• DOI:10.2307/2717202
• Corpus ID: 149978378

Hardin and Langston: Western Black Spokesmen of The Reconstruction Era

@article{Berwanger1979HardinAL,
  title={Hardin and Langston: Western Black Spokesmen of The Reconstruction Era},
  author={Eugene H. Berwanger},
  journal={The Journal of Negro History},
  year={1979},
  volume={64},
  pages={101 - 115}
}

• Eugene H. Berwanger
• Published 1 April 1979
• History
• The Journal of Negro History

William J. Hardin made an impassioned plea for equal suffrage in Denver on November 7, 1865. Speaking before a racially mixed audience, he so swayed his listeners that they resolved wholeheartedly to give him the right to vote. They did not, however, include other black Coloradans in their gesture, and since their endorsement had no force of law, Hardin too remained disfranchised. In a similar appeal two years later, Charles H. Langston stirred a reporter in Wathena, Kansas, to write: "He speaks words of 'truth and soberness,' and deserves to succeed in the work to which he is devoting his energies." The reporter went on to describe Langston's speech as an "able, rational and sensible discussion" for black suffrage.' These instances were far from unique. Reports in Colorado and Kansas newspapers during the post-Civil War period indicate that these two men received frequent mention and were well-known in their respective areas. For Hardin this included Denver and the booming mining towns of Central City and Black Hawk on the eastern slope of the Rockies. Langston lived in Leavenworth but was a familiar figure as well in Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison and in the smaller towns scattered throughout the northeastern part of Kansas. Whites easily recognized their names, and leading politicians acknowledged and appreciated their influence in the black community. Despite this prominence in their own lifetime, neither Hardin nor Langston-or any other blacks-are mentioned to any extent in early histories of Colorado and Kansas. In his History of the State of Colorado, Frank Hall, who had been territorial secretary and acting governor at the time that Hardin crusaded for equal suffrage, referred to the black leader once and only in passing. Langston's name appears twice in D. W. Wilder's Annals of Kansas, but in neither instance does Wilder connect him with civil rights. Wilder, in fact, faithfully recorded the activities of whites in the suffrage campaign of 1867 but completely overlooked the role played by blacks in the same movement.2 While the failure of these historians to recognize Hardin and Langston can be regarded as a deliberate oversight, it was not an exceptional one. For early state and regional histories of the West which cover the five years following the Civil War avoid two important and evident topics: the impact of national Reconstruction at the local level and the very existence of a western black population.3 On perusing these early works, one can assume, on the one hand, that westerners