 1900 the mining town of Buxton was established, creating a thriving environment that had a black majority in this still overwhelmingly white state.
Although this story is largely unknown in the historiography, this work does not simply seek to tell a story that has never been told before. Using social, political, and legal methodology and primary sources, it reveals useful insights about race, gender, class, family and black visions of citizenship in the nineteenth-century Midwest. It shows how African Americans innovatively engaged in politics by other means. And it confronts the common assumption that blacks were not capable of creating social change or protecting their rights in states where they lived in small numbers.
Call Number: E185.93 I64 B76x 2007ISBN: 9780549297055Publication Date: 2007
Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and white supremacy on the Hawkeye frontier by
A history of Iowa and its changing attitudes towards black civil equality through the workings of the judiciary, the legislature and the efforts of the citizenry. The text looks at how Iowa became the most racially progressive state in the the Union, after originally rejecting black suffrage.
Call Number: E185.93.I64 D95 1997ISBN: 9780813823089Publication Date: 1997-05-01
Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland (Expanded Edition) by
From 1900 until the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland. It was the largest unincorporated coal-mining community in Iowa and the majority of its 5000 residents were African Americans - unusual for a state which was over 90 per cent white.
Call Number: Available as an ebookISBN: 9780877458524Publication Date: 2003-09-03
Centerville: A mid-American saga by
From the moment that the surveyor set down his tools in 1846 to the instant that the Flying Farmers crossed the sky at the centennial celebration, the history of Centerville, Iowa, has gifted us with a unique insight into the mid-American experience. Though the population never exceeded 8,600, immigrants from more than forty different countries created a community that was both melting pot and crucible--just like the nation at large. The town forged an identity through the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, race relations, education debates and World Wars I and II while its people survived the dark history of Prohibition, crime, the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and the Depression. In this definitive history, Enfys McMurry captures both the particular feelings of Centerville's citizens and how they reflected and participated in the larger American story.
Call Number: F629 C43 M36x 2012ISBN: 9781609496647Publication Date: 2013-01-15
Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the upper Midwest by
Most studies of emancipation's consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. Emancipation's Diaspora follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens. Schwalm explores the hotly contested politics of black enfranchisement as well as collisions over segregation, civil rights, and the more informal politics of race--including how slavery and emancipation would be remembered and commemorated. She examines how gender shaped the politics of race, and how gender relations were contested and negotiated within the black community. Based on extensive archival research, Emancipation's Diaspora shows how in churches and schools, in voting booths and Masonic temples, in bustling cities and rural crossroads, black and white Midwesterners--women and men--shaped the local and national consequences of emancipation.
Call Number: E185.93.I64 S34 2009ISBN: 9780807832912Publication Date: 2009-07-15
Exploring Buried Buxton by Call Number: F629 B98 G73 1990 ; also available as an ebookISBN: 9781587295744Publication Date: 1990-02-01
George Washington Carver: A Life by
Nearly every American can cite at least one of the accomplishments of George Washington Carver. The many tributes honoring his contributions to scientific advancement and black history include a national monument bearing his name, a U.S.-minted coin featuring his likeness, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Born into slavery, Carver earned a master?s degree at Iowa State Agricultural College and went on to become that university?s first black faculty member. A keen painter who chose agricultural studies over art, he focused the majority of his research on peanuts and sweet potatoes. His scientific breakthroughs with the crops?both of which would replenish the cotton-leached soil of the South?helped spare multitudes of sharecroppers from poverty. Despite Carver?s lifelong difficulties with systemic racial prejudice, when he died in 1943, millions of Americans mourned the passing of one of the nation?s most honored and well-known scientists. Scores of children?s books celebrate the contributions of this prolific botanist, but no biographer has fully examined both his personal life and career until now. Christina Vella offers a thorough biography of George Washington Carver, including in-depth details of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, supporters, and those he loved. Despite the exceptional trajectory of his career, Carver was not immune to the racism of the Jim Crow era or the privations and hardships of the Great Depression and two world wars. Yet throughout this tumultuous period, his scientific achievements aligned him with equally extraordinary friends, including Teddy Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, Henry A. Wallace, and Henry Ford. In pursuit of the man behind the historical figure, Vella discovers an unassuming intellectual with a quirky sense of humor, striking eccentricities, and an unwavering religious faith. She explores Carver?s anguished dealings with Booker T. Washington across their nineteen years working together at the Tuskegee Institute?a turbulent partnership often fraught with jealousy. Uneasy in personal relationships, Carver lost one woman he loved to suicide and, years later, directed his devotion toward a white man. A prodigious and generous scholar whose life was shaped by struggle and heartbreak as well as success and fame, George Washington Carver remains a key figure in the history of southern agriculture, botanical advancement, and the struggle for civil rights. Vella?s extensively researched biography offers a complex and compelling portrait of one of the most brilliant men of the last century.
