African Americans in Davenport, Iowa, comprise the third largest black community in Iowa with a history that precedes the Civil War.
Geography and demographics The Quad-Cities, with Davenport as the largest member, has for years been one of five cities that have been home to a majority of the state's black population. The others are Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Iowa City, and Coralville. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, these cities held 55.2% of Iowa's black population. , 2013, Iowa Data Center
From the 2008 U.S. Census estimated population of 99,514, 9.2% (9,200 citizens) in the Davenport metro area identified as African-American. For comparison, the average African-American population in Iowa cities is 2.5%. In recent history, Davenport has been home to the third-largest, in absolute numbers and percentage, African-American community in Iowa, behind both Coralville (2,647 in 2019) and Waterloo (9,529 in 2000, 8,398 in 1980, 10,600 in 2019), and originally behind Des Moines (16,025 in 2000, 13,164 in 1980). In 2000, 9,093 (9.3%) of Davenport's population was African-American, up from 6,229 in 1980, and in 2019, it was 11,939 (11.67%)."African Americans in Iowa: 2009" . State Data Center of Iowa. Retrieved 2009-02-25
The United States Census Bureau estimated that from 2005 to 2007, there was a larger black community in the Davenport: 11,300 persons or almost 12% of the city.Ed Tibbetts, "Q-C minority population grows steadily, census data shows", Quad City Times, 12 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-02-25
+Black alone (non-Hispanic) population (2020)CityPopulationBlack pop% BlackDes Moines214,13324,53811.46%Davenport101,72411,83311.63%Cedar Rapids137,71014,15310.28%Waterloo67,31412,03117.87%Iowa City74,828Dubuque59,667Sioux City85,7974,9315.75%Coralville22,318State of Iowa3,190,369129,3214.05%
History
19th century African-Americans settled in Davenport as early as the 1830s. Iowa was a free territory; and a free state when it joined the Union late in 1846. Dred Scott, whose legal fight for freedom was ruled on in the 1857 Dred Scott Decision of the United States Supreme Court, lived with his family in Davenport as he followed his master to various military postings in the Midwest. Scott and his wife based their appeal for freedom on the fact that they had been held for extended periods of time in free states and territories, including Scott's stay with his master in Davenport in 1834–1836. An historic plaque was installed at the site of Scott's residence in Davenport.Tom Saul, "Much of Davenport's black history lost to the wrecking ball", Quad City Times, 14 February 2009
There were two major periods of African-American migration to Davenport. In the years up to and including the Civil War and the second, the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th century. In the 19th century, African-Americans fleeing both slavery and the Civil War came to Davenport because it was a major port in a free territory on the Mississippi River. They found ports in Missouri, a slave state, too hostile even for free black migrants. In Davenport, white residents became agitated in meetings and newspaper petitions against continued African-American migration to the city were circulated.Leslie A Schwalm. "'Overrun with Free Negroes': Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest", Civil War History, Vol. 50, Number 2, June 2004, pp. 145–174.
On October 31, 1865, months after the Civil War, 700 members of the 60th U.S. Infantry Colored Regiment met at Camp McClellan in Davenport to rally for the right to vote and other civil rights. It was an early meeting in a campaign that resulted in an Iowa referendum in which voters granted the right to vote in 1868 to African-Americans. Alexander Clarke of Muscatine, elected to preside over the meeting, telling the audience, "[W]e have discharged our duty as soldiers in the defense of our country, [and] respectfully urge that it is the duty of Iowa to allow us the use of our votes at the polls ... [H]e who is worthy to be trusted with the musket can and ought to be trusted with the ballot."Frese, Stephen J., Marshalltown High School, Marshalltown, Iowa Senior Division Historical Paper, National History Day 2006 Competition, "From Emancipation to Equality: Alexander Clark's Stand for Civil Rights in Iowa", article at the website of the journal The History Teacher, essay from the November 2006, Vol. 40, No. 1; article cites (footnote 23) Alexander Clark, "Address to the Convention of Colored Iowa Soldiers." Christian Recorder, November 18, 1865. Reprinted from Muscatine Journal, November 6, 1865; retrieved March 11, 2009
Late 19th and early 20th centuries A small black business district developed on Fifth Street, starting in 1884 when Linsey Pitts, a former slave from Missouri and a Civil War veteran, opened his saloon at 120 E. Fifth Street. He had previously worked as a laborer and barber. In the 1870s, about a half dozen black women ran prostitution businesses on Front Street and on the blocks east of Brady Street downtown. By 1886, Mattie Burke, who ran a combination saloon and house of prostitution (serving both blacks and whites), moved her business to 124 E. Fifth Street. In 1888, a city directory described her business as a restaurant, which would have complemented Pitts' saloon. Pitts' business did well. In 1890, Pitts' saloon was assessed at $340; the next year, $1,740. It also attracted other businesses to the area. By 1890, four Black businesses and households had moved to the same block and by 1900 there were 10, with Pitts' saloon acting as an "anchor" for the little business district. It faced the Chicago Rock Island & Peoria railroad tracks just east of Brady Street. The businesses were two blocks from the CRPI&P depot, from which Black dining-car workers, porters, and passengers might visit.Wood, Sharon E., The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City, p. 95, "Mattie Burke" section, UNC Press, 2005,
According to historian David Brodnax, African Americans in Davenport enjoyed a relative lack of "open violence" from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century. But "several high-profile events—including a race riot, waves of hysteria following alleged rapes of white women by black men, a near lynching, and legal harassment of African-American activists—show that even the threat of violence was a tool of social control to maintain class and racial privilege." An established, middle-class black community mixed with other ethnic and social groups, including Southern, Midwestern, foreign-born, wealthy and poor whites, and more recent Southern migrants, "especially in the wharfs, bars and illegal enterprises along the waterfront, where interaction between the races was often greatest".Abstract of Brodnax, David, "The Mob Was in Complete Control: Racial Violence and the Law in Davenport, 1869-1905", paper presented at the annual meeting of The Law and Society Association, July 06, 2006, retrieved from All Academic Research Inc. website on March 11, 2009.
