In Ozarks, violence followed by exodus: Pressure, limited opportunities and violence drove many blacks from Ozarks.

By Jefferson Strait Springfield News-Leader Online: http://v.l'Nw.springfieldnews-leader.com/webextra/tomI20501.html 12-4-2001

In the waking days of the 20th century, Ash Grove was dotted with homesteads, farms­and diversity. More than 150 black families lived in the area of rural Greene County.

Many black landowners dreamed of passing on the land they worked so hard to acquire in the decades after the Civil War to generations of their descendants.

The Berrys did just that. Moses Berry and his family live in the same house near Ash Grove his great grandparents built a few years after they were released from slavery in 1865.

The Rev. Moses Berry lives in the house of his great-grandfather, William Berry, in Ash Grove. Dean Curtis / News-Leader

But the Berrys stand alone. Berry believes his is the only black family in the Ash Grove area living on the land of family long past.

"1 remember my grandmother saying they may have driven some ofthese people out of the area, but she wasn'tgoing anywhere," Berry said.

Ozarks experts believe some blacks were pressured off their property by land-grabs, both legal and illegal, in the early 20th Century. But most believe limited opportunities and violent incidents - such as lynchings in Springfield and Pierce City in the early 1900s - had more to do witll the virtual disappearance of black landowners in southwest Missouri.

"It was kind of clear that if you hung around, you were dead," Pierce City historian Murray Bishoffhas said about the lynching and buming of black citizens' homes there in 1901.

Census numbers from the early part of the century show that many blacks left the area near the time of the lynchings. In 1900, according to census figures, there were 3,298 blacks in Greene County, about 6.26 percent of the total population. Ten years later, there were about 11,000 more people living in Greene County, but almost 700 fewer blacks.

"It had a very large effect on the psyche of people," Berry said of the violence. "These kinds of events take their toll. People would go 'Jeez, this happened in Springfield, this could happen to me.'"

Over the years, black populations have remained small while the white population has soared, leaving Springfield the sixth-whitest city in the United States, according to the 2000 census.

"I'm sure (the lynchings) left a scar," said Denny Whayne, who became the first black city councilman to serve in Springfield in more than a century when he was elected last year. "Otherwise it wouldn't be the sixth whitest city in the nation."

Violence, lawsuits, jobs

Southwest Missouri State University English professor Katherine Lederer, who has spent years researching black history in Springfield, estimates she has come across 12 to 15 instances of land unfairly wrested from black hands.

Methods varied. Lederer knows of one black farmer who was burned from his home in Nogo, a tiny, train-stop settlement east of Springfield. Whether the man owned the land or not is unclear, but the family did give up fanning and moved to Springfield.

But "it didn't always have to be violence," Lederer said. "In a suit a black man or a woman wasn't going to win. Things happened that way and people got cheated."

One example: A Springfield man named Fleming McCullah bought a piece of land from a white man, built a house on it and began his life. Later, a white man came and laid claim to the land. It turned out the man who had sold McCullah the land had double-sold it. .

McCullah, who had been sold the land first, took the case to court. The judge found in favor of the white landowner.

Still, that didn't stop McCullah. "So he bought it again," said Lederer, "the same property, only it cost more this time

because it had a house on it - his house." Other practices may have been legal, but unscrupulous. Lederer came across one instance in

which a black elderly couple was buying a house from a white man - they had been making payments every month for years. When the husband died, the white owner called in the outstanding payment. The woman, who had never worked, couldn't pay the entire amount.

"So the land owner allowed her to live there and keep making payments," Lederer said. "Only now it was rent."

In addition to lynchings and land grabs, discrimination and scarce opportunities were factors in the drop in the number of blacks in the Ozarks, Lederer said. She said she once saw a city phone directory from the early part of the century with advertisements of white-owned businesses - and which ones hired black people.

"There were very limited jobs for blacks," Lederer said. Many were forced to move to other areas to find work. Berry said many left farms in rural counties for the big city because, like many of their white counterparts, they couldn't make a financial go of it.

And, added Lederer, the climate after the lynchings probably wasn't one of tolerance. "The main thing after that was simply the attitude, having demonstrated that they could do it

and would do it," she said. "A lot of people just didn't want to live under that threat." And it wasn't always necessarily blacks who were pushed out, Lederer said. Poor whites

may have also been at a disadvantage to defend their possessions when someone more powerful had something to gain.

"It's not always white pushing black. It's big pushing small," she said. "It was just a lot easier to push black."

Impact of 1906 lynching

The impact that the 1906 lynching of three black men had for landowners in Springfield is unclear. Lederer said hundreds may have left the city soon after the lynching, but returned in coming days. She isn't aware of anyone who lost land then.

