Stay consistent. . . . Honoring Black HIStory '23

In 1926, an African American newspaper editor in Topeka, Kansas, announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. His name was Nick Chiles. Although a black person had not occupied a Senate seat since 1881—and would not do so again until 1967— Chiles had grown disgusted with Kansas Senator Charles Curtis’s unwillingness to fight for the voting rights of black Southerners.

So, Chiles decided to take matters into his own hands. His campaign platform included eight planks, most of them focused on ending Southern segregationist control of the Senate, re-enfranchising African Americans, and guaranteeing workers a living wage. It also included a plank that made Chiles’s righteous indignation clear: “The Holy Bible for my Guide.”

However, Chiles was best known in his early years for engaging in perhaps the greatest evil a late 19th-century evangelical Protestant could envision: the liquor trade. Yet Chiles evolved. He used his saloon business to launch more respectable enterprises. A 1922 profile of Chiles glowed: “He came to Topeka with only fifteen dollars in his pocket, but he now owns a $7,000 plant, his own building, a fine residence, and a large amount of other property." Most important to Chiles’s mini-empire was his newspaper, the Topeka Plaindealer,arguably the most prominent Western black newspaper in the early 20th century. Fact is, there was at least one consistent theme in Chiles’s lifelong anti-racism activism: appeals to the Christian principles of white Americans.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23)