Oklahoma history

Before statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was home to Native American tribes pushed out of other regions by white expansion. Then the government decided to open up this land, too, and it became attractive to former slaves who were fleeing persecution in the South. It was also home to Black people who had been brought to the territory by slave-holding tribes.

Some African Americans participated in the land runs in the late 1800s. They included E.P. McCabe, the leader of a movement who hoped to make Oklahoma a majority-Black state free from white oppression.

“(McCabe) actually recruited Black people to come to Oklahoma on the theory that Oklahoma was the new promised land for these folks,” said Oklahoma historian Hannibal Johnson, author of several books about Oklahoma’s Black history. “Oklahoma didn’t really live up to its billing, obviously.”

Instead, white settlers,

In the 1920s, during the so-called Harlem Renaissance when African Americans were migrating from the South, Tulsa had a Black community of close to 10,000 people on the north side of the Frisco railroad tracks. The city was flush with money from the booming oilfields, and Black residents held jobs as hotel porters, car mechanics, laborers and domestic workers. The Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, with its own stores, restaurants and other Black-owned businesses.

A hundred years later, African Americans still live on the city’s north side and account for about 16% of Tulsa’s population of 400,000, or double the proportion found in Oklahoma overall. The median income of Black households is $25,979, about half that of white households in Tulsa County.

For decades after the massacre, doctors, ministers and lawyers, along with the faculty of Booker T. Washington High School and the publishers of the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper, provided leadership. But Black residents had little say in the city’s government because Tulsa had