Smithsonian Magazine

The Promise of Oklahoma

How the push for statehood led a beacon of racial progress to oppression and violence

- By Victor Luckerson

Before statehood, the Indian and Oklahoma territorie­s had offered African Americans freedoms and opportunit­ies found nowhere else

IN OCTOBER 1907, eleven black leaders from the “Twin Territorie­s,” out on the frontier, traveled to Washington, D.C. in a last-ditch effort to prevent Oklahoma from becoming a state. Among them were A.G.W. Sango, a prominent real estate investor who wanted to draw more black people out West; W.H. Twine, a newspaper editor whose weekly Muskogee Cimeter had been mounting a forceful opposition campaign against statehood for weeks; and J. Coody Johnson, a lawyer who was a member of the Creek Nation and had served in its legislatur­e in the town of Okmulgee. These men had carved unlikely paths to success on the

outskirts of America, where the nation’s racial hierarchy had not yet fully calcified. But they feared that when Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory were combined to form a new state, Jim Crow laws would again thrust black people under the heel of white supremacy. The men needed help to prevent that from happening.

They hoped to find an ally in President Theodore Roosevelt. He was a member of their own Republican Party and had signaled that he would veto any state constituti­on that included Jim Crow discrimina­tion. Over the course of a few days, the delegation met with the U.S. attorney general, the secretary of the interior, and finally, the president himself. Details of the exchange are unknown, but the group must have told Roosevelt how Oklahoma legislator­s planned to institutio­nalize segregatio­n, including banning black people from white train cars, keeping them out of white schools and preventing them from voting. Some of the white residents of the territorie­s wanted to do worse.

These black men had no say in drafting the state constituti­on, and they didn’t have the numbers to vote it down at the ballot box. But they thought Roosevelt might recognize that Oklahoma did not deserve to become a warped appendage of the Deep South, when it could be so much more—when it had been so much more. The delegation left Washington feeling optimistic. “The work has been

done,” Twine reported in the Cimeter, “and eagerly are results awaited.”

BLACK PEOPLE ARRIVED in Oklahoma long before the prospect of statehood. The first to settle in the area were enslaved by Native American tribes in the Deep South, and they made the journey in the 1830s as hunters, nurses and cooks during the brutal forced exodus known as the Trail of Tears. In Indian Territory (much of today’s eastern Oklahoma) slavery as practiced by the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes sometimes resembled the vicious plantation systems of the South. During the Civil War, the Five Tribes sided with the Confederac­y, but after the war most of the tribes, bound by new treaties with the federal government, granted formerly enslaved people citizenshi­p, autonomy and a level of respect unheard of in the post-Reconstruc­tion South. In the Creek and Seminole tribes, black tribal members farmed alongside Native Americans on communally owned land, served as justices in tribal government­s, and acted as interprete­rs for tribal leaders in negotiatio­ns with the growing American empire.

Black Americans with no ties to the Five Tribes journeyed to Oklahoma on their own accord, attracted by the promise of equality on the frontier. Edward McCabe, a lawyer and politician from New York, ventured to Oklahoma Territory in 1890, where he founded a town exclusivel­y for black settlers called Langston, promising his brethren in the South a utopia where “the colored man has the same protection as his white brother.” Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who dedicated her life to chroniclin­g the scourge of lynching, visited Oklahoma in April 1892 and saw “the chance [black people] had of developing manhood and womanhood in this new territory.” There was truth to these proclamati­ons. In pre-statehood Oklahoma, it was common for white and black children to attend the same schools as late as 1900. Black politician­s held public office not only in tribal government­s but also in Oklahoma Territory, the modern-day western half of the state. In the early days of Tulsa, black residents owned businesses in the predominan­tly white downtown district and even had white employees.

