"[1] But, leaders of the Alliance realized that it was impossible to establish a profitable agricultural system while a large black population served as potential competitors and a source of cheap, exploitable labor.
The order’s statement of principles was in the vein of Booker T. Washington, promoting economic self-sufficiency and racial ‘uplift’ through vocational training, at the expense of demands for political equality.
Virtually all white Southerners, including the Farmers' Alliance, denounced the bill as a return to the policies of Reconstruction, and the Democrats succeeded in making it the central issue of the 1892 Presidential election in the South.
The majority of black Populists supported renewed federal intervention to preserve their civil rights, which were being eroded by state changes to voter registration and electoral laws.
In 1891, after the split over the elections bill, the Colored Alliance called a general strike of black cotton-pickers to demand a wage increase from 50 cents to $1 per hundred pounds of cotton.
The white Farmers' Alliance, whose membership in the South included large numbers of landowners employing sharecroppers, were the most vehement opponents of the proposed strike.
The Georgia chapter of the Colored Alliance, with a large contingent of landowners, refused to support the strike, viewing it as detrimental to the interests of black farmers who owned or rented their land.
A minor cotton pickers strike of 1891 in the Arkansas Delta in September was crushed by local vigilantes, resulting in the death of fifteen strikers, including several who were lynched.
He packed the Colored Farmers' Alliance delegation with pro-third party white men in a series of proxy deals that were contrary to the organization's charter.