Preface

Shortly after my retirement from KU in July 2017, I attended the African American Quilt Convention and met Dr. Daniel Atkinson at the Lied Center. He presented his initial research for his biography on George “Nash” Walker (1872-1911), a renowned performer and producer born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. On one slide, he showed a postcard of a small girl posing with four cake walk dancers—Walker, his partner Bert Williams, and two women—and wondered who she was. Well! His provocative question screamed at me to find out her identity, for I had published three journal articles on the history of early child actors and child spectators.¹

Dr. Atkinson had begun studying Walker’s early life during his time as Assistant Director of the Kansas African Studies Center at KU. To extend his research, I compiled and sent him a five-part contextual overview of African American life in Lawrence gathered from local newspapers online.² My compilation from the 1870s through the early 1890s covered people George knew and everything he would have experienced as a young bootblack through downtown businesses, touring minstrelsy shows, schools, churches, politics, celebrations, and clubs, as well as his early performances before he left town. Atkinson then published “George Nash’ Walker: The Unsung Favorite Son of Lawrence, Kansas” in The Enduring Struggle for Freedom, volume 2 of The Embattled Lawrence series, edited by Dennis Domer. Daniel and I have stayed in touch ever since by email and phone.

Reading Lawrence newspapers allowed me to become quite familiar with the names of a wide cast of players. So, I decided to build upon the foundational work of Katie H. Armitage, published in “Seeking A Home Where He Himself Is Free”: African Americans Build a Community in Douglas County, Kansas” by starting this book.³ Along the way, two booklets informed this work: “Good Trouble: Two Lincoln Schools in North Lawrence,” a fundraiser for the Lawrence Juneteenth organization, printed by Allen Press (2021), and “African American Survivors and Victims of Quantrill’s Raid in Lawrence,” printed by the Douglas County Historical Society at Watkins Museum (2022).

As a retired KU theatre professor, born and raised in westside Detroit, I fully acknowledge my extensive white privilege. While some people may strongly object to a white woman writing about Black experiences, I see my research and writing skills as a means of giving back to our community. If not me, then who—and when? Anyone is more than welcome to write and publish similar projects.³ Why wait for more theses and dissertations from KU graduate students? My time and labor are offered for free at no financial cost and no expectations for financial renumeration or so-called “fame.” My scholarly reputation has already been established. Instead, I feel incredibly humbled by the little-known stories of extra-ordinary African Americans whose past lives deserve to be remembered and treated with the utmost respect and celebrated with dignified honor. As a life-long learner, I seek to educate all readers who want to understand and confront our racialized past in order to reconcile and change present racial injustices. It is my sincere hope that this work may also prove useful to descendants of Black Lawrencians who seek to trace and expand upon their own family genealogies.

The Purpose and Organization of this Book

The purpose of this book is to describe and explain early African American lives in Lawrence by relying primarily on local (and otherwise scattered) newspaper articles and census records from the 1850s through the 1920s, as well as secondary sources. This work focuses on detailed biographies of first generation Black citizens who settled in Lawrence over the long term and their second generation children in order to spotlight and contextualize individual differences. News reports are necessarily limited to those Black men, women, and children who were most “well-known” by white newspaper editors and their white reporters. Given that men held countless political meetings that gave them public visibility, they received far more news coverage than women who spent their days working privately in their homes as housekeepers, mothers, washerwomen, or domestic servants for white families. Furthermore, the lives of ordinary, low-income families often went unreported, unless they were arrested for mostly petty crimes (e.g., disturbing the peace), or their deaths were noted in very brief obituaries, if at all. Detailed obituaries are quoted in full when possible. Given that Lawrence’s Black population peaked in 1880 at nearly 2,000 residents, it is not possible to include everyone’s lives but at least a dent can be made with additions made by future researchers and family genealogists.

The political biases of predominately white Lawrence newspapers and their editors must be taken into consideration, especially during years when particular events sparked or heightened racial tensions. Readers cannot assume that all news reports were accurate or factual. In most cases, we do not know whether white reporters directly interviewed individuals or family members for information passed down orally, based on contemporaneous or fading memories. Misspellings of names were common in both newspapers and census records. Every effort has been made to “triangulate” so-called “facts” by verifying pieces of evidence with other sources. Future researchers and genealogists are encouraged to correct my mistaken evidence.

Whenever possible, I quote the exact published words of Black individuals to give them full agency. I also rely on reports from Black-owned newspapers: John L. Waller’s Western Recorder published in Lawrence from March 1883 to June 1884; The Historic Times published in Lawrence from July to November 1891; Samuel H. (and Lula B.) Johnson’s column, “The Reminder,” published over five months in 1894 in the Democrat-Populist Jeffersonian Gazette; and The Topeka Plaindealer published since 1899, among others in Kansas.