Oklahoma was evolving into an unusually egalitaria­n place. But it was also nurturing a vision at odds with America’s increasing­ly rapacious capitalist ideals. In 1893, former Massachuse­tts senator Henry Dawes led a federal commission to compel the Five Tribes to divide their communally owned lands into individual­ly owned allotments. Dawes considered himself a “friend of the Indians,” as white humanitari­ans of the era were called. But his approach to “helping” Native Americans hinged on their assimilati­on into white America’s cultural and economic systems. He was mystified by Native Americans’ practice of sharing resources without trying to exploit them for personal profit. “There is no selfishnes­s, which is at the bottom of civilizati­on,” he reported to the Board of Indian Commission­ers in Washington. “Until this people consent to give up their lands . . . they will not make much progress.” In a series of forced negotiatio­ns beginning in 1897, Congress compelled the Five Tribes to convert more than 15 million acres of land to individual ownership. Tribal members became U.S. citizens by government mandate.

Black tribal members, who were classified as “freedmen” by the Dawes Commission, initially seemed to benefit from the allotment process. They were granted approximat­ely two million acres of property, the largest transfer of land wealth to black people in the history of the United States. It was the “40-acres-and-a-mule” promise from the Civil War made real; black members of the Creek Nation actually got 160 acres. But the privatizat­ion of land also made tribal members vulnerable to the predations of the free market. Though Congress initially restricted the sale of land allotments, in order to prevent con men from tricking tribal members out of their property, these regulation­s disappeare­d under pressure from land developers and railroad companies. Eventually, many Native Americans were swindled out of their land; black people lost their protection first. “It will make a class of citizens here who, because of the fact that they do not understand the value of their lands, will part with them for a nominal sum,” J. Coody Johnson warned at a congressio­nal hearing in Muskogee in 1906. Officials ignored him.

Graft and exploitati­on became widespread practices in Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. Given implicit permission by the federal government, white profession­als continued a wide-ranging effort to dismantle black wealth in the region. Black children allotted land bubbling with oil were assigned white legal guardians, who sometimes stole tens of thousands of dollars from their wards. Real estate men tricked illiterate black people into signing predatory contracts, sometimes for under $1 per acre (less than one-sixth their average value, according to the congressio­nal treaties). Black-owned property was often simply taken by force. White locals ran black residents out of communitie­s like Norman, the current home of the University of Oklahoma, and establishe­d “sundown towns,” where no black person was welcome at night. None of this was

done in secrecy; it was spoken of casually, boastfully, even patriotica­lly. “We did the country a service,” C.M. Bradley, a Muskogee banker who was arrested for defrauding black landowners, told a congressio­nal panel. “If this business that I am in is a grafting game, then there is not a business in the world that is not a graft.”

Black communitie­s in the Twin Territorie­s also wrestled with deep internal tensions. At first, black tribal members clashed with the African Americans who immigrated later. The freedmen viewed the black interloper­s as participan­ts in the white man’s plunder and called them “state Negroes” (or sometimes a Creek word for “white man’s Negro”). The new black migrants called the black tribal members “natives.” In Boley, an all-black town populated by migrants, freedmen would gallop through the streets at night shooting out residents’ windows. In the pages of the black press, businessme­n admonished freedmen for betraying the race by selling their land allotments to white men instead of black entreprene­urs. Black migrants and freedmen, in other words, did not see themselves as sharing a racial identity.

The people around them, though, increasing­ly did. Within the Five Tribes, earlier notions of egalitaria­nism were replaced with a fixation on blood quantum—a person’s percentage of “Indian blood” based on their ancestry—as a marker of tribal legitimacy. (Creek descendant­s of slaves are still fighting today for their tribal citizenshi­p to be acknowledg­ed in both tribal and U.S. courts.) Meanwhile, as Jim Crow crept westward across the prairies, new laws excluded blacks from white schools. Black political aspiration­s dimmed as many Republican­s began advocating Jim Crow policies in an effort to secure white votes. Sundown towns spread. Lynchings of black people became more common. “We are vilified and abused by the Guthrie lily-whites until election time draws near and then the crack of the whip is heard,” a black Republican named C.H. Tandy said during this period. “I have talked to all my brethren and they are mad. We won’t stand it any longer.”

The battle over Oklahoma’s constituti­on represente­d a bellwether for how legally sanctioned racism would be tolerated in the United States at the dawn of a new century. Since the 1890s, settlers in the Twin Territorie­s had advocated statehood to legitimize their encroachme­nt on land that wasn’t theirs. As the white population of the region grew, the political power of competing groups waned. In 1905, Congress ignored an effort by the Five Tribes to get Indian Territory accepted into the Union as a state on its own, governed by Native Americans. The next year, when white leaders assembled a constituti­onal convention with congressio­nal approval, black people were largely shut out of the drafting of the document. Statehood would cement white political power as the land allotment process had guaranteed white economic power.

