Racial Justice and Public Land: On Charlotte Hinger’s “Nicodemus”

Charlotte Hinger | Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas | University of Oklahoma Press | 2016 | 280 Pages

In his 2014 Atlantic article, Ta-Nehisi Coates made the case for reparations. Citing degradations from slavery to present, Coates outlined the “multi-century plunder of black people in America” and helped push the reparations debate into mainstream U.S. politics. It has been the subject of a Congressional hearing and many debates among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.  Whether for or against reparations, most of the candidates’ ideas about racial politics find their seeds in the Post-Reconstruction ideologies of African American communities.

Kansas historian Charlotte Hinger uses one of these communities—Nicodemus, Kansas—as the lens through which to view racial politics at the national and local level in the Great Plains. In Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas, Hinger charts how freedpeople from the South founded Nicodemus during Reconstruction. The settlement became the largest and longest-surviving African American homesteader community in the country. Hinger focuses on three intellectual leaders of Nicodemus—Abram Hall, E.P. McCabe, and John Niles—and how they responded to the post-Civil War racial climate in the United States and in Kansas, in particular. Hall, McCabe, and Niles arrived early in the community’s development in 1878, and each man had a different vision for Nicodemus and for himself.

Any African American intellectual in the post-Civil War Era shares space with the American intellectual giant Booker T. Washington. At a time when Washington was on the rise, Hall mirrored Washington’s own philosophy of self-sufficiency. He helped early Nicodemus settlers file claims on homesteads, thereby assisting them in attaining the landownership with which they would build livelihoods. He worked tirelessly to create an image for the community as a beacon of African American achievement and self-improvement. However, his obsessive desire to see Nicodemus understood as such led him to dissuade the community from aiding and absorbing thousands of Exodusters—poor, black refugees from the South—that started arriving in 1879. He feared they might tarnish the reputation of the more established Nicodemus settlers and harm his land business. Still, Hall echoed Washington’s ideas of self-help—ideas that would remain influential in African American communities for years to come.  

McCabe and Hall had been friends in Chicago before they moved to Nicodemus together. McCabe worked with Hall to help Nicodemus survive in the early years of the colony, but he disagreed with Hall about the treatment of refugees. He wrote letters to Kansas Governor John St. John to encourage support for Exodusters. His was a proactive vision of African American political engagement. McCabe saw direct involvement in electoral politics as the best way to improve the lives of black Kansans—and to secure his career. His work as a leader in Nicodemus would see him appointed as a county clerk and then elected as state auditor in 1882, making him the highest-ranking black elected official outside of the South. After his election to state office, he left Nicodemus and spent most of his time in Topeka before leaving to lobby for the organization of Oklahoma into an all-black state. Hinger sees McCabe’s dogged political participation as a forbear to efforts that would eventually blossom into change during the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-twentieth century. 

Niles, Hinger’s third Nicodemus intellectual, was a “controversial and flamboyant” booster of the community. Unlike Hall and McCabe who had been born free, Niles, like most Nicodemus settlers, was born into slavery. He eschewed the strict self-help of Hall and advocated for reparations for time spent in slavery. During his time boosting Nicodemus, he became embroiled in multiple scandals; he was even accused of stealing aid meant for refugees. These accusations and Niles’s increasingly rancorous insistence on reparations hurt his reputation. By the early 1880s, Niles and his quest for reparations were largely ignored in Kansas political circles just as the U.S. House of Representatives would ignore John Conyers’ reparations study proposal (HR 40) a century later.

Hinger’s book builds on the tradition of scholars of the African American West like Robert G. Athearn, Nell Irvin Painter, and Quintard Taylor. She builds directly on the masterful work of Kenneth Hamilton whose research explores the history of all-black towns in the West and early Nicodemus in particular. Hinger succeeds in providing an intimate understanding of ideas about community, race, and politics in the most important rural African American community in the Great Plains. She skillfully does this by offering an analysis of Nicodemus as the center of racial politics that included the South and refugees fleeing to the plains. 

However, Hinger largely ignores one other intellectual thread in her analysis. Hall, McCabe, and Niles had all left Nicodemus before 1890, which makes Hinger’s book a story of early Nicodemus. The central ethos to Nicodemus’s history lasted long after these three men moved on. The missing thread rests in the land, or, as Nicodemus descendant Angela Bates puts it, in the settlers’ “lives, their blood, their sweat, their tears.”  An ethos of hard-fought liberty kept them on the land. Their resilience imbued each harvest with implied shouts of, “From owned to landowner!” Zachariah and Francis Fletcher exemplified this resilience when they built a new life in Nicodemus and found extra time to start Nicodemus’s first school in a dugout to teach the next generation. 

While missing from the narrative, the settlers who stayed on the land inherited their sense of community from Hall, McCabe, and Niles early in Nicodemus’s history. Hinger’s exploration of these leaders makes an important contribution to the history of racial politics in the United States and the Great Plains. Tens of thousands of African Americans moved from the South to the plains to claim land through a federal program, the Homestead Act. Nicodemus stands as a monument to the promise western land held for those homesteaders, and a reminder, to us all, of what is possible.

This review is part of our series on Midwestern history, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.