In African American genealogy, the 1870 “brick wall” or “roadblock” refers to the difficulty many people face when seeking to trace family ancestry before 1870—the first year that the US census recorded African Americans by their names after the 13th Amendment abolished human bondage in 1865. Before that year, innumerable slave schedules listed the names of slave owners and enslaved people only by their gender and ages.⁴ Only in rare instances may genealogists find the names of African Americans in 1850 or 1860 US censuses indicating their births in free Northern states (e.g., Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana) or those persons emancipated by their Southern owners before the Civil War that allowed them to relocate to other states.⁵ Thankfully, Debby Lowery and Judy Sweets published the names of over 2,000 individuals in “African-Americans in the 1865 Kansas State Census (Douglas County)” in 2006, an invaluable reference for local genealogists.

First names and surnames are complicated issues. Readers should not presume that all enslaved persons accepted the surnames of their white slaveowners; some did while others did not. During the Civil War as refugees escaped human bondage by fleeing to Lawrence, some changed their last names to common family names, such as Smith, Jones, Johnson, Jackson, Williams, etc. to avoid being returned to owners. In other cases, white people, such as Rev. Hugh D. Fisher, changed their first and last names for them to historical white persons (e.g., George Washington) so they could not be traced or found by their former owners. “Prof.” (short for Professor) usually referred to a man with musical expertise. “Doc” (short for Doctor) may have been used or given as a first name to self-educated men. “Dr.” most often referred to medical physicians and/or those persons with advanced college degrees.

Tracing women’s original maiden names is especially challenging as women married, remarried, or divorced, or in some cases, took back their maiden names. Like men, women also chose different nicknames; for example, “Elizabeth” could be “Eliza,” “Charlotte” could be “Lottie,” and “Katherine” could be “Kitty.” Every effort has been made to verify the identity of the same woman with different surnames over time. Many Black families also cared for and adopted non-biological children or grandchildren within households and changed their surnames accordingly (whether legally or not). Some couples married legally after the births of a woman’s or man’s biological children.

Many birth years and places (states) of birth are approximate, given that most enslaved persons did not know when or where they were born, especially when children were forcibly separated from their biological parents and raised by multiple caregivers. For these reasons, children were taught to call adults “aunt” or “uncle” or younger persons “sister,” “brother,” or “cousin” to establish mutual obligations and responsibilities within enslaved communities—a tradition that continues to this day. Thus, in some cases, white reporters referred to some Black citizens as “Uncle” or “Aunt,” presumably out of respect in keeping with Southern traditions. Readers may decide for themselves whether or not white people had the right to use these honorific terms or whether they should have restricted themselves to addressing Black persons as “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss.” Note also that the use of “Mrs.” may not always be taken literally to mean a married or widowed woman, because in some cases, a single, never-married woman was called “Mrs.” out of respect for her elderly age. 

Places or states of birth also vary by individual considerably in both US and Kansas censuses. Some people reported their births in border or southern states (e.g., Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, or Virginia). Many enslaved persons born in these states were forcibly moved to Missouri, a pro-slavery state, to increase its slave-holding populations. Thus, many people reported Missouri as their “birth” state from which they migrated to Kansas, especially when they did not know their parents’ birth states. Therefore, the state most frequently reported across all available censuses and/or detailed obituaries are used as much as possible.

Another cautionary warning: Readers should not assume that all white Lawrencians were outright or “closet” racists. Of course, racism existed in all its forms between and among Blacks and whites alike throughout the 19th century, especially between socioeconomic classes and perhaps by varying degrees of skin color. While some politically biased news reports contained explicitly racist viewpoints, the majority referred to “colored” people, a word considered offensive today, or “negro” or “Afro-American” that came into use during the 1880s and ‘90s. Rather than delete these contemporaneous terms, I keep these words intact within quotations and allow readers to interpret and judge racist perspectives for themselves based on respective contexts at particular points in time. My own unproven theory is that racism increased gradually during the 1890s as Lawrence’s civil rights leaders and white abolitionists passed away. It was also during this time that a few members of the second Black generation, such as George Walker and other talented performers, left Lawrence to pursue other career opportunities. Those who earned KU degrees also left town for teaching positions or higher-paying professional jobs in other cities. Based on these interdependent factors, systemic racism in Lawrence intensified over the course of the 20th century. 

The Introduction explains what is now regarded as the “Free State Myth” by Kansas historians and the concept of “parallel development”; that is, how and why Black residents established and developed separate churches and organizations parallel to those of white residents. No history would be complete without first acknowledging four American Indian nations that lived within the current city boundaries of Lawrence. A timeline of major events in Lawrence, Kansas, and the United States outlines respective struggles for civil rights over time and first achievements by local Blacks. A table of Black populations in Lawrence and Douglas County indicates increases and decreases over time. Subsequent sections are organized and introduced by thematic topics, along with biographies of men and their families that detail the complexities of individuals’ lives. Again, these biographies are compiled from newspaper articles and census records using familysearch.org and Kansas ancestry that includes city directories.