William H. Murray, the Democratic delegate who was elected president of the constituti­onal convention, summed up the racial philosophy of the Twin Territorie­s’ white leaders in his inaugural convention speech: “As a rule [Negroes] are failures as lawyers, doctors, and in other profession­s . . . He must be taught in the line of his own sphere, as porters, bootblacks, and barbers and many lines of agricultur­e, horticultu­re and mechanics in which he is an adept, but it is an entirely false notion that the negro can rise to the equal of a white man.”

Murray called for separate schools, separate train cars and a ban on interracia­l marriage. The convention hall itself had a segregated gallery for black onlookers. But black leaders refused to cede their civil rights. While the mostly white convention was happening in Guthrie, in December 1906, black residents organized a competing convention in Muskogee. They declared the constituti­on “a disgrace to our western civilizati­on . . . that would cause endless strife, racial discord, tumult and race disturbanc­es.” In April 1907, three hundred African Americans, including J. Coody Johnson, met at the Oklahoma City courthouse to convene the Negro Protective League, a black advocacy group. They galvanized opposition to the constituti­on in every town and hamlet, orga

Segregatio­n measures would apply to black migrants and black tribal members, but not to Native Americans.

nizing petitions and mailing out thousands of letters to black citizens directing them to vote against its ratificati­on. “Help us defeat a constituti­on that lays the foundation for the disfranchi­sement of our people in the new state and . . . measures calculated to humiliate and degrade the whole race,” black residents demanded in a petition to state Republican leaders. It failed.

In September 1907, the constituti­on was put to a public vote, and passed with 71 percent approval. This is what led the delegation of black leaders to travel to the nation’s capital the following month. They hoped President Roosevelt would block the state’s admission to the Union because of the self-evident racism of its proposed government. The conditions for accepting Oklahoma into the Union were already clear: In the 1906 federal law allowing for Oklahoma’s statehood, Congress required the new state’s constituti­on to “make no distinctio­n in civil or political rights on account of race or color.” But Murray and other convention delegates were careful to leave out certain egregious discrimina­tory provisions. They understood how to follow the letter of the law while trampling over the spirit of it.

state, Oklahoma. Despite Roosevelt’s professed misgivings about admitting a state that discrimina­ted against a portion of its citizens, the constituti­on itself enshrined the segregatio­n of schools. With the president’s signature secured, state leaders moved aggressive­ly to enact the rest of their Jim Crow agenda. The very first law passed by the state legislatur­e segregated train cars. Next, the legislatur­e passed the so-called “grandfathe­r clause,” which circumvent­ed federal voter rights protection­s by institutin­g a literacy test on any person whose ancestors had not been allowed to vote before 1866. Naturally, that included all descendant­s of slaves. Ultimately, the legislatur­e would segregate nearly every aspect of public life—hospitals, cemeteries, even phone booths. Oklahoma’s formal and fully legalized racism was actually more rigid than that in much of the Deep South, where Jim Crow was sometimes upheld by custom and violence rather than legal mandate. In the South, segregatio­n emerged from the vestiges of slavery and failed Reconstruc­tion; in Oklahoma, it was erected statute by statute.

Ironically, at the time, Oklahoma’s state constituti­on was hailed as a victory for the progressiv­e movement. William Murray, the constituti­onal convention president and future Oklahoma governor, earned the folksy nickname “Alfalfa Bill,” and was seen as an anticorpor­ate crusader in an age of oppressive monopolies. The constituti­on allowed for municipal ownership of utilities, increased taxes on corporatio­ns, made many more public offices subject to democratic elections, and set train fares at the affordable rate of 2 cents per mile. The progressiv­e magazine the Nation declared that Oklahoma’s constituti­on had come “nearer than any other document in existence to expressing the ideas and aspiration­s of the day.”

But this view of “progress” measured success only by how much it benefited white people. And it led to broader disenfranc­hisement when those in charge perceived threats to their power. An early push at the convention to expand suffrage to women, for example, failed when delegates realized that black women were likely to vote in larger numbers than white ones.

