Buxton

"From 1900 to the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland: Buxton, Iowa, established by the Consolidation Coal Company. The majority of Buxton's five thousand residents were African Americans - a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white. At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration - steady employment, above-average wages, decent housing and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as 'the black man's utopia in Iowa.'…