Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1915.(Brief Article)

Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877-1915. By Kenneth Marvin Hamilton * Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xii + 185 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $29.95.

For many years historians have shown an interest in the all-black communities that sprang up in the trans-Appalachian West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did they begin? What were the motives of their founders? Were black settlers seeking a haven from white oppression? Were these towns utopian experiments? Or were they, as Mozell C. Hill wrote in a pioneering 1946 article, the result of a social movement "in which Negroes were attempting to solve the "race problem'" (p. 156)?

In a thorough and meticulously researched study, Kenneth Hamilton challenges the prevailing wisdom by arguing that none of the older interpretations is correct. Rather, the towns were founded, much like white and biracial towns, primarily for economic reasons. Race was only incidental, a selling point to attract a particular audience. Although generalizations are made about all forty-two black settlements, the study focuses on five towns--Nicodemus, Kansas; Mound Bayou, Mississippi; Langston City and Boley, Oklahoma; and Allensworth, California. Taking them up one by one, Hamilton examines such topics as land acquisition, the planting and selling of lots, the socioeconomic background of early settlers, business development, social and cultural life, town politics, and population growth (or decline).

Hamilton solidly proves his point. The members of the Nicodemus Town Company, Mississippi land agents James Hill and Isaiah Montgomery, Oklahoma speculators William Eagleson and Edward P. McCabe, and California developer Allen Allensworth, were all motivated by the prospect of acquiring wealth. They promoted their townsites in newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, speeches, and through national political leaders; and they advertised cheap land, fertile soil, natural resources, business opportunities, ...