"That's not to say that nothing like that happened because of the lynchings, but I don't think that was the real cause."

She does, however, feel that Springfield is a different place today because ofthe events -culturally, if not economically. Moving to Springfield in the 1960s, she was amazed when she would meet white people who had never met a black person.

"A radio news man said .. . to me once, 'I guess I've led a sheltered life. I grew up on the south side and I've never seen black people.'

"To me that's incomprehensible."

Whayne said he would like nothing more than to see closure to the lynchings and focus on good things happening in the community. The events of the past left a terrible mark, but "it still doesn't mean it's not a good place to be."

The quest for black-owned land may have played a bigger role in violence that occurred near the tum of the century in Pierce City, one historian believes.

When Bishoff, the managing editor of the Monett Times, learned about the lynchings and riots that drove scores of black families from the town in 1901, he was amazed something so gruesome could happen so close to home.

Ten years later, he's made a life out of it, writing newspaper articles, reliving every moment of the lynching and the events that surrounded it. He's spent much of the past decade searching for a reason.

Today, he thinks he might have found one. A quest for the property owned by the around 200 black people who lived in the community

then may have been part of the reason for the lynching and the riots which drove them out of town, Bishoff believes.

"This is the thing that struck me cold one day," he said. "They tell us in our business 'follow the money trail. '" Owners of a real estate agency in the city at that time "were the only ones who could profit from this."

In researching the riot and the surrounding events, Bishoffhas come across land records that show the company took control of the two black churches in the town - St. Paul's Baptist and the African Methodist Episcopal Church - and sold them for profit. He's also found a Joplin Globe article describing the aftermath three days after the riot:

"The negroes will be allowed to return and get their property and the white men stand ready to buy their real estate," the Aug. 22, 1901 article read. "After this is done, they must leave the town."

A recent investigation by the Associated Press backs that up. The AP documented the cases of nine Pierce City blacks who lost a total of 30 acres of farmland and 10 city lots. Whites bought it all at bargain prices.

For years, while working on a book, Bishoff has pondered the oddities of the riot, which lasted for five hours. He's wondered if the 1,000 people who showed up for the lynching were fueled by someone who could benefit from the black-owned land.

"There's stories about the 9 o'clock train loaded with people. How did they get the word?" If owners of the real estate company didn't contribute to the riot, they were at least willing

opportunists, Bishoffbelieves. "I see them very much in the midst of taking advantage of what happened, because a mob

does not do its business in five hours. A inob will run out of steam in 90 minutes." If the real estate company did playa hand in the riot, the roots may have begun seven years

before. In 1894 a black man was lynched in nearby Monett after a white railroad employee was

killed in an altercation near a saloon. A white citizen's committee then invited the black population to leave, a contemporary newspaper account said.

Monett would continue to prosper in later years, while the influence of Pierce City declined. "When Monett became all white and prospered," noted Bishoff, "I very much see the real

estate company seeing ... a real advantage to leveling the playing field by becoming all white too." If boosting the local economy was anyone's intention, it didn't work in the long run. Today,

Pierce City - exacerbated by the decay of railroad traffic to the west and the general decline of small-town businesses - has dwindled to about half the 3,000 people who lived there at the tum of the century. The city did log more than $100,000 in sales tax revenue this year, however.

Bishoff said it's unclear what the community would be like today if the lynching, riots and house burnings hadn't occurred. Because blacks in the town didn't own businesses, it may have been hard for them to flourish economically, he said.

"It's hard to imagine that Pierce City could have grown much more," he said. "I think there were enough forces at play that Pierce City would have faced much the same fate as it has -whether or not the blacks had stayed there."

Cultural savvy

Berry often thinks about the traits his great-grandparents must have had to make the transition from becoming the property of local slave owners to owning property themselves, how through it all - the lynchings and the Great Depression and rough agricultural times that drove many from the farms - his family endured.

He believes a lot of it may have had to do with their personalities, a cultural savvy he once saw exhibited in his grandmother.

He was 12. A white man had come to buy a handful of cows from his grandmother and offered a ridiculously low price.

"Well, boss, I don't think I can do that," his grandmother said. The man said it was his final offer. "I thank you, boss," she said, and the man left. A few minutes later he retumed. "Maybe you were right." As frustrating and embarrassing as it was to him then, that his grandmother didn't just laugh

at the man's offer or at least tell him how unfair it was, Berry realizes today that his grandmother's shoe-shuffling timidity was necessary, a way of surviving. After all, her goal had only been to sell the cows.

It was this know-how which Barry believes led his ancestors to thrive - ·or at least get by in a world where a small offense could result in a big injustice.