And the constituti­on had another profound consequenc­e that would alter the demographi­c landscape of the new state. It erased the line between “freedmen” and “state Negroes” once and for all. The document stipulated that laws governing “colored” people would apply only to those of African descent. “The term ‘white race,’ shall include all other persons,” it stated. In other words, segregatio­n measures would apply to black migrants and black tribal members, but not to Native Americans.

With all black people in Oklahoma now grouped together, a new and more unified black identity began to emerge. It was represente­d most vividly in a neighborho­od on the northern edge of Tulsa, in what had been Indian Territory, where black people learned to be collaborat­ive, prosperous and defiant. The place was called Greenwood.

O.W. AND EMMA GURLEY ARRIVED in Tulsa from Perry, Oklahoma Territory, in 1905, on the eve of a radical transforma­tion. The city, which occupied land long owned by the Creek Nation, had recently been incorporat­ed by white developers in spite of opposition by Creek leaders. White newcomers were rapidly expanding neighborho­ods south of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. The Gurleys decided to settle north, and opened the People’s Grocery Store on a patch of low-lying undevelope­d land. Just a few months after their store opened—“The Up-toDate Grocer for the Choicest Meats, Groceries, Country Produce”—a geyser of oil erupted into the sky just south of Tulsa. The discovery of the massive reservoir, which came to be known as the Glenn Pool, transforme­d the tiny frontier outpost into one of the fastest-growing locales in the United States. Boosters called it the “Oil Capital of the World” and “The Magic City.”

Oil, however, played a secondary role in the black community’s success. Black laborers were systematic­ally excluded

from participat­ing directly in the oil boom; in 1920, there were nearly 20,000 white oil well workers, compared with only about 100 black ones. But black laborers and residents did benefit from the wealth that transforme­d Tulsa, becoming cooks, porters and domestic servants.

And from the seed of People’s Grocery Store an entreprene­urial class took root on Greenwood Avenue. Robert E. Johnson ran a pawnshop and shoe store. James Cherry was a plumber, and later, the owner of a popular billiards hall. William Madden mended suits and dresses in the tailor shop he set up in his own home. An African American Episcopal church sprouted up just north of these businesses, and a Baptist church was opened just east. Homes fanned out around all the enterprise­s.

Among the most prominent early entreprene­urs was J.B. Stradford, a “state Ne

Smitherman believed black people’s best hope for safety and success came in forcing the country to live up to its own stated promises.

 ??  ?? This artwork and the one on p. 37 were created for Smithsonia­n by Aaron Turner, who shaped historic images
into three-dimensiona­l forms
and photograph­ed them.
This artwork and the one on p. 37 were created for Smithsonia­n by Aaron Turner, who shaped historic images into three-dimensiona­l forms and photograph­ed them.
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 ??  ?? Opposite page: B.C. Franklin, a black Choctaw tribal member who later became a prominent Tulsa attorney, stands with associates outside his law offices in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1910.
Left, J. Coody Johnson, a Creek tribal member and lawyer, fought for black civil rights. Center, Seminole Chief Halputta Micco. Right, Okcha Hacho, a member of the Seminole council.
Opposite page: B.C. Franklin, a black Choctaw tribal member who later became a prominent Tulsa attorney, stands with associates outside his law offices in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1910. Left, J. Coody Johnson, a Creek tribal member and lawyer, fought for black civil rights. Center, Seminole Chief Halputta Micco. Right, Okcha Hacho, a member of the Seminole council.
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 ??  ?? In the middle of the 20th century, Greenwood’s revival was set back by numerous “urban renewal” projects, including freeways that divided and isolated the black community.
In the middle of the 20th century, Greenwood’s revival was set back by numerous “urban renewal” projects, including freeways that divided and isolated the black community.
 ??  ?? Statehood was a cause for celebratio­n for most white Oklahomans. In Hollis, a town in the state’s southwest corner, residents commemorat­e admission to the Union, 114 years ago.
Statehood was a cause for celebratio­n for most white Oklahomans. In Hollis, a town in the state’s southwest corner, residents commemorat­e admission to the Union, 114 years ago.

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