Chalfant: Racism had various hues in Pettis County

While the Internet is a wonderful tool that provides users access to a wealth of material, historians realize that not all information is available online.

Most personal documents, such as diaries, have been made available. Many public records have not yet been digitalized. While old editions of some newspapers are available online through the Library of Congress, most are not. The careful researcher must study primary and secondary sources, and sometimes must travel to the repositories where such documents are kept.

In addition, the careful researcher must identify exactly what he or she is looking for. This often means defining abstract concepts in order to narrow the research.

In looking for evidence of racism in Pettis County, one must first define racism. Richard Schaeffer, author of Racial and Ethnic Groups, defines prejudice as “a negative feeling toward all members of a particular group.” If the target of the prejudice is a racial group, racism is the term used to define the negative feeling.

Racism may make itself manifest in many ways. One of the most obvious was the practice of slavery. In 1840, according to the federal census, Pettis County had 2,930 people; 552 of these were slaves. Only one free black lived here. By 1850, the county’s population had grown to 5,150, with 884 of these being slaves. An influx of settlers from Kentucky in the 1850s increased the county’s population of slaves to 1,880 in a total population of 9,392.

One of the most virulent examples of racism is the use of racial slurs such as the N-word. A review of both the Sedalia Democrat and Sedalia Bazoo, newspapers that supported the Democratic Party and Southern sympathizers, showed use of this epithet during the years after the Civil War.

In 1901, the Sedalia Weekly Sentinel printed a nasty piece of doggerel — some 14 stanzas — denouncing the notion of African Americans, identified by the N-word, taking over the White House after Booker T. Washington had lunch there at the invitation of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Another way racism may make itself known is through the segregation of members of a particular group. Sedalia’s neighborhoods were segregated, with most of the city’s blacks living in or near Lincolntown, a subdivision in the northern part of the city platted by George R. Smith in 1868, according to the plat maps at the Pettis County Recorder of Deeds office and the 1882 History of Pettis County.

Near the turn of the century, small black settlements developed near 20th Street and South Ohio Avenue, and later a few blacks lived near West 14th Street and South Harrison Avenue. Most neighborhoods were closed to African Americans.

In 1899, Sedalia Sentinel Editor George Scrutton proposed moving the “tough element,” more specifically the houses of prostitution, bars and dives on Main Street, to a neighborhood north of the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks, where “such an element would not be … a detriment to property values … or an insult to reputable and religious people.”

The residents of the area north of the tracks, primarily respectable, churchgoing, working-class African Americans, protested. The city did not comply with Scrutton’s request, much to the relief of the residents of Sedalia’s northside.

Sedalia’s public buildings also were segregated. Schools were segregated by state law. Blacks had to sit in the balcony at movie theaters. Most Sedalia restaurants were closed to blacks. This type of segregation existed until the 1950s and 1960s, when federal law banned segregation in public buildings.

An extreme example of segregation was the Sundown Ordinance, which in many towns prohibited African Americans from being in the town after dark. Sedalia’s Sundown Ordinance differed. It was primarily designed, according to both the Bazoo and the Democrat, to keep prostitutes and their cohorts from congregating on Main Street in the evenings.

However, the ordinance was used occasionally against African Americans. During the 1870s, newspaper reports show that African Americans with legitimate reasons for being on the streets after dark were stopped by the police and asked to demonstrate they were only engaged in lawful activity.

In one instance, a woman returning to home after a long day of work as a domestic servant was stopped and accused of stealing the kitchen chair she was carrying. After a number of questions asked her and her employer, police determined that the chair had been given to the woman by her employer.

In another instance of misapplication of the Sundown Ordinance, in July 1899, according to the Sedalia Sentinel, a group of African-American employees of the M.K.& T. Railroad passed through Sedalia on their way to their homes in Kansas City from Pleasant Green, where they had been working.

 Several citizens called the Sedalia Police, believing the men formed a mob “threatening to commit some horrible crime … and frightening several people to death.”

That white residents would suspect a group of men of being dangerous is an example of stereotyping, defined as “the practice of assuming that all members of a group share negative characteristics of a few members of the group.”

Detective Turner investigated the men and found they had done nothing wrong. Officer Williams escorted them to the city limits, where they were allowed to continue their journey.

These incidents of slavery, racial slurs, stereotyping and segregation reveal a pattern of racism in Sedalia and Pettis County.

Next week’s column describes a more dangerous type of racism: the organization of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.