Call Number: S417 C3 V45 2015ISBN: 9780807160749Publication Date: 2015-09-14
Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the long Civil Rights Era by
Between the 1930s and 1960s, the University of Iowa sought to assert its modernity, cosmopolitanism, and progressivism through an increased emphasis on the fine and performing arts and athletics. This enhancement coincided with a period when an increasing number of African American students arrived at the university, from both within and outside of the state, seeking to take advantage of its relatively liberal racial relations and rising artistic prestige. The presence of accomplished African American students performing in musical concerts, participating in visual art exhibitions, acting on stage, publishing literature, and competing on sports fields forced white students, instructors, and administrators to confront their undeniable intellect and talent. Unlike the work completed in traditional academic units, these students' contributions to the university community were highly visible and burst beyond the walls of their individual units and primary spheres of experience to reach a much larger audience on campus and in the city and nation beyond the university's boundaries. ​ By examining the quieter collisions between Iowa's polite midwestern progressivism and African American students' determined ambition, Invisible Hawkeyes focuses attention on both local stories and their national implications. By looking at the University of Iowa and a smaller midwestern college town like Iowa City, this collection reveals how fraught moments of interracial collaboration, meritocratic advancement, and institutional insensitivity deepen our understanding of America's painful conversion into a diverse republic committed to racial equality. SUBJECTS COVERED Edison Holmes Anderson, George Overall Caldwell, Elizabeth Catlett, Fanny Ellison, Oscar Anderson Fuller, Michael Harper, James Alan McPherson, Herbert Franklin Mells, Herbert Nipson, Thomas Pawley, William Oscar Smith, Mitchell Southall, Margaret Walker CONTRIBUTORS Dora Martin Berry, Richard M. Breaux, Kathleen A. Edwards, Lois Eichaker, Brian Hallstoos, Lena M. Hill, Michael D. Hill, Dianna Penny, Donald W. Tucker, Ted Wheeler
Call Number: Available as an ebookISBN: 9781609384418Publication Date: 2016-11-15
Iowa's Black Legacy by
African Americans make up only a small minority of Iowa's population, but contrary to widespread belief, there is a very rich historical culture of African Americans throughout the state. This photographic history focuses on that heritage, and especially on ten Iowa cities with the largest African-American populations.Through vivid images into the early history, religion, culture, sports, recreation, education, health, law, business, and industry in ten towns in Iowa, Charline Barnes, Ed.D, and Floyd Bumpers clearly show that the African- American community of Iowa has made many significant contributions to the history of that state.
Call Number: E185.93 I64 B37x 2000ISBN: 0738503517Publication Date: 1999-12-07
Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa by
Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa speaks of life in Iowa from the nineteenth century to the present day. The voices in these pages range from factory workers to doctors, politicians to lawyers. Each individual shares interesting insights into what it was like for African Americans in the state. Racism was prevalent, with each person encountering it in some form, but despite these challenges, those profiled here made a significant contribution to society.Willie Stevenson Glanton recalls her time spent as the first African American woman in the Iowa Legislature. George Boykin remembers the early days at the Sanford Center in Sioux City. Although a physician, Percy Harris tells about the problems of finding a place to live in Cedar Rapids. Bernice Jones recalls challenging the status quota as a federal government worker in the Quad Cities. The participants in this oral history ranged in age from late 50s to early 90s at the time of their interviews.
