Brent M. S. Campney, "This is Not Dixie;" Southern Spaces

After the Leavenworth burning, the Topeka Daily Capital admitted that Kansas was no longer "in a position to make disparaging remarks concerning violent deeds occasionally perpetrated by the hot-blooded people beyond the pale of Mason and Dixon's line." 41 Ultimately, however, by appraising their record of racist violence against the aggregate number of incidents perpetrated by white southerners rather than against their own image, white Kansans, irrespective of their political affiliation or their position towards blacks, seldom questioned the limits of the Free State. Certainly, they disagreed vigorously over the efficacy of racist violence; they rarely disagreed, however, on the assumption that blacks had little cause for complaint in Kansas. Commentators who denounced racist violence in one breath sometimes rehabilitated the Free State narrative with the next. When a mob drove a black family from a house in an all-white neighborhood in 1910, the Pratt Republican insisted that it "always stands for law and against any form of mob law" but advised angry blacks that "it might be well to remember that the black man had no rights until the white man gave him that 14th amendment to the Constitution and also the liberal laws of Kansas." 42

As compelling as the Free State narrative was, there were instances too obvious to ignore. When students at the University of Kansas raided the dissection laboratory in 1902, seized the cadaver of an unknown black man, and hanged it on campus, in what one commentator called a "sham lynching," the Horton Commercial complained that many Kansas papers had suppressed an incident that undermined state lore. "Had this lynching of a dead Negro occurred in Louisiana or Texas, it would be termed 'another Democratic outrage in the South' by Republican papers of Kansas. But as it occurred in Kansas they deem it wise to keep mum." 43 Others cautioned Kansas newspapers to practice humility in their denunciations of the South given the propensity for inflicting similar violence against blacks within the Free State. The El Dorado Daily Walnut Valley Times voiced this concern after whites elsewhere in the state murdered a young man in 1893. "Let us not howl at the south for murdering 'niggers.' Up at Salina a mob hung a darkey for slashing but not killing a man." 44

In some instances, whites explicitly repudiated the Free State narrative, defiantly embracing anti-black violence irrespective of its consequences for the state's image and economic prospects. The Fort Scott Herald unapologetically accepted responsibility on behalf of Kansas when a mob dragged, hanged, and burned an alleged rapist in that city in 1879: "Neither do we pretend to get out of it by claiming that a large proportion of the men engaged in it were from Missouri." Exasperated by homilies from elsewhere after the 1901 burning, the Lawrence Daily Journal revealed that the Free State was better at doling out condemnation than at accepting it, warning that "other states should understand that this is a family affair, and if they don't keep their hands out of it, Kansas is likely to back Leavenworth up to sail in and do it again. Kansas demands for herself the privilege of doing the criticizing." 45