Cory Booker and Buxton, Iowa

Could be an early 20th century shot from a lot of places on the map. There's a hill up the street, but the place looks like any of a thousand small towns from almost any region of the country. That this town is in Iowa makes little difference; the place looks positively generic.

But if I could bring you up close to those folks on the wooden sidewalks, you'd soon note something peculiar--not impossible, but unique. The residents of this burg are African-American. The town is in Iowa, and its residents are black. Mostly. 

The place is named Buxton, and, should you look for it, you won't find it because it is no more. The place went boom/bust, its life created, fueled, and eventually destroyed by coal, by mining. For a time in the early years of the 20th century, as many as 10,000 people lived in Buxton; most of the men were miners, who, hard as it is to believe, earned wages that allowed them a higher standard of living than African-Americans almost anywhere else in the country, surely in the state. 

In an age-old pattern being relived every day by thousands, even millions of immigrant workers from south of our national borders, once upon a time African-American workers recruited from Southern states were promised a good living wage and equal pay for equal work in a town in Iowa. The engine of all that prosperity--and the prosperity was considerable--was the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, who needed coal. Significant deposits were available in Monroe County, and mining operations were opened. Buxton was born. It's immigrant residents were strike-breakers who took jobs white folks didn't want, at least not at the wages the company was willing to pay. When white men walked off the job, the company simply hired cheaper labor. Does all of this sound familiar?

Some white folks considered Buxton a black town--many of its professionals were also black: school teachers, medical professionals, and store owners. But historians have made it clear that its population was multi-racial, multi-ethnic. Employment opportunities were by no means limited to ex-slaves or their kids from south of Mason/Dixon. Census records indicate lots of white folks lived in Buxton too, many recently arrived in this country from Europe, men perhaps less given to racial prejudices. 

At the time in Iowa, Buxton could well have been considered a city. But once World War I ended and the need for coal dropped off, workers began to lose those well-paying jobs and, one after another, take a road like that one pictured above out of town. When finally the mines shut down, the city did too. Today, what was once the largest coal-mining city west of the Mississippi, is no more. 

Last week in Cedar Rapids, Democratic Presidential candidate, Cory Booker, told an audience I was sitting in that his grandmother was born in Iowa. It seemed preposterous to me, unless, of course, his grandmother was white, which she wasn't. She lived, quite comfortably, in Buxton, Iowa. 

Cory Booker is not making things up for the caucuses. Once upon a time a booming little city in southern Iowa attracted hundred, even thousands, of black folk from down south. For a couple of decades, people from every tribe and nation lived in what might have been for many of them unimagined prosperity in a mining town named Buxton, Iowa.

Amazing story. Amazing.

Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), a man with Iowa roots