African-Americans in Antebellum Iowa
Even though the First Territorial Assembly passed an act that forbade any "black or mulatto" to settle in the state without a certificate of freedom verified by a judge and a $500 bond "as surety against becoming a public charge," African-Americans nonetheless had a presence within the state and in Waterloo during the 19th century and had contributed to the state’s development in various ways, decades before the bulk of the African-American population arrived in the early 1910s. Before statehood, the census of 1840 counted 188 African-Americans, 16 of them slaves, living in the Iowa Territory. Most of these pioneering African-Americans lived along the Mississippi River, working in the mines at Dubuque or as laborers on the waterfront in cities such as Burlington, Davenport, and Keokuk (Bergmann 1969). There were a handful of African-Americans living in the Cedar Valley during the antebellum period, most notably is George Butler, an African-American barber from Waterloo, who enlisted in the 4th Iowa Cavalry at the beginning of the Civil War (Lyftogt 1993).
After the war, African-Americans (many of them newly freed slaves from Missouri) continued to flow into the state, primarily settling in the agricultural counties along the southern border of the state and along the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys on the eastern and western boundaries. In Black Hawk County, the number of African-Americans remained relatively low (ranging from 37 in 1880 to 12 in 1890), and remained so until the years before WWI (Bergmann 1969). The Cheatham family arrived in Waterloo in 1910 from Kentucky, foreshadowing the next wave of arrivals into the city and state.
