In December 1941 the Kansas City Times ran a piece by Paul Wellman headlined "Missouri's Little Dixie Is Real Although It Appears on No Maps." Seven years later Robert Crisler drew one, in the Missouri Historical Review: thirteen counties running from the Mississippi above St. Louis to the Missouri River in the middle of the state, Audrain, Boone, Callaway, Chariton, Howard, Lincoln, Pike, Marion, Monroe, Ralls, Randolph, Saline and Shelby. Other writers have counted as many as seventeen.
What the name meant
The first Anglo-American settlers of these counties came largely from the hemp and tobacco districts of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, and they brought enslaved people with them or bought them in Missouri. Across the state the enslaved share of the population fell from 18 percent in 1830 to 10 percent in 1860. In Little Dixie it ran from 20 to 50 percent by county and township, highest in the river counties laid out for plantations, and in seven counties a quarter or more of the people were enslaved. Even here most slaveholders were farmers, not planters. More than 90 percent of Missouri slaveholders held fewer than ten people, and they hired out the workers they could not use to their neighbors.
During the war enslaved Missourians left in large numbers, and after November 1863 many men enlisted in the Union army. Missouri's constitutional convention ended slavery in the state on January 11, 1865.
The schools
The Reconstruction legislature made public schooling free for the first time and required every township with twenty or more Black children of school age to open a school for them. Black communities built churches and schools of their own. In the early twentieth century Callaway County had at one time twenty-eight schools for African American children, Boone eighteen, Howard sixteen and Chariton fourteen, and in 1933 the Little Dixie counties still had more Black schools than anywhere in the state outside St. Louis and the Bootheel. In Hannibal, Douglasville School opened in 1870 as the town's first public school for Black children.
The violence came with it. Between 1889 and 1919, thirteen Black men were lynched in Boone, Howard, Monroe, Pike and Randolph counties, 16 percent of the state's lynchings in counties with less than 6 percent of its people. Farm machines cut the need for labor, and families left in the Great Migration for St. Louis and the cities of the North.
Finding them again
From 1998 to 2002 the State Historic Preservation Office surveyed the surviving African American schools in fifteen Little Dixie counties, then across Missouri. Its teams recorded the buildings, many of them one room and long since put to other uses, and interviewed former students and teachers about school under Jim Crow. A number of the schools were then recommended for the National Register.