As the Missouri-Kansas rivalry plays out in an epic football game Saturday, most Americans — and perhaps some Kansans — won’t realize it also goes deep into the nation’s history of abolition. Kansas’ anti-slavery border warriors even gave KU a name for its mascot, the Jayhawkers. The fear and loathing go way back but fit the mood this week, as the Wall Street Journal found, describing a Tigers fan wearing a University of Missouri football jersey with the name “Quantrill†(named for William Quantrill, whose 1863 guerrilla raid on Lawrence left 150 dead), then a University of Kansas shirt featuring an image of John Brown and the words “Kansas: Keeping America safe from Missouri since 1854.â€
There is room for argument about the better football team, but picking the better state history is no contest (even though the bloody incursions went both ways). We’re with Heather Knox, a KU alumna and accountant in Kansas City, Mo., who told the Journal: “They’re the slave state. We’re the free state. Look who won out in the end.â€
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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26 Comments
Sedgwick County Kansas definetely parallels the “slavery” this country faced in the 19th century,so can you hope Kansas will win without SG county?
GO JAYHAWKS!!!!!
And A-Dad: try not to whine, OK? Take your meds.
___
Congrads to the JHWKS (my license plate) on their great football season!! For once we did not have to wait for basketball season to have something to cheeer about!
In the interest in balance, and also because my parents graduated from there, and I did some post graduate work through the school.
Go TIGERS!!!
I grew up in Manhattan, went to KSU, then to WSU, then took some courses from MU, so if I were to do anything at ISU or NU, I would have KU surrounded! ;-)
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
As usual, Rhonda doesn’t get things right. The Yankee idea was to import European serfs, giving them “freedom” without empowerment, under the control of eastern capitalists, which extended medievalism. They wanted a territory to conduct this experiment, in essence an internal colony. They didn’t want to bring either European immigrants nor African-Americans to a state of full political rights (e.g. when was our last presidential primary held, when do we get to see before elections who pays for Kansas political candidates’ campaigns, how many government officials evade our sunshine laws to the greatest degree they think they can?) and economic self-determination.
Read John Ise’s “Sod and Stubble”, recall the reasons why Kansas was a centerpoint of anti-eastern-capitalist Populism in the 1890s, the “Robin Hood” noteriety of Kansas bank robbers during the Great Depression, when bankers were heartlessly repossessing farms, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education…
On Saturday’s game, I’d love to see KU win. They’ve played well above and beyond anything we’ve seen in a long time. But understand, Mark Mangino was subject to constant forces to settle for mediocrity, and earned a disliked reputation for being a “mean” “hard ass” by many in the KU athletic department.
KU is going to go to a bowl game, probably a BCS game if it beats Mizzou but loses to Oklahoma, maybe a BCS game if it loses to Mizzou.
If the team goes 12-1, 13-1 or 14-0, Mangino is either going to be courted by Michigan, or else if Michigan lures Les Miles back home, LSU. Penn State and Florida State will in the hunt if they decide it’s time to put their past-their-prime coaches out to pasture. Miami’s boosters are really unhappy campers and are demanding a new coach.
Notre Dame will be strongly courting him. Mangino is an Italian Catholic. A good fit.
My prediction for Mangino next year, if he loses 1 game this season, or goes undefeated: 1. Michigan, 1. LSU if Miles takes Ann Arbor, 2. Notre Dame, 3. Miami, 4. Penn State if Papa Joe retires, 4. Florida State if Bobby Bowden retires.
My favorite KU teeshirt:
Caricature of Mangino
“Our coach can eat!”
“As both Kansas and Missouri prepare to go to war on the football field, let me remind Kansans that Missouri Governor Matt Blunt already fired the first shot.
Governor Blunt signed a new law by the Missouri Legislature which requires that non-residents include in Missouri taxable income all non-Missouri property taxes deducted in calculating federal taxable income. This in effect robs a Kansas resident working in Missouri of tax dollars and robs the state of Kansas of revenue for credits paid to other states.
It’s high time Governor Kathleen Sebelius and the Kansas Legislature shoot back.”
http://www.wickedlocal.com/ghs-newsservice/regional_news/midwest/kansas/x931145694
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/aug/10/sebelius_warns_blunt_over_tax_law/
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics/story/367222.html
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/22761.html
MPS: You must be in a hurry to get to Thanksgiving dinner. Your usual brilliantly written analysis appears to be totally missing in action in your first two paragraphs. You have mixed together a number of separate ideas like a chef’s salad or turkey dressing — such that I’m not sure what you are talking about.
In your first paragraph, who were the “European serfs” and “eastern capitalists” and what was the “freedom without empowerment” you refer to?
