When a black man named Oliver Cromwell began organizing local chapters of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance throughout Leflore County, Mississippi, and the surrounding area in 1889, both white planters and black farmers took notice, although for different reasons.
Founded in Houston County, Texas, just three years earlier, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, or “Colored Alliance” as it was more commonly known, quickly blossomed to over one million members across the South and beyond. The group offered self-help programs for black farmers, ran home ownership campaigns, argued for fair pricing, provided education programs on modern farming practices, educated farmers on their cooperative purchasing power, lobbied legislatures, and even launched strikes and boycotts.
In Leflore County, where three-quarters of residents were black, and two-thirds of those worked as sharecroppers, many formerly enslaved, Cromwell and the Colored Alliance offered the hope of upending the ruling planter class in the precarious years between the end of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow.
Cromwell, whose namesake was an African American Revolutionary War hero, had a long history of standing tall in the face of violent threats. He had served in the 5th United States Colored Heavy Artillery regiment in the Civil War, fighting in the Battle of Milliken’s Bend. And he had braved the 1875 Clinton Massacre, where nearly sixty people were slaughtered and another thirty injured, following a rally and picnic for Reconstruction-era black politicians in Mississippi.
Now, with white elites inflamed at his sharecropper organizing, Cromwell again found himself in peril. Death threats, both verbal and printed, poured in. Backing up Cromwell, seventy-five armed representatives of the Colored Alliance delivered their own message: they would not be intimidated, had power in numbers, and were military trained.
The act of defiance and solidarity was not enough, however. Mobs of white men from throughout the region descended upon the town in search of black farmers, with little attention given to whether the people they were attacking were even members of the Colored Alliance. The governor called in the National Guard, but they quickly dispersed as the mob grew out of control. By the time the deadly attacks came to an end, over twenty black citizens had lost their lives, with some reports claiming the number was closer to two hundred.
Although short-lived and little-known today, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and similar groups in the late 1800s made up the largest black political movement in the South before the modern civil rights movement. Black populism not only helped pave the way for later resistance among black sharecroppers, farmers, and other agrarian workers, but tilled the soil for a sustained mass black politics and the dreams of an alternative to a racist, plutocratic system.