Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland, an Expanded Edition

FROM 1900 until the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland--Buxton, Iowa. Originally established by the Consolidation Coal Company, Buxton was the largest unincorporated coal-mining community in Iowa. What made Buxton unique, however, is the fact that the majority of its five thousand residents were African Americans-a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white. At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration-steady employment, above-average wages, decent housing, and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as "the black man's utopia in Iowa." Containing documentary evidence-including newspaper reports, census records, photographs, and state mining reports-along with interviews with seventy-five former residents, Buxton: Work and Racial Equality in a Coal Mining Community (originally published in 1987 and winner of the 1988 Benjamin Shambaugh Award) explored the Buxton experience from a variety of perspectives. The authors-an American historian, a family sociologist, and a race relations sociologist-provided a truly interdisciplinary history of a unique community. Now, eighty years after the town's demise and sixteen years after Buxton's original publication, the history of this Iowa town remains a compelling story that continues to capture people's imaginations. In Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland, the authors offer further reflections upon their original study and the many former Buxton residents who shared their memories. In a new essay, "A Buxton Perspective, " they address issues such as social class andthe town's continuing legacy. The voices captured in Buxton, although recorded over twenty years ago, still resonate with exuberance, affection, and poignancy; this expanded edition will bring their amazing stories back to the forefront of Iowa and American history.