Did you know the first African-Americans to come to Kansas, arrived in eastern Kansas in 1830 with the ShawneeIndians along with their French associates from St. Louis. Don’t think any “eastern capitalists” were in control.
Regarding the well-respected John Eise, I met him at K.U. in the early 1960’s when he was a guest lecturer in a political science class. I have read his “Sod and Stubble” book in the past but don’t recall details now.
In the 1890’s, your “populist era,” the first Kemper of the later Kemper banking dynasty, arrived in Topeka from Chicago, as a young lawyer and bankuptcy judge on the Santa Fe railroad case. Mr. Kemper married a young lady from the Crosby mercantile company in Topeka thus incorporating the name, Crosby, into their family. The next generation of Kempers, including Crosby Sr, William T., and another son whose name I can’t recall now, later owned their own banks in Missouri and Kansas including Commerce Bank, United Missouri and the former Bank IV and probably a hundred other smaller banks across Missouri and Kansas.
Don’t know what your reference to “Brown vs Topeka School Board” relates to. This ruling has been the law of the land since 1954 until modified a few months ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.
What about the “Robin Hood” notoriety of the Oklahoma bank robbers? Why did one kill a deputy Sheriff in downtown Wichita at Douglas and Water back in the 1930’s?
Just thought I would add a reality check here on Thanksgiving Day, 2007!! Better save the desert till later.
My favorite KU teeshirt:
Caricature of Mangino
“Our coach can eat!”Posted by: outlander | November 22, 2007 at 10:09 AM
My favorite is related to yours. I saw this in the Joe College shop along Mass St last summer. It’s a plain blue t-shirt with a Jayhawk and this below, in bold, all-caps font:
“OUR COACH BEAT ANOREXIA”
Go KU!
JWink, read your history. Brown v. Board was about a black family that made enough money to live in a white-dominated neighborhood. But the daughter was forced to go to an all-black school not in the neigbhorhood, where the infrastructure was inferior. “Give up your gains, we don’t want you to join us.” That was nearly a century after the Civil War ended.
On John Ise re-read him. How he and his sibs were called “dirty little Dutchies” (German-Americans) and beat like slaves by Anglo_American schoolteachers (and in one case a strapping older brother of one, who had zero legal authority to issue corporal punishment).
Look at the hundreds of thousands of Kansas settlers who lived in dirt abodes (sod dugouts with dirt floors). Look at the fraudulent “Garden of Eden” come-ons disseminated across central and eastern Europe, the rulers who took payoffs and allowed railroad company recruiters into their countries to take off their hands undesirables, as Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem immortalized, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
Farmland sold by the railroads and federal-land phony squatter-claimant-employing capitalists, who issued mortgages, lent money for equipment and household necessities. This was little different from tenant farming. Most settlers could never get ahead and become independent entrepreneurs, they were always under the thumbs of capitalists, most of whom didn’t even live in Kansas.
If you want to know who makes big money in Kansas farming, look to banks, insurance companies, distant food processors, farm-equipment manufacturers, oil companies that fuel production, commodities brokers, transportation companies and non-Kansas residing landowners who lease land to tenant farmers. We know this scheme isn’t working for Kansas farmers, because most Kansas rural counties are losing population, and without federal farm welfare subsidies, the exodus would be a flood.
In his excellent book: Civil War on the Western Border, 1854-1864; Jay Monaghan tells a believable history of the struggle. With both U.S. Presidents (Pierce and Buchanan) supporting pro-slavery territorial governors, Atchinson, et al with Military from Forts Riley and Leavenworth, the situation was especially rough on abolitionists. The Nebraska Act set up Kansas Territory as the initial battleground of the Civil War, with each side supported and financed by groups from all of the states, not just Missouri and Massachussets. Lawlessness was rampant on both sides of the issue, 150 years ago.
because most Kansas rural counties are losing population, and without federal farm welfare subsidies, the exodus would be a flood.
The exodus is already a flood and is not going to stop because someone provides farmers a hand out. Small towns are giving away city plots to attract new residents. The number of young people in rural Kansas is less than the rate of replenishment. Face it, for the most part, young kids want to get off the farm and get a job in the city or somewhere exciting. Elsewhere, very few young people in America go to college get a degree, and dream of ending up in Kansas.
Again throwing good dollars after bad will not stem this tide.
The hard part is some people in rural America are having a hard time coming to grips with this reality. They spend money and time trying to attract tourists and business to “grow” their rural towns and cities. Larger communities are enjoying some success, small town USA is not.
There will not for many years, if ever be a steady stream of those wanting the lifestyle we have come to know and love in rural USA.
Of course, now that Okie, Misery, and other surrounding states have enacted tough illegal immigration laws and policies, Kansas will become more attractive for illegals. Hablo Espanol?
Young people. God bless em.
