"Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa" by Rachelle Chase

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When I met Rachelle Chase at the 2021 Okoboji Writers Retreat, I was intrigued by the premise of her book, “Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa.”  

A Black utopia in Iowa that I had never heard about? I was amazed. 

So was Rachelle. She lived in San Francisco when she learned about this lost piece of Iowa history. She came to visit her friend, who lived in Ottumwa in 2008, who took her to the site of the former coal mining town. 

It wasn’t just a history of industry that made Buxton an alluring subject to Rachelle. Established in 1900 by the Consolidation Coal Company, Black and white people lived together south of Oskaloosa in an integrated society that was unheard of for the time. 

There had been places like Black Wall Street in Tulsa and Harlem in New York City that were mostly Black communities. But the difference, Rachelle explained, was that those communities were established because nowhere else would welcome Black people to live. Black residents in Buxton had been recruited to work and live there, along with Welsh immigrants and other white people.

“I couldn’t believe that I had never heard about that,” Rachelle said. “And as I found out, a lot of people hadn’t heard about it, even in Iowa. I thought if I’m amazed, other people are going to be amazed by the story of this community in Iowa.” 

Rachelle was right. I was born and raised in a small town in eastern Iowa. I somehow went 23 years without knowing the story of Buxton. This is the second time I’ve been surprised by what I haven’t learned in school about Iowa’s capacity to be inclusive. 

An anomaly in Iowa

The Buxton that Rachelle described felt unlike anything I had ever heard about my home state. The Consolidation Coal Company, a division of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, established Buxton in 1895 as a company town to supply coal to the railroad. Early on, amid strikes and struggles to recruit workers, the company recruited Black families from the South to live in the town and work in the coal mines. 

“And they’re paying them equal rates and they’re giving them training. They’re paying for housing. When I was looking at mines elsewhere, not only were Black people segregated in housing, but you also had separate mines that only Black people were working in,” Rachelle explained. 

Nearly every profession in Buxton employed and served both white and Black citizens alike. Black folks were elected political leaders. There was no segregation in the country store. Dr. E.A. Carter was a Black doctor who cared for both Black and white patients — he was also the first African American person to receive a medical degree from the University of Iowa, a fact I had never encountered in my four years studying there. 

As I read Rachelle’s book, and later as we chatted on Zoom, I started to consider what segregation might have looked like in Iowa. I’d learned about Jim Crow in the deep South, but never what was happening around the time and place my grandparents grew up.

“It was more understated,” Rachelle explained. “In some of the smaller towns, where you only had one or two Black people, there wasn’t going to be that necessarily distinct segregation. In the larger cities like Des Moines and Iowa City, it would be more clearly stated, like separate seating at restaurants and ‘no, you don’t go in that store.’” 

Buxton’s impact

With Buxton being such an anomaly for the time, Rachelle was also surprised to discover a lack of racially-motivated violence perpetrated against Black people that was common in the United States at that time.

But Rachelle explained that the community wasn’t perfect. Some people didn’t get along. Nearby newspapers covered crime in Buxton disproportionately to other communities, making it seem as if the town was more violent than it was. But the town shows what could have been possible at that point in history.

“Even if they’re not embracing this, they’re at least putting aside whatever those differences are to exist in this town,” Rachelle said. 

I asked Rachelle if she was able to discover any lasting impacts Buxton made in surrounding communities and the state of Iowa. Did it seem to change the perspectives of other Iowans? Were its strategies implemented anywhere else? 

She had that question, too. She couldn’t uncover any evidence that Buxton made a significant impact anywhere else. The families who owned the Consolidation Coal Company moved on to new businesses that didn’t appear to implement integration like they did in Buxton. Some of the Black community members went on to achieve great things, such as Dr. Carter and Attorneys George H. Woodson and Samuel Joe Brown. Woodson co-founded the Niagara Movement in 1905, which eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Woodson and Brown were two of the five co-founders of the National Bar Association.

“So far, I’ve been surprised that, wow, we had this amazing town, and it seems like when it was gone, the impact was gone. I still want to do more research to look into if Buxton had a ripple effect in the Black community,” she said. 

Rachelle continues to have an interest in Buxton, its place in Iowa’s history, and Black history in general. She founded a nonprofit, United Through History, which “creates immersive experiences where you can connect with the history of people of color.” She’s working on a children’s book about Susan Clark, the first Black student to integrate a school in Iowa. 

Rachelle hopes that through sharing these stories and connecting with Iowans, she can create positive change in our state. 

“History is not just the past. History is today. It’s what is happening right now,” Rachelle said. “If you really read about people — immigrants, Black people, Indigenous people, if you really read about their history and lives and cultures, if we actually know and embrace and understand everyone’s history — it makes us work on fixing the things that we need to fix that are broken.”

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