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This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927. By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 281. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03950-8.)
Political and cultural authorities in Kansas regularly blamed outbreaks of racist violence on white southerners, usually men from Missouri who had ostensibly brought their reprobate traditions to the Sunflower State. Indeed, Kansas has long employed Dixie as a foil against which to present its own free state narrative of racial goodness. However, as Brent M. S. Campney thoroughly explicates in this book, Kansas (and, by extension, the American Midwest) was no bastion of tolerance, for "so-called southern-style" violence was manifest here from the earliest days of statehood (p. 217).
Campney opens This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 with the Civil War and Reconstruction. A variety of expulsions created "sundown towns," leaving the small black population of Kansas "concentrated in scattered pockets" and allowing white residents to "[reassert]...