I have found it interesting to see just how few Kansans know what a Jayhawker is. Very few seem to have learned anything about that history.
MPS: Let me point out where you are wrong.
In the 1954 Brown vs Topeka school board case, the school and location in Topeka along east 6th Street, old Highway 10, was chosen for the test case because the black school was actually in better shape than the white school. The black family named Brown wanted their daughter to attend the white school because it was closer to their home, not because of the condition of the school.
The “law of the land” pre-1954 was that schools could be segregated if the condition of black schools was at least equal to white schools … the old separate but equal rule. However, many black schools did not meet that standard which was what was originally going to be tested.
The Topeka situation was specifically chosen by the U.S. Supreme Court to raise the stakes to test the idea that separate but equal was not good enough … the damage was done by separating students in schools by color, culture or whatever, not by relative physical condition of the schools.
Interestingly, another school district in Kansas, the old South Park school district in Merriam, Johnson County, Kansas (now part of the Shawnee Mission school district) was almost chosen for the test case. Ironically, the person bringing that case was a Jewish woman named Brown. The problem there was the condition of the black school was not anywhere equal to the then new “white” South Park school located near 47th and Merriam Drive.
Only about three years ago, I drove by the old black school in Merriam that was almost used in that Supreme Court test case … it still stands and was then being used for a small church.
So, MPS, that is the rest of the story.
Ben, the old term I’m familiar with.
I have an relative back in my ancestry who was very much a hooligan. The letters I’ve read written by his Aunt or sister (don’t remember) referred him as a “redleg.” I think that was interchangeable with a “jayhawker” but not sure. I just know, even though he was abolitionist in view, he was still considered an outlaw in the family and the ‘proper’ folks didn’t want much to do with thim.
The Kansas Jayhawk mascot I was told was a cross between a bluejay and another bird, some kind of hawk I guess and really had little to do with the abolitionist movement. Don’t know, before my time. :D
“”"”As both Kansas and Missouri prepare to go to war on the football field, let me remind Kansans that Missouri Governor Matt Blunt already fired the first shot.”"”
But when Blunt signed it he was very blunt about the way the tax would bluntly effect Kansans in Johnson County whom Missourians just love to tax. So Blunt can stick his tax in a Blunt cigar and put it where Monica did!
kev – almost every state in the country taxes earnings of residents of other states. That person then gets a credit against his home state tax return for that non-resident state tax.
Before I became a Kansas resident I paid Kansas income tax on earnings in Kansas. Standard operating proceedure.
Kansas: I know something about the “bleeding Kansas days” in about 1856 prior to the Civil War. Several years ago, I figured out where many of the Redlegs or Jayhawkers generally lived as neighbors in the vicinity of Shawnee, Kansas.
So my question is … what was your hooligan/Redleg/ancestor’s last name? If it is the same as yours, please call me. I will look for the name on an 1870’s map of Johnson County. I am a little hazy on this subject now but might find something of interest.
So my question is … what was your hooligan/Redleg/ancestor’s last name? If it is the same as yours, please call me. I will look for the name on an 1870’s map of Johnson County. I am a little hazy on this subject now but might find something of interest.
Posted by: JWink | November 22, 2007 at 10:30 PM
Don’t know for sure JWink. This ancestry occurred on the maternal side of my family.
The letter was an exchange from two female relatives of the Teague/Hedgecock Family. Both eventually lived in Doniphan County Kansas near the early White Cloud settlement. The person referred to as the “Red Leg” was just called “A.M.” or “H.M.” His wife’s name was written as Betsy, so I’m guessing “Elizabeth.”
The owner of the old letter was never sure what the first letter of the name was. I have scant notes about the letter as the owner died many years since back and unsure who may have the letter now.
So it could have been a relation of the either the Teague or the Hedgecock family, no one that has researched that family knows for sure because “A.M. or H.M.” is never mentioned again by any of the family historians or any of the journals/letters.
The other problem is that Teague/Hedgecock would have been the married names of the women letter writers, so the surname of “A.M. or H.M.” could have been entirely different.
“A.M. or H.M.” could have lived in Johnson County or was just a roamer or even part of the early family that went to Missouri before they came to Kansas.
I know that’s not much help, but that’s a collateral relationship of my family and I never put much study into them. The impression from the letter that he was a relative, but unsure just how he was related.
My female relatives lived in Doniphan County. The descendants (my line) didn’t leave White Cloud until later in the 19th century and the family living that area scattered all over Kansas and other parts of the country.
As a side note, the earliest incursion into North East Kansas by a relative of mine who name was Patrick Gass, a Sergeant of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Of course, that has nothing to do with “Red Legs” as that was early 1800s before Kansas was even thought about. Just like to mention it to keep the legacy alive. heh
Well, the illegals sure know where to come now.
Kansas: I’ve got to leave for breakfast. But want to mention that none of the names you mentioned are familiar in relation to early Johnson County history, of which I am very knowledgable. I wish you could have come up with the name of a redleg relative. I once noticed that many of those well-known characters seemed to live in a then isolated part of Johnson County near 47th and Antioch and their names show up on old maps of the area.
“JWink” –
The safe bet is “Kansas” was making it up.
It’s happened before.
Kansas: I’ve got to leave for breakfast. But want to mention that none of the names you mentioned are familiar in relation to early Johnson County history, of which I am very knowledgable. I wish you could have come up with the name of a redleg relative. I once noticed that many of those well-known characters seemed to live in a then isolated part of Johnson County near 47th and Antioch and their names show up on old maps of the area.
Posted by: JWink | November 23, 2007 at 07:45 AM
Well, not surprising JWInk as the surnames I gave you are the married surnames of the women and not the surnames of the person of topic.
What are you using for a reference? From a book I hope not. Books are not primary source information and are often wrong because they omit or include people.
Knowledgeable by what means JWink? Are you a trained research Historian or Certified Genealogist?
Did you also check all listings of Quantrill raiders from official records?
Did outlaws use alias names back then?
Let me give some text from Kansas history.
In course of time the term “Red Leg” became general along the border. Connelley says: “Every thief who wanted to steal from the Missouri people counterfeited the uniform of the Red Legs and went forth to pillage. This gave the organization a bad name, and much of the plundering done along the border was attributed to them, when, in fact, they did little in that line themselves. There were some bad characters among them—very bad. But they were generally honest and patriotic men. They finally hunted down the men who falsely represented themselves to be Red Legs, and they killed every man found wearing the uniform without authority.”Kansas: a cyclopedia of state history, embracing events, institutions, industries, counties, cities, towns, prominent persons, etc. … / with a supplementary volume devoted to selected personal history and reminiscence. Standard Pub. Co. Chicago : 1912. 3 v. in 4. : front., ill., ports.; 28 cm. Vols. I-II edited by Frank W. Blackmar. Transcribed July 2002 by Carolyn Ward.
Perhaps my relative was one of these wannabe, thieving fake redlegs.
That would be a good reason why he would never show up on any “list.”
JW, thank you for your thoughtful clarification. My choice of term “infrastructure” was unfortunately ambiguous.
I was really thinking of social infrastructure. Part of this was equal in the two schools, as to teacher qualifications. Part of it was ostensibly equal, as to curriculum, but even here, as someone who is familiar with K-12 education, you of course realize that teachers shape their courses to their perceptions of their students’ abilities.
Back in the 1950s everyone took geography in junior high, and even used the same textbooks within districts, but the ostensibly same topic matter taught in classrooms actually varied greatly. So one geography class might have short-essay exam questions, while another might have fill-in-the-blank and true/false exams. One might encourage student questioning and teacher-student classroom discussions, while another might discourage these things as the teacher acted as a one-way-information-promulgator. The first would promote high-level communication skills, through writing and oral expression by students, the latter would impede these skills’ development.
Children’s understandings of society were different for those who attended integrated schools, than for those who were racially isolated.
These are social infrastructure issues, they relate to what is called social capital.
Linda Brown Thompson later recalled the experience in a 2004 PBS documentary:
“We lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal and they left me out…to sit outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn’t understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.”
So Linda Brown lived in a neighborhood that represented interracial personal social development. The Board of Education took a happy, well-adjusted kid and dictated, “You have to go to school with people ‘of your own kind’. But what was Linda Brown’s ‘kind’? People of other colors with whom she was friends, children whose parents had no objection to their having a Negress as a social peer. These were her ‘kind’ of people.
But the Board had a social-engineering agenda. Its “letter of the law” complying scheme was a shabbly legalistic fraud in that its purpose was not to create an equal education for black students, but to pretend this was the objective, when the real objective was to maintain unequal race-based class distinctions. If this WASN’T the objective, Linda Brown would have simply been allowed to enroll in her neighborhood school.
Linda was removed from a school in which white English was spoken to one in which black American dialect was spoken. The latter represented an inferior social and academic infrastructure.
Linda was removed from a school whose families were working class, with hopes of progressive social-class advancement among parents and children, to a school in which such hopes were significantly reduced. Simply put, a black student who was well adjusted among a white majority was exposed to a different range of advancement ambition in his or her peers, and encouraged to think about future pathway options that were larger and higher than those observable and and thus conceivable in an all-black school.
Late breaking news:
LSU lost to Arkansas this afternoon. So if the Jayhawks win tomorrow, they’ll be the #1 ranked college football team in America!