Call Number: E185.93 I64 L54x 2001ISBN: 0738508411Publication Date: 2001-08-10
Lost Buxton by
Buxton, Iowa, was an unincorporated coal mining town, established by Consolidation Coal Company in 1900. At a time when Jim Crow laws and segregation kept blacks and whites separated throughout the nation, Buxton was integrated. African American and Caucasian residents lived, worked, and went to school side by side. The company provided miners with equal housing and equal pay, regardless of race, and offered opportunities for African Americans beyond mining. Professional African Americans included a bank cashier, the justice of the peace, constables, doctors, attorneys, store clerks, and teachers. Businesses, such as a meat market, a drugstore, a bakery, a music store, hotels, millinery shops, a saloon, and restaurants, were owned by African Americans. For 10 years, African Americans made up more than half of the population. Unfortunately, in the early 1920s, the mines closed, and today, only a cemetery, a few foundations, and some crumbling ruins remain.
Call Number: F629 B98 C49x 2017 ; also available in ISU Library Special CollectionsISBN: 9781540214232Publication Date: 2017-01-09
Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black packinghouse workers and their struggle for racial and economic equality by
Using oral history interviews drawn from the massive United Packinghouse Workers of America Oral History Project (underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities), Halpern and Horowitz trace the impact of the packinghouse on race relations, the civil rights movement, and African American communities from Chicago to Fort Worth. The interviewees speak for themselves with power, intelligence, and emotion. They reveal the importance of the packinghouse employment to mid-western black communities, and offer insights into the work experience and family relationships of African Americans. They relate the remarkable representation of interracial cooperation within a labor union and the positive role this organization played in the promotion of social change, racial equality, and tolerance.
Call Number: HD8039.P152 U54 1996ISBN: 0805791205Publication Date: 1996-10-18
My Iowa Journey: the life story of the University of Iowa's first African American professor by
Philip Hubbard's life story begins in 1921 in Macon, a county seat in the Bible Belt of north central Missouri, whose history as a former slave state permeated the culture of his childhood. When he was four his mother moved her family 140 miles north to Des Moines in search of the greater educational opportunity that Iowa offered African American students. In this recounting of the effects of that journey on the rest of his life, Phil Hubbard merges his private and public life and career into an affectionate, powerful, and important story. Hubbard graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in electrical engineering in 1946; by 1954 he had received his Ph.D. in hydraulics. The College of Engineering extended a warm academic welcome, but nonacademic matters were totally different: Hubbard was ineligible for the housing and other amenities offered to white students. Intelligent, patient, keenly aware of discrimination yet willing to work from within the university system, he advanced from student to teacher to administrator, retiring in 1991 after decades of leadership in the classroom and the conference room. Hubbard's major accomplishments included policies that focused on human rights; these policies transformed the makeup of students, faculty, and staff by seeking to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, or other nonacademic factors and by substituting affirmative action for the traditional old-boy methods of selecting faculty and administrators. At the same time that he was advancing the cause of human rights and cultural diversity in education, his family was growing and thriving, and his descriptions of home life reveal one source of his strength and inspiration. The decades that Hubbard covers were vital in the evolution of the nation and its educational institutions. His dedication to the agenda of public higher education has always been matched by his sensitivity to the negative effects of discrimination and his gentle perseverance toward his goals of inclusion, acceptance, and fairness. His vivid personal and institutional story will prove valuable at this critical juncture in America's racial history.
