Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  In 1887, the Dawes Act—also known as the General Allotment Act—was passed by Congress, which allowed the federal government to parcel out tribal lands into individual plots. This legislation was supposedly passed to protect the property of Native Nations, but, in effect, it divided up communally held tribal lands, allowing “surplus” lands to be claimed by white settlers and railroad companies.

  And then, caving to pressure, President Benjamin Harrison made a decision that would once again cheat Indigenous people out of what they owned. Initially, he opened up for settlement nearly two million acres that had not been designated to any specific tribe, but it wasn’t long before he permitted white settlers to claim sections that had been assigned to Indigenous people.

  In March 1889, President Harrison announced that 1.9 million acres of Indian Territory would be ready for the taking at noon sharp on April 22. People traveled from all over the United States to lay claim to the land, and per the Homestead Act of 1862, passed during the American Civil War, anyone who remained on the land for five years, had “never borne arms against the United States government,” and “improved” the land would be the owner. People who participated in the land run were called Boomers, and they didn’t waste time preparing for April 22. (Sooners, which you may know as the nickname of the state and mascot of the University of Oklahoma, was the name assigned to people who illegally staked their claim before the official noon start time.) Thousands of people began congregating around the borders of the territory, erecting tent cities on all sides. Hopeful Boomers arrived on horseback, in covered wagons, and even by foot.

  By the time April 22 rolled around, more than fifty thousand people were ready and waiting for the ceremonious gunshots, booming cannons, and blaring horns that would signify the land run had officially begun. And by day’s end, tens of thousands of people had laid down roots in the territory, forming towns such as Oklahoma City and Norman.

  Oklahoma hosted seven land runs in all, from the first one in 1889 to the last in 1895, which took place on land previously designated to the Kickapoo Tribe. Throughout these six years and seven events, the government implemented a lottery system to assign the claims.

  Luck, along with white supremacy, was on the side of the colonizers. They’d acquired land that was never meant to be theirs—and it would prove even more valuable than they could have imagined.

  * * *

  Kentucky Daisey and the Women of the Oklahoma Land Runs

  Though women weren’t afforded many rights and opportunities at the time, nothing stood in the way of their participation in Oklahoma’s land runs. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed for single women who were head of their household to claim 160 acres. And hundreds of these women—some widowed, some Black—took full advantage.

  Perhaps the most famous is the outspoken Nanitta Daisey, also known as “Kentucky Daisey,” who’d already made a name for herself in her home state as a newspaper reporter and an educator. Oklahoma legend has it that Daisey, on assignment to cover the first land run in 1889, leaped off a moving train to stake her claim to land, shooting her pistol into the air as she shouted, “I salute Kentucky Daisey’s claim!”

  Daisey participated in other land runs, including the 1892 opening of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation, when she was sent away for trying to enter the territory too early, and the 1893 Cherokee Outlet opening. A newspaper reported that with the latter land run, Daisey had started a town called Bathsheba with more than thirty other women, though the story has been widely disputed over the years.

  * * *

  After the land runs came the oil.

  Indigenous people were the first to discover the black liquid in Oklahoma. They used the natural oil and gas that seeped from the ground and settled on top of water sources as medicine for themselves and their animals. The Native Nations forced to relocate to the state heard about the oil that oozed from these sources (also known as “medicine springs”) and began noting their location. Soon, people from nearby states would camp by the water to make use of the natural phenomenon.

  Lewis Ross, brother of Cherokee chief John Ross, discovered oil in 1859 while drilling a deep saltwater well in the Cherokee Nation. The oil well he established provided as much as ten barrels a day for almost a year. Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the home of Phillips Petroleum Company, is named after Jacob H. Bartles, who operated a trading post; his employees George B. Keeler and William Johnstone would go on to make history as the first commercial oil well drillers. They did so with the help of the Cherokee Nation, which leased the land, and the Cudahy Oil Company, which did the actual drilling. This well, called Nellie Johnstone No. 1—named for William’s daughter—produced fifty barrels of oil per day, but eventually the output surpassed the demand and storage availability, and the well was capped.

  The Oklahoma oil boom truly began in 1899, when the railroad system arrived in Bartlesville. Over the following decade, the town ballooned from two hundred people to more than four thousand. Oil production increased as well, with the annual number of barrels growing from one thousand to more than forty-three million. Oklahoma produced the most oil in the mid-continent region from 1900 to 1935, and was second for another nine years; overall, the state produced nine hundred million barrels of oil during the entire period.

  Perhaps the two most famous Bartlesville residents who earned their riches from oil are J. Paul Getty, who secured his first million from oil investment at the age of twenty-three and went on to build the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is part of the renowned Getty Center in Los Angeles; and Frank Phillips, founder of Phillips Petroleum Company, which was based in Bartlesville from 1917 until it merged with Conoco in the early 2000s.

  Whites living in Indian Territory wanted to be citizens of the United States as early as the late nineteenth century. The real push for statehood began shortly after the land run of 1889, when thousands more settlers began moving into the area. The next year, the Organic Act of 1890 was established, which officially split present-day Oklahoma into Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. Per this law, a nonvoting delegate from Oklahoma Territory would be sent to the US House of Representatives.

  Territory residents held several statehood conventions for nearly fifteen years, between 1891 and 1905, though they didn’t all agree on how the state should be recognized. Some believed Oklahoma should have a single statehood, which would combine the two territories into one state. Others thought Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory should operate as their own separate states. Some advocated for Oklahoma Territory to seek statehood without acknowledging Indian Territory whatsoever. And, finally, some residents were in favor of piecemeal absorption, which meant Oklahoma Territory would gain statehood immediately, and Native Nations throughout Indian Territory could be added individually.

  Not all leaders within Indian Territory agreed on how statehood should be decided, either. While some believed Indian Territory should form its own state called Sