The Back-to-Africa Movement in Faulkner County 
by Kenneth C. Barnes

Editor's Note: Kenneth C. Barnes, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. The Faulkner County Historical Society is proud to publish this article on a previously-forgotten important event in the history of our county. Dr. Barnes is also the translator of Leitstern, the 1880 guide to the St. Joseph Colony recently reprinted by our Society. 

On the morning of April 6, 1889 the German steamer Gellert made its way into New York harbor after a two-week voyage from Hamburg on the North Sea. Passengers speaking German, and probably Yiddish and several eastern European languages, must have chattered excitedly about their dreams for a better life in America. One can imagine that many eyes became misty as they beheld the Statue of Liberty, torch held high, while the ship passed by on its way to Castle Garden, the arrival point for immigrants in the port of New York. On that same day, a small bark, the Monrovia, left New York harbor packed to the brim with black families from the American South who were leaving the United States to return to their ancestral homeland of Africa. Perhaps the two ships passed each other in the harbor. While millions of eastern and southern Europeans were coming to America to follow their dream of political freedom and economic opportunity, thousands of black Americans were equally anxious to get out of this country. On board the Monrovia were John and Elissa Johnson and their six children, from Conway, Arkansas. 

The dream to repatriate American blacks back to Africa began early in the nineteenth century when some abolitionists founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817. The Society was instrumental in the founding of the African Republic of Liberia and had settled nearly 13,000 blacks there before the Civil War. The situation radically changed, however, when Northern victory in 1865 brought freedom, citizenship, and even voting rights for African Americans. The Back-to-Africa work of the American Colonization Society practically ended. Why would blacks desire to move to Africa if they had the rights of all other Americans? 

But as Reconstruction ended and conservative white Democrats who had supported the Confederacy reclaimed power throughout the South, the situ- ation for African Americans changed dramatically. By the late 1870s in Deep- South states where blacks were a majority of the population, like South Carolina and Mississippi, white Democrats used electoral fraud, intimidation, and violence to take away the newly won black rights and to keep black votes from electing Republican officials. In South Carolina the terror was so ruthless that blacks besieged the ACS to send them to Africa. When the Society could not accommodate them, black South Carolinians in 1878 formed their own Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, bought a ship, and trans- ported a shipload of blacks to West Africa.(l)

As conditions for blacks deteriorated, the Back-to-Africa movement thus was revived. The movement came to Arkansas when an emigration club was organized in 1878 around Helena in Phillips County, one of Arkansas's Deep- South counties where blacks outnumbered whites. During the next two years 126 settlers from Phillips County sailed on ships of the ACS for Liberia.(2)

The movement came to central Arkansas in the early 1880s when thousands of blacks from South Carolina arrived in a mass migration. Edgefield County was the center of this exodus to Arkansas just as it had also been the focus of the Back-to-Africa movement a few years before. Some plantation districts were literally depopulated from a mass migration around Christmas 1881; most of these blacks from Edgefield County settled along the railroad from Little Rock to Russellville, with the largest number apparently in Conway County. They brought with them to Arkansas their dream of one day returning to Africa. By 1883 black residents around Plumerville, in southeastern Conway County, had formed a Liberia Exodus Association and in December three from Plumerville sailed to Liberia aboard the bark Monrovia.(3) 

Fon Louis Gordon, in her recent book, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920, argues that thousands of black settiers came to Arkansas in the years immediately following the Civil War viewing the state as a promised land offering a better life. Arkansas' s black population grew faster, in aggregate numbers and proportionally, than that of all other Southern states between 1870 and 1890.(4) The arrival of large numbers of black settlers in Faulkner County transformed the racial and political situation in the county. The black population more than doubled between 1880 and 1890 (from 1,418 to 3,348) with the percentage black increasing in these same years from 11 to 18 percent.(5)

Moreover, the larger black population became a political problem for the white Democratic authorities who ran the county. In 1882 two organizations for small farmers were founded in Arkansas: the Agricultural Wheel and the Brothers of Freedom. The aim of both organizations was to rescue poor farmers from the hopeless cycle of mortgage debt and tenancy which farmers believed kept them chained to the interests of merchants, bankers, and lawyers in town. The rural neighborhoods of Faulkner County sponsored several chapters of these organizations, and even made efforts to incorporate black citizens into the movement.(6) In fact, Arkansas's two home-grown agrarian populist movements formally merged in 1885 at a meeting in Greenbrier, keeping the name of the Agricultural Wheel. 

By the mid-1880s the farmers had become a threat to the rule of post- Reconstruction white Democrats. The Wheel nominated its own slate for county offices in 1886 and 1888, under the populist Union Labor Party ticket. In neighboring Conway County, the splintering effects of this third party devastated white Democratic control. With the farmers defecting from the Democratic party, the Republicans, who relied on the black vote, won the county elections of 1884 and 1886.(7) Faulkner County Democrats surely feared the same thing could happen in their county. Black voters had become a threat to white Democratic rule and thus became all the more vulnerable by the mid to late 1880s. This political tension formed the context within which the Liberia emigration movement grew in Faulkner County. 

In early 1886 a native African, J. C. Hazeley, arrived in Arkansas to recruit settlers for Liberia on behalf of the American Colonization Society. He visited Helena, Little Rock, Augusta, Newport, Fort Smith, and points in between, including possibly Conway. Professor Hazeley, as he titled himself, presented quite a grand lecture and panorama with over one hundred pictures in his exhibit, all for the admission price of fifteen cents, ten cents for children under 10. Evidently several black residents of Faulkner County attended his show, for in April Hazeley asked the secretary of the ACS, William Coppinger, to send copies of the Society's paper, the African Repository, to eleven men from Conway and four from Cato. One of the Conway men referred by Hazeley, John Johnson, named his baby born that year Monrovia, presumably for the capital of the Republic ofLiberia. Three years later the Johnson family would leave for West Africa.(8)

Back-to-Africa Movement in Conway 

Within a year's time of Hazeley's panorama, a serious Liberia emigration movement had awakened in Conway. Led by the Reverend J. K. Ware, a Baptist preacher in Conway, twenty-four African Americans formally applied to emigrate through the ACS in February 1887. In his fractured written English, Ware told secretary Coppinger: "I have consulted a large Number of people that has give me thy word that thy will cross over if the raingment can be made... We have offt thought that it would be a plasure for us to get home." The Conway group wanted to leave the following fall. Ware asked Coppinger to explain the costs of transportation and to send them books and newspapers so they could learn more about Africa.(9)

Ware continued to work for the movement. Later in February he announced to Coppinger that he had many more names of applicants to send him. However, many of his people were widows and children, he worried. They could not pay their way, Ware said, but they have "as much right to go as I do." Ware went on to organize emigration clubs in Pulaski and Perry counties and another in Macon County, Alabama. By the summer he was getting ready to sell the eighty acres of improved farmland he owned. Ware informed Coppinger that he had recruited a young "first choice" school teacher from Perry County to accompany the Conway emigrants. However, his people wished to make one more crop before they left.(10)

Reverend Ware thereafter disappeared from the record. The emigration club in Conway, however, survived. The next year, John Johnson of Conway wrote to the ACS office in Washington, D.C.: 

Conway Ark. Aug 7th 1888 

Mr. President 
Dear Sir: 

You will please send me some information touching African emigration. Be not weary with this question for we are dul of comprehension and as there is a clause in the pamplets we have received heretofore, stateing the amount each emigrant is expected to pay for passage to Liberia, that we don't exactuly understand, I write once more asking an explanation on this point. We have a club organized which is our reason for seeking information times change and so do laws and regulations. 

Very respt. 
John Johnson 

Evidently, Johnson received information that satisfied him, for in early January 1889 he sent in $70 to the ACS to secure passage to Liberia for himself and his family. On April 6, 1889, he, his wife Elissa, and six children sailed from New York with 42 others bound for Liberia.(11)

Perhaps the Johnson family sent favorable reports from Liberia back to Conway, for the Africa migration movement in Faulkner County grew rapidly thereafter. However, by 1890 blacks had more compelling reasons to wish to leave the area. The political power of African Americans had been magnified by casting their votes in coalition with those of poor white farmers. In the 1890 election the farmers' Union-Labor ticket contained a combination of Republican and populist candidates, and the fusion ticket won the county .(12) Thus by 1890 Democratic leaders throughout Arkansas determined to remove the black vote, and by so doing, to destroy the opposition alliance of the poor. The next session of the state legislature passed legislation instituting the secret ballot and poll tax, measures designed specifically to curb or remove the votes belonging to the illiterate or poor. While they were at it, the legislature went on to pass the separate train coach law which forcibly segregated train cars, the beginning of Jim Crow in Arkansas.(13) 

Arkansas Blacks Face White Violence 

The situation for blacks in Arkansas quickly worsened in the early 1890s. While only three lynchings occurred in Arkansas in 1890, by 1891 the number had risen to eight. In 1892 nineteen black men and women were lynched in the state.(14) Faulkner County had seen a lynching in 1884 after a black man named Tom Wilson had reportedly attempted a sexual assault against a married white woman. As the constable transported Wilson to jail in Conway, a band of masked men overtook him and hung Wilson to the limb of an oak tree. This event was nearly re-enacted in April 1890 when a black man in Conway, Charles Humphreys, reportedly attacked a white woman at her residence on Robinson Street. The Arkansas Gazette reported that "the town was wild with excitement." When it looked as if a lynching would occur, Sheriff L. B. Dawson took Humphreys to a Little Rock jail for safekeeping. Similarly the next year, August 1891, the county sheriff flagged down a freight train to take a black murder suspect to Little Rock to keep enraged Conway townspeople from lynching him.(15) 

With this sort of environment, Conway's Liberia emigration club became larger and well organized. By late 1889 it claimed fifty families as members and was led by G. W. Pounds as president and J. E. Walker, secretary. Letters from Conway began to pour in to the ACS office in Washington, D.C., requesting information about travel costs, the weather, soil and climate of Liberia.(16)

The American Colonization Society clearly led the members of the Conway emigration club to believe they would be transported to Africa in the spring of 1891. The Arkansas Colored Convention, which met in Little Rock in January 1890, elected the Reverend Joseph H. Harris, a black preacher in Conway, to represent the state at the national Colored Convention held in Washington, D.C., in early February. While in Washington, Harris met and talked with William Coppinger, a white man from Pennsylvania, who almost singlehandedly ran the business of the ACS as its executive secretary. After his return, Harris wrote to Coppinger frequently in 1890, by November telling him he had 185 settlers from Conway ready to go to Africa.(17)

The ACS in these years typically made three crossings a year to Liberia, taking about fifty settlers on each voyage. They expected emigrants to make some payment for their transportation which cost around $100 per adult passenger. By the end of 1890, the Conway applicants expected a spring departure and had sent in a total of $197 to the ACS office in Washington for their passage. Some were selling their possessions and land. Reverend I. M. Suggs said that he had sold everything but what he had packed in his trunks, ready to go. He had even sold the family's dishes. But by February their hopes were dashed when the applicants learned that there was no room for them on the spring voyage. The Conway applicants lost their spots on the steamer Liberia to forty-five emigrants from neighboring Morrilton. One of the Conway emigration club members, John L. Rilhard, wrote to Washington saying they were sorry they could not go to Africa, but that they "still stand organized as a club in Conway, Ark." Reverend Suggs, who had sold out anticipating a quick departure, was less amicable. He wrote requesting his money back, explaining he had been forced to move and buy a house again in Forrest City. Reverend Harris later explained to Secretary Coppinger that Suggs was labelling the ACS a fraud for not taking the Conway applicants and encouraging others to get back their money. Suggs or other discouraged applicants spread the rumor that the ACS had only sent five colored people to Liberia in the last five years.(18)

Blacks in Rural Faulkner County Consider Emigration 

Despite the discouragement in Conway, the Liberia emigration movement spread throughout Faulkner County in 1890 and 1891. By late 1890, J. L. Woodard, a school teacher who claimed a second-grade education, was organizing an emigration club in Wooster. Within a few months, sixty-nine black residents of the Wooster area had applied to emigrate. Woodard was 
particularly interested in getting federal assistance for Africa emigrants, asking Secretary Coppinger for information about a proposed law by which "Congrist shall aid in insist the collard population" to get from their homes to the embarkation point. Woodard had evidently heard of the Butler Bill, proposed in 1890 by South Carolina Senator Matthew Butler, by which the federal government would provide transportation for southern blacks who wished to leave the United States permanently. The bill never came to a vote, but discussion of the bill fanned the flames of the Back-to-Africa movernent throughout the South. Woodard even asked Coppinger if England might aid them in their emigration efforts.(19) By later in 1891 the Wooster club was sending in contributions toward transportation to Liberia. When they were not granted passage in 1891 or early 1892, one member of the company, S. J. Jenkins, wrote the ACS offering $250 in addition to what they had already contributed, in order for them to get on the spring 1893 voyage. Although 148 individuals from the Wooster area formally applied to ernigrate to Liberia, it appears that none actually made the journey .(20)

Besides the Wooster and Conway emigration clubs, another group organized in Pinnacle Springs in the northern part of the county. Pinnacle Springs was a community on the North Cadron Creek two miles west of present-day Guy. Founded just a few years earlier, it was a sizeable settlement by 1890 with a 40-room hotel, several stores, a junior college, and a ferry crossing the creek.(21) Race relations became more tense in the area in fall 1890 when white and black residents quarrelled over title to some government homestead land. A white man named James Cook had filed an ejection suit in circuit court to remove a black man named Jackson from some property both men claimed. After a deputy sheriff removed Jackson and Cook took possession of the homestead, eleven black men and one woman showed up at his doorstep and shot Cook, though not fatally. Authorities promptly arrested the offending blacks, but the neighborhood was much astir over the incident.(22)

Shortly afterward, Thomas Riley, a black man frorn near Pinnacle Springs, wrote to the ACS for information about how to ernigrate to Africa. By 1892 an emigration club was formed there with H. Bailey as the chair.(23) One black man from the area, Harvey Hopson, a farmer and carpenter, had a farm of 120 acres he was trying to sell in order to get to Africa. His main concern was that he could ship a seven-foot wooden box to Liberia containing his carpentry tools. By 1891 Hopson and his neighbors became discouraged, like the Conway and Wooster applicants, when they could not secure spaces on the departing ships. In July 1891 Hopson wrote to Washington that his friends "say it is all humbug we've made applications, no action." But he would not give up, writing again the next month, "I am determined to go to Liberia. Near all the men rond me have give out going to that good land." By May 1892 several of the forty-eight applicants from Pinnacle Springs began to ask for their money back.(24) 

Besides these emigration clubs, the ACS received applications or inquiries about emigration to Africa from Mayflower, Preston (located between Mayflower and Conway ), Lollie, and Damascus. Some of these letters show careful reflection on the part of the authors and a growing sense of black nationalism as the Jim Crow laws eroded any sense of identification with white America. For example, Scott Edwards wrote from Mayflower: 

Sirs, haveing studied our cases we thing that Africa would be the best place for us. So we write to you for informations first what arnount of money will each emigrant have to pay the Society. What age if any difference would midled age men be excepted I am a farmer and carpernter i would like to help to build up the home of my forefathers and thare are maney that are looking the same way. Please send some books and papers on the Africa migration. Please direct same to Mayflower PO Faulkner County, Arkansas to Scott Edwards. Yours truely, 

Scott Edwards.(25)

A.D. Allen from Damascus gushed enthusiastically about the prospects of a government by, of, and for black people: "I hardly know how to address you as I am so much hape up at the thoughts of such a glorious country for the colored man, as ruling and governing among themselves."(26)

The white reaction to the Back-to-Africa movement is difficult to establish. Some white Southerners apparently agreed with the Butler Bill and hoped that blacks would leave the South exclusively for white citizens. Others obviously were dependent on the labor of black workers and could not afford for them to emigrate. In neighboring Conway County, the emigration clubs took disguised names, calling themselves Young Men's Associations, in order to conceal their true purpose from white neighbors. With two emigration clubs each in Menifee, Plumerville, and Morrilton, and several others elsewhere and nearly 1,300 blacks formally applying to leave for Africa, Conway County literally faced the loss of a significant portion of the agricultural labor force.(27) But even in the town of Conway, Reverend Joseph Harris asked the ACS secretary to send mail in unmarked envelopes without return addresses. He said: "Our mail is being intercepted, and opened, just how and by whom we can not tell." Harris explained that some of his outgoing mail to Washington had been "seized on the way, as the whites are doing all they can to prevent the movement." After the Conway applicants failed to get places on the Liberia steamers, white residents apparently said Harris had duped his followers. He wrote complaining to Washington: "I am having a hard time here among the white neighbors because I stand firm for Liberia and my race. They have found a few colored men ungrateful enough to take the stand against me in these matters. They say I fooled a lot of good colored citizens and made them send their money off on a false pretext." However, the correspondence shows that Harris dutifully asked Washington to send back contributions when his club members asked him to do so.(28) 

Liberian Emigration Movement Declines

It is not certain exactly how long the dream to go to Africa lasted in Faulkner County. Secretary William Coppinger of the ACS died suddenly in February 1892, just before the arrival in New York City of about fifty black emigrants from Morrilton authorized for the March departure and thirty four unauthorized migrants from McCrory (Woodruff County) who just descended on New York City expecting passage. In a maze of confusion in the weeks that followed, the McCrory blacks were resettled in New York and the Morrilton blacks shipped on to Liberia. Thereafter, lacking an executive secretary, the ACS scaled back its emigration program. Even the record-keeping broke down by later in 1892 so that it is impossible to know how many Southern blacks wrote letters begging for passage to Africa. In frustration with the ACS, some prominent black church leaders, led by the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry M. Turner of Atlanta, organized the International Migration Society in 1894 with its headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. This society chartered steamships during the next two years to transport approximately five hundred Southern blacks to Liberia, about half of them from the Pine Bluff and Forrest City areas of Arkansas.(29) The scraps of correspondence preserved in the records of the ACS suggest that Faulkner County blacks may have retained their Africa dream for some years to come. In 1894 a black man from Lollie wrote saying he had worked up five hundred people to go to Liberia. They all wanted to go, he said, but they had very little money. As late as 1897, Reverend L. M. Bell of Wooster, who had applied to emigrate back in 1891, again asked the ASC to send him and his friends to Liberia, saying "a great many want to go."(30)

It appears that black residents of Faulkner County, like elsewhere in Arkansas, had powerful motivations to leave not just the area but the entire United States. As J. S. Smith of Conway wrote to the ACS in 1890: "Your all don't know how we are treated this is the reasing we all want to git a way."(31) Their efforts to escape, however, were largely unsuccessful. One wonders what were the experiences of the one black family from Faulker County, the Johnsons, who made it to their promised land of Liberia. 

Footnotes:

(l) For more information on the South Carolina to Liberia migration, see George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negroes 1877-1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 153-168; and William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Contro1 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 138-167.

(2) African Repository, 55 (July 1879): 88 and 56 (August 1880): 82-83. For an examination of this early Arkansas migration to Africa, see Adell Patton, Jr.. "The 'Back-to-Africa' Movement in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Summer 1992): 164-177. 

(3) For information about the South Carolina exodus to central Arkansas in 1880 and l881 see Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 169-177. For the record of the Plumerville emigration club, see African Repository 60 (January 1884): 30-36. 

(4) Louise Gordon, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 8-22. 

(5)Compendium ofthe Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892), 476. 

(6) Arkansas Gazette, August 26, 1884. 

(7) For an examination of the situation in Conway County, see Kenneth C. Barnes, "Who Shot John Clayton? Politica1 Violence in Conway County, Arkansas in the 1880s," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 42 (Winter 1993): 371-404. 

(8) See Hazeley's correspondenceto William Coppinger, January-April, 1886, in American Colonization Society Records, microfilm reel 128. Original manuscripts are housed in the Library of Congress. Hereinafter cited as ACS Records. The flyer advertising Hazeley' s lecture was used in Parsons, Kansas in the following fall, and sent to Coppinger by a skeptical black man who asked if Professor Hazeley had actually seen Africa. See A. A. Shelton to Coppinger, October 30, 1886, ACS Records, reel 129. 

(9) J. K. Ware to Coppinger, February 13, 1887, ACS Records, reel 129. 

(10) Ware to Coppinger, late February, 1887 (actual date is torn off), reel 129, August 30, 1887, ACS Records, reel 130. 

(11) Johnson to ACS, August 7, 1888, reel 131 and January 22, 1889, reel 132, ACS Records; African Repository 65 (July 1889): 94. 

(12) Arkansas Gazette, August 5, 1890. [See also two articles published in Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings, 14 (Spring 1972): Mary Beth Sudduth, "Central Arkansas Valley Agrarian Thought on the Ocala Convention of 1890," pp. 3-11, and Mark Paul Thessing, "The Agricultural Wheel in Faulkner County," pp. 13-20.] 

(13) For a discussion of these measures, see John Graves, Town and Country; Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 150-163. 

(14) Thirty Years of Lynching jn the Unjted States, 1889-1918 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 48. 

(15) Arkansas Gazette, February 21,1884, April 10, 1890; Robert W. Meriwether, "A Lynching Thwarted (1891)," Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings 33 (Fall/Winter 1991), 10-11. 

(16) G. W. Pounds and J. E. Walker to Coppinger, September 14, 1889; Walker to Coppinger, October 30, 1889, reel 133; Alex Samuel to Coppinger, May 13, 1890; G. W. Davis to Coppinger, May 16, 1890; Arthur Hill to Coppinger, August 17, 1890, reel 134, ACS Records. 

(17) Harris to Coppinger, November 17, 1890, reel 134, ACS Records. 

(18) J.M. Suggs to Coppinger, December 24, 1890; Harris to Coppinger, December 27, 1890; application from Freeman Loftoll, December 1890; Suggs to Coppinger, February 3,1891; John L. Rilhard to Coppinger, February 18,1891, reel 136, ACS Records. Harrist to Coppinger, June 9, 1891, unsigned Conway letter, July 24,1891, reel 137, ACS Records. 

(19) J. S. Woodard to Coppinger, August 27, 1890, reel 134, ACS Records; Woodard to Coppinger. April 10, 1891, ree1137. ACS Records. For more information on the Butler Bill, see Edwin S. Redkey. Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back- to-Africa Movements. 1890-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 59. 72
. 
(20) S. J. Jenkins to J. Ormond Wilson. August 24. 1892. reel 141. ACS Records. 

(21) For more on Pinnacle Springs, see Jimmy Glover, "Pinnac1e Springs," Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings 7 (Summer 1965), 21-27; and Arkansas Gazette, March 21, 1888. 

(22) Arkansas Gazette, October 29. 1890. 

(23) Thomas Riley to ACS, December 18, 1890, reel 135. ACS Records; H. Bailey to ACS. May 17, 1892, reel 140, ACS Records.

(24) Harvey Hopson to Coppinger, March 19, 29, 1891, reel 136, ACS Records; Hopson to Coppinger, July 16, 29, 1891, reel 137, ACS Records; Hopson to Coppinger, August 20, 1891, reel 138, ACS Records; H. Bailey to ASC, May 17, 1892, reel 140, ACS Records.

(25) Scott Edwards to ACS, June 28, 1892, reel 141, ACS Records.

(26) A.D. Allen to ACS, June 22, 1891, reel 137, ACS Records. Other letters from Mayflower, Preston, and Lollie include J. S. T. Ware to Coppinger, August 30, 1890, reel 134. ACS Records; application form from Preston, September 1891, reel 138. ACS Records; A. Rentles to Coppinger. September 30, 1892, reel 141. ACS Records. 

(27) For some of the Conway County letters, see W. K. Fortson to Coppinger. July 9. 1890. reel 134, ACS Records; W. A. Diggs to Coppinger, April 21, 1891; John R. Jimison to Coppinger, April 22, 1891; D. H. Patterson to Coppinger. May 26, 1891, reel 137, ACS Records. 

(28) Harris toCoppinger, December 11, 1890, reel 135, ACS Records; Harris to Coppinger, late December 1891, reel 139, ACS Records. 

(29) See Redkey, Black Exodus, 195-251. 

(30) A. Buttes (unclear) to J. Ormond Wilson, 1894 (date torn off), reel 145, ACS Records; L. M. Bell to ACS, December 3, 1897, reel 144, ACS Records. 

(31) J. S. Smith to Coppinger, December 8, 1890, reel 135, ACS Records.