Call Number: LD2567 H83 A3 1999ISBN: 0877456720Publication Date: 1999-06-01
Necessary Courage: Iowa's Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery by
During the 1850s and early 1860s, Iowa, the westernmost free state bordering a slave state, stood as a bulwark of antislavery sentiment while the decades-long struggle over slavery shifted westward. On its southern border lay Missouri, the northernmost slaveholding state. To its west was the Kansas-Nebraska Territory, where proslavery and antislavery militias battled. Missouri slaves fled to Iowa seeking freedom, finding opponents of slavery who risked their lives and livelihoods to help them, as well as bounty hunters who forced them back into bondage. When opponents of slavery streamed west across the state's broad prairies to prevent slaveholders from dominating Kansas, Iowans fed, housed, and armed the antislavery settlers. Not a few young Iowa men also took up arms. In Necessary Courage, historian Lowell J. Soike details long-forgotten stories of determined runaways and the courageous Iowans who acted as conductors on this most dangerous of railroads--the underground railroad. Alexander Clark, an African American businessman in Muscatine, hid a young fugitive in his house to protect him from slavecatchers while he fought for his freedom in the courts. While keeping antislavery newspapers fully apprised of the battle against human bondage in western Iowa, Elvira Gaston Platt drove a wagon full of fugitives to the next safe house under the noses of her proslavery neighbors. John Brown, fleeing across Iowa with a price on his head for the murders of proslavery Kansas settlers, relied on Iowans like Josiah Grinnell and William Penn Clarke to keep him, his men, and the twelve Missouri slaves they had liberated hidden from the authorities. Several young Iowans went on to fight alongside Brown at Harpers Ferry. These stories and many more are told here. A suspenseful and often heartbreaking tale of desperation, courage, cunning, and betrayal, this book reveals the critical role that Iowans played in the struggle against slavery and the coming of the Civil War.
Call Number: E450 S66 2013 Also available as an ebookISBN: 9781609381936Publication Date: 2013-11-01
Outside In: African-American history in Iowa, 1838-2000 by
Comprehensive history of African Americans in Iowa. Published by the IOwa State Historical Society, the book is the result of a 6 year project bringing together the work of 36 committed Iowa scholars- historians, business people, doctors, lawyers, professors, public employees, and students. Three themes connect the 21 chapters: the struggle of black and white Iowans to establish equal rights; the pursuit of individual opportunity in Iowa's economy; and the creation of coherent communities and inclusive culture. Generously illustrated with photographs and well documented with footnotes and extensive bibliography and index.
Call Number: E185.93 I64 O98 2001ISBN: 0890330131Publication Date: 2001-10-01
A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City by
This book looks at the movement of urban American blacks into the Midwest through the experience of Iowa City, a town desperately trying to redefine itself. Pressing questions have plagued the community for decades: Why are people from Chicago coming here? Who gets to define community identity? Who makes decisions on housing, employment and education? Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Call Number: Available as an ebookISBN: 9780786473670Publication Date: 2014-05-21
White Racism on the Western Urban Frontier: Dynamics of race and class in Dubuque, Iowa (1800-2000) by
"This book examines almost two hundred years of race and ethnic relations and white-on- black racism in Dubuque, Iowa’s oldest industrial city, in connection with political and economic developments at the local, state, and national levels. Dubuque made the national headlines when there was a sudden eruption of hate crimes during the 1989- 1991 period. Subsequently a group of concerned citizens devised a five-year racial diversity plan to attract one hundred “families of color” to Dubuque, but failed to achieve their objective due to a lack of community support.
Using a critical political economy approach and based on historical data, the author presents compelling evidence that racist sentiments and discriminatory practice towards blacks tend to escalate during periods of economic downturns, even in cities with little or no minority population. Main topics that are discussed in the book include the evolution of “race” as a socially created concept, a historical analysis of two centuries of African-Americans` presence in Iowa and Dubuque amidst a persisting white–on-black racism; the presence of Ku Klux Klan in Dubuque, the relationship between the organized labor and black workers in Iowa, and Dubuque residents` determination to envision plans to fight back and promote racial diversity. Although the author acknowledges that economic conditions and ensuing race relations for each urban community are historically specific, in this book he also makes the case that Dubuque’s race relations history can be used as an example of “any town! USA” in search of solutions to fight white-on-black racism and discrimination in urban settings with little or no racial diversity."
Call Number: F629 D8 C46 2006ISBN: 9781592213757Publication Date: 2006-02-01
Your Librarian
Susan A. Vega García
she | hers
Contact:
Assistant Dean, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Associate Professor
204 Parks Library
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011
she | her | hers
Associate Professor
204 Parks Library
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011
she | her | hers