A description of African-Americans in Davenport was published in a chapter of Them was the Good Old Days, a 1922 book by William L. Purcell. This was a compilation and revision of material collected from newspaper columns in the Davenport Democrat newspaper. Written in humorous dialect, the book reminiscences about the "good old days", often without specifying the years involved and always with an eye toward amusing the reader. The chapter "Old Time Cullud Folks" mentions Linsey Pitts and gives short descriptions of various people, including John Hanover Warwick, a barber on Third Street who had four sons, one of whom left to become a minstrel; George Washington, a whitewasher and the first black man in the community to marry a white woman; Milton Howard, who worked at the federal arsenal and who learned several languages; Henry McGaw, who started a night janitor service for doctors and lawyers; Jake Busey, the first black person in Davenport to graduate from the public schools, and who had "a style of his own in jugglin' hard words that made the cullud folks gasp". Busey and his two brothers did not respond to racial insults with anger, according to the book, which said, "No sah! They'd just laugh at you," and they would sing a racist song with mock solemnity.Purcell, William L., Them was the Good Old Days: In Davenport, Scott County Iowa, "Old Time Cullud Folks", Purcell Printing Company, 1922, retrieved via Google Books on March 13, 2009.
City officials in the 1910s commented on the visible segregation of Davenport, but contended that this was the result of self segregation.Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. The Southern Workman . Hampton (Va.) Institute (1913) p.338
In this period, the African-American population of Davenport was tiny: 569 counted in the 1910 census, from a total city population of 43,028. Although second in Iowa to Des Moines, it was much smaller than the capital's recorded community of 2,930.Monroe Nathan Work (ed.). Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro . Negro Year Book Pub. Co. (1916), p. 385.
At the beginning of the 20th century, labor unions were segregated in Davenport. When the American Federation of Labor Brotherhood of Leatherworkers went on strike against Davenport employers in 1904, the businesses recruited African Americans as scabs. In the wake of the failure of the strike, union leaders called on their members to reject segregation so that all workers could stand together.Philip S. Foner. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Policies and Practices of the A. F. of L., 1900–1909. International Publishers Co. (1964), pp. 254, 458. .
Great Migration of the 20th century
The Great Black Migration of the first half of the 20th century, when a total of 1.5 million African Americans migrated out of the South to Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, resulted in settlement of such rural migrants in Davenport and other river towns.
According to John D. Baskerville of the University Northern Iowa, "The years between 1910 and 1920 marked the beginning of a major shift of the African-American population within the United States. The nation's African-American population shifted away from underdeveloped rural areas in the South to industrial centers in the cities, particularly in the North and the West."
"It has been estimated that nearly 500,000 to a million African-American men, women, and children 'left the South before, during, and shortly after the first World War, settling in urban areas such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and other areas in the North and Midwest. For example, Chicago's African-American population increased from 44,000 to 110,000 during this period." (Franklin and Moss 1994)
Davenport was at the time a manufacturing center related to farming. Factories of J.I. Case, John Deere, Caterpillar, Alcoa, and others employed many locals. This factory work was paid nearly as well as the alternate destinations of Detroit and Chicago factories, but in a less urban environment. Some migrants came from towns such as Quincy and Hannibal in addition to those from the Deep South.
In the late 1970s, when the manufacturing sector began to slow down and shed jobs, African-Americans, often the last hired, were the first to feel pain. A sustained economic downturn led to rough financial seas for most African-Americans in Davenport. They closed many of the black businesses in The Strip, located along the 600–900 blocks of Harrison Street; including Buckner Hauling, owned by Louis Buckner, one of the area's first African-American-owned garbage collection businesses; and the "Green Apartments," an apartment complex on Eighth Street in which future Super Bowl star Roger Craig grew up.
Civil rights struggles in the mid-20th century