The following discussion is only a very incomplete, preliminary sketch. Discussion is invited, either through the discussion forum mailing list (link given below) or by private e-mail.
In 1855, Shawnee County had 36 free black people and 45 slaves. Most of the slaves were in Tecumseh, the slave-state county seat. Slavery once existed in this county.
The original settlers of Topeka were free-staters, but Giles notes that most of them would not have wanted to be called "abolitionists." They disliked slavery, and didn't want it around them. But they also disliked black people, and didn't want them around. The first free-state Constitution presented to Congress from Kansas, the Constitution drafted by the Topeka Convention of 1856, would have outlawed both slavery and black immigration into Kansas, limited the vote to white males and Indian males who had received citizenship under a treaty, and required the first legislature to enact black codes restricting the lives of black people already here. When the Wyandotte Convention of 1859 was debating the document that became the present state Constitution, moreover, the entire Shawnee County delegation to that Convention voted to place similar restrictions on black immigration and life in this state in that Constitution as had appeared in the Topeka Constitution. Fortunately, there were enough opposing votes from other parts of the Territory at the Wyandotte Convention to defeat these propositions.
It is true, of course, that the opening phase of the Civil War was fought in "bleeding" Kansas in 1856 and 1857, that Topekans fought and died on the free-state side, and that Topeka endured the better part of a year in a state of siege in the cause of making Kansas a free state. When the Civil War went national in 1861, Kansas regiments also fought on the Union side. There were also three or four Topeka families who were a part of the Underground Railroad and, just after the Civil War, Col. John Ritchie established what may have been the first racially integrated residential area in the United States on land he owned just south what was then the city limits. But all of this does not mean that Topekans in general were in favor of black equality. As stated above, Topeka favored not black equality but black exclusion. Topekans wanted a free white state.
Nevertheless, there were blacks in Topeka. After the Civil War and until 1877, the white and black populations of Topeka increased at parallel rates. Segregated elementary schools were established in 1858 and authorized by the Legislature in 1861, and it was generally understood that, for the most part, the better class of jobs outside of black-owned businesses (of which there came to be quite a few) were for whites only. There were, however, notable exceptions to this. Moreover, many blacks lived in mixed (albeit generally poor) neighborhoods with whites.
However, there was a clear line between black and white churches. A few white churches did start mission churches in black areas, but these were blacks-only missions of white churches. The black members of these missions weren't welcome in the sponsoring white churches. Whites were, generally, welcome in black churches, though they seldom went there.
The race lines both in society and in the churches started to harden noticeably after 1878. In 1877, the administration in Washington changed, and the nation abandoned the Reconstruction of the South started at the end of the Civil War, adopting instead the "Compromise" of 1877. This "Compromise" was more like a surrender. It gave the South to the Ku Klux Klan and, essentially, put an end to the enforcement of the post-Civil-War civil rights acts in the rest of the country. Life became very difficult for southern blacks for the next 80 years.
Because the situation had now become so oppressive in the South, large elements of the black population there started to move north. One early aspect of that movement was the movement which became known as the "Exodus." This was a mass migration of something like 50,000 southern blacks, the largest number being from Tennessee, to Kansas, in a period of a little over two years, beginning in 1878 and ending in early 1881. Thirty thousand of these came through Topeka and stayed here for at least a little while. About 10,000 remained here permanently. The pressure of all of these new black people, who were not welcomed by either the existing white or black community, were one factor which tended to cause the already noticeable color lines in Topeka to harden.
Moreover, the change in Federal race policy in 1877 also hastened the hardening of the color line here, as did the Supreme Court's 1883 decision in the Civil Rights Cases, which invalidated the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 on the theory that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress no authority to protect a (black) person's "civil" rights in society, as opposed to his purely "political" rights to be free from blatant "state action." It is noteworthy that United States v. Stanley, the lead case among the six consolidated into the Civil Rights Cases, arose from the prosecution of an innkeeper in Hiawatha, Kansas, only 60 miles from Topeka, for refusing a room to a black man. By 1890, the color line, both in greater Topeka society and in the church, was quite hard.
Indeed, the color line in Topeka remained quite hard for a long time. In society at large, it remained so inflexible as late as 1954 that the Topeka school district carried before the U.S. Supreme Court their insistence on their right to maintain segregated elementary schools, and to bus black children to those schools rather than permit them into neighborhood white schools. Yes, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas arose here. (Note that, since 1861, state law had authorized, but not required, segregation, so it was really Topeka's choice all along). The color line in the Church remained equally hard, from all I have seen (though my research on this question has barely started) long after 1954, and is still staunchly maintained by several white churches. Fortunately, there are now some predominantly white churches that truly, in practice, accept black Christians into their own membership equally as brothers and sisters regardless of race, but these churches are probably still in the minority. Churches in predominantly black denominations always have been, and still tend to be, much more accepting of whites than the reverse.
Charles Sheldon, Charles Parham and the revivals that almost started here.
Summary of the founding of Topeka and its present implications.
Areas for repentance (first list)
A page discussing the definition of heresy, showing that racism in the church is a form of heresy.
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