By ANNE KAZMIERCZAK Register Reporter
Jim Leiker spoke to a handful of people Tuesday evening about “Race Relations in the Sunflower State,” as part of the Iola Big Read.
Leiker, a history professor at Johnson County Community College, said Kansas has long touted its history as a free state, although that title doesn’t tell the whole picture. Kansas’ history varies, Leiker said, from east to west and rural to urban.
“Elementary kids are routinely taught that Kansas is where the civil war began,” Leiker told the small group at the Iola Public Library. He said the state boasts that “Kansas drew a line in the sand and said ‘You’re not going to extend slavery here.’”
That reputation led to an influence of Exodusters, he said, free blacks who moved in from the newly abolitioned south. The term, he said, has nothing to do with Kansas’ dusty plains, but is based on the biblical book of Exodus, where Jews escaped slavery in Egypt and sought a free land. Over 26,000 Exodusters moved to Kansas “after southern troops moved out,” Leiker said.
“Exodusters arrived with little more than the clothes upon their backs,” Leiker said, leading to a strain on charitable services as blacks tried to fit into the established society.
Some decided to found their own towns, and by 1914, Kansas boasted over two dozen all-black communities. Many fell victim to typical rural hardships, however: Railroads passed them by and expanding urban centers drew the population with greater opportunities.
“Kansas does have a better claim to tolerance than many of its sister states,” Leiker said, but it, too, housed pockets of segregation and racism. “On the issue of black rights, Kansas hasn’t always lived up to its image.”
“The pattern of discrimination follows centers of population,” Leiker explained.
In 1879, Leiker said, Kansas law allowed first class cities —those with populations over 15,000 —to offer segregated schools. Segregation spread throughout the larger communities, but high schools were not segregated, as many blacks joined the work force after grammar school. “It was less of an issue,” Leiker pointed out.
Although “few white Kansans openly accepted black inferiority,” Leiker said “the Jeffersonian belief in strong local government allowed cities to have racial disparity as suited their needs.” In eastern Kansas, segregation was common. “In arid western Kansas, the need for settlers outweighed racial prejudice,” Leiker said. Right or wrong, he said, “Western Kansas was sold as a racial utopia.”
In a few communities, that held true to a degree.
“In the 1930’s, a biracial coalition at the University of Kansas protested discrimination at state institutions,” Leiker said. “We were doing things in Kansas a decade before Martin Luther King, Jr. was thinking of doing it in Alabama.”
“Of all states that practices segregation,” Leiker said, “Brown v. Board of Education was the most likely to prevail in Kansas.”
Still, Kansas is predominantly conservative, Leiker said. It holds a strong belief in private property rights, and distrust of large or liberal government. As a result, Leiker said, “Race relations here was never a simple two-sided affair.”
Blacks and whites, for example, joined together to eradicate inidgenous peoples, he said. “They used the most vulgar epitaphs possible when calling for the removal of Indians,” he said.
Yet “Indians used the reservation system to their advantage, to sustain their tribal identities.” As a result, the number of people claiming Native American heritage in Kansas has been rising, from a mere 1,000 in 1940 to 20,000 in 2000.
“Without a doubt,” Leiker said, “native people have been the fastest growing minority in Kansas — but numerically, Hispanic population growth is greater.”
That growth has been predominantly in southwest Kansas, Leiker said. As the railroads expanded and needed workers, they looked to Mexico for cheap labor. Mexicans were also recruited to work in the beet fields, salt mines and sugar processing. Their numbers grew from less than 100 in 1900 to over 13,000 in 1920.
“Moving here was not the traumatic uprooting for Mexicans as it was for Europeans,” Leiker said, so many of them settled in and brought or established families.
Then, “During the 1930s, companies throughout the country were pressured to layoff their Hispanic labor forces to open positions for Anglos,” Leiker said.
“The Santa Fe Railroad refused, however, bucking the state by claiming their workers came from New Mexico, and therefore couldn’t be deported.”
By 1998, the work force of Dodge City was 60 to 80 percent Hispanic, Leiker said. Numbers are likely similar in other southwestern meatpacking towns, he said. Ethnic violence, racial profiling and gang violence are now common concerns in southwest Kansas, he said.
Hispanics have been classed as both black and white through history, Leiker said, depending on the whims of the time.
“Most Hispanics resent being classed as black,” Leiker said, showing racism is not yet dead in the Sunflower State.
“How are those communities going to address racial mascots? Or Immigration laws?” Leiker pondered.
“The United States is the largest country in the world that still asks about race” when defining its citizens, he said. Yet race assumes a static, fixed group, he said, and populations are anything but.
“What is white, anyhow?” Leiker asked. “Are Jews white? Are Arabs? In Haiti,” he said, “anyone with one drop of white blood was considered white. In an interview once, Papa Doc Duvalier said 98% of the population of Haiti was white.”
For younger generations, though, the question may be moot.
“More and more people are talking about class,” Leiker said. “That’s a good thing.”
“When I lecture on college campuses, they’re really surprised we still use categories of race.”
Youth of America see themselves as part of a single culture, not as individual racial groups with distinct cultures, Leiker said.
“They think it’s not a big deal.”
3/4/09
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