History Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2021
Abstract
This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.
Recommended Citation
Brent M. S. Campney; “A White-and-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted”: The Twilight of Jim Crow in the Postwar Urban Midwest. Pacific Historical Review 8 January 2021; 90 (1): 84–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2021.90.1.84
Publication Title
Pacific Historical Review
DOI
10.1525/phr.2021.90.1.84
Comments
2021 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2021.90.1.84.