Farmers' Alliance sponsored cooperative stores at which members could obtain necessary goods at reduced prices, published newspapers which attempted to educate members of the organization as to new farming techniques, and in some places raised money to help support the underfunded segregated black schools of the region. The Colored Farmers' Alliance's organizational strength peaked in 1891, with some 1.2 million members claimed. Opposition The Alliance was opposed by a group called the Knights of Reciprocity, founded in Garden City, Kansas in winter of 1890 by a group of Republicans including Jesse Taylor, D. M. Frost and S. R. Peters. By 1895 the Knights claimed 125,000 members and had lodges in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio. Founders included Masons, Oddfellows and Pythians. Its program included trade reciprocity, protection of American industries, just pensions for Union veterans and disenfranchisement of those who accepted or offered a bribe for a vote. The Knights were adamant in their opposition to what they called the Democratic Union Labor - Farmers Alliance combination in politics. One of their circulars from 1891 reads: The only way for the farmers to meet the Alliance secret political society is with a secret society the object of which shall not be to nominate men for office, but to assist in educating the people and making them thoroughly acquainted with the wants of all the people and the fallacies of the Alliance "calamity" howlers, who are traveling from State to State, county to county, town to town, township to township, schoolhouse to schoolhouse, not for the good of the people, but for the money they make and in hopes of political promotion. The people should organize at once in opposition to this gigantic scheme. Agenda and achievements As a widespread movement consisting of three independent branches and existing for more than two decades, reduction of the Farmers' Alliance to a few universal objectives is problematic. As Southern Alliance leader C.W. Macune noted in 1891, the agenda of the organization was both amorphous and dynamic, a response to local problems and conditions: Included among these concerns to greater or lesser extent were the question of exploitative terms of credit, insufficient money supply to sustain the economic needs of society, super-profits extracted by merchants, millers, and other middlemen, systemically unfavorable terms of trade levied upon small-scale agricultural shippers by the railroad industry, negative impacts on