1. The first Colored Farmers Alliance was actually established four years earlier, in 1882, but it was not recorded in the official history of the organization by Gen. R. M. Humphrey in 1891. Milton George had helped establish this ÔNegro Alliance' in Prairie County, Arkansas, as documented in Roy V. Scott, "Milton George and the Farmer's Alliance Movement," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLV (June, 1958), p. 107.

2. This figure of one million plus is contested by Lawrence Goodwyn in Democratic Promise. He believes that a figure of 250,000 is a more accurate estimate of the number of those active in the Colored Farmers Alliance.

3. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt, p. 26 Ð Taken from Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis, 1967)

4. Federal efforts in 1869 to eliminate the Klan not withstanding, organizations such as these went underground, rearing their heads in even larger numbers throughout the remainder of the century.

5. A note on the names of the organizations I refer to in this paper: Keeping up with the correct name of the white Farmers alliance -- Southern or Northern -- organization is a research task in and of itself. Between 1887 and 1889 the growing ÔAlliance' shed no less than three names. Until 1887, with minor changes, it was the Farmer's State Alliance of Texas. In 1888, through merger with the Louisiana Farmers' Union, it became the National Farmer's Alliance and Cooperative Union. On September 30, 1889, it became officially the Farmer's and Laborers Union of America, after uniting forces with the Agricultural Wheel. In December of the same year, at the request of anticipated Northern affiliates, its name became The National Farmer's Alliance and Industrial Union; so it remained. Similarly, the organization central to this paper, the Colored Farmers Alliance, while registered officially as the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Co-Operative Union, is referred to interchangeably as the Colored Farmer's Alliance, Colored Farmer's Alliance and Cooperative Union, and the Colored Alliance.

6. Humphrey, ÔHistory of the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Co-Operative Union,' p. 290

7. Ibid, p.292

8. Meier, p. 100-118.

9. Humphrey, p. 290

10. Washington National Alliance, May 31, June 7, September 6, November 1, 1889; Richmond Planet, August 15, 1891; Kansas City American Citizen, July 26, 1889

11. For instance Saloutos, pp. 69-70 and Hicks, The Populist Revolt, p. 115

12. Cited from a web page on Kansas Farmers through the Stephen F. Austin State University history department website at http://www.libarts.sfasu.edu/history

13. Coombs, The Black Experience in America, Chapter 6 ÔFrom Slavery to Segregation'

14. Blackburn, "The Populist Party in the South, 1890-1898" pp.8, 16-17

15. Blackburn, Op. Cit., p. 10

16. James C. Bonner, "The Alliance Legislature of 1890" in Studies in Georgia History and Government, ed. by James C. Bonner and Lucien E. Roberts, Athens, 1940, p. 163

17. Names of delegates are found in Jamie Lawson Reddick, "The Negro and the Populist Movement in Georgia," Unpublished Master's thesis, June 1937, Atlanta University, p. 35, and National Economist, March 5, 1892. Each has a partial list.

18. Mabry, p. 28.

19. Figures taken from John Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 263

20. Henry D. Lloyd, "The Populists at St. Louis, " in The Review of Reviews, Vol. XIV, pp. 299-300

21. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, pp. 718-719. In fact, the entire final chapter, ÔThe Propaganda of History,' is one of the most devastating critiques of racist American historical scholarship.

22. Humphrey estimated approximately a quarter of the members of the Colored Farmers Alliance in 1891 were women. This figure, however, only partially includes the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of male members of the organization who made it logistically and materially possible for them to participate.

23. Edward Ayers' The Promise of the New South documents some of the activities of women in the Populist movement. I have yet to come across a single documented instance of an African-American woman's role in the the Colored Farmers Alliance or the Populist Movement as a whole.

24. Another potentially interesting source to pursue is that of the oral histories gathered by the Freedman's Bureau in their interviews in the South.

25. Douglass, Quarles, pp. 334-335

26. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, New York, 1940, pp. 40, 54. This viewpoint is brought out again in Dr. Du Bois's article, "From McKinley to Wallace," in the Marxist Monthly Masses-Mainstream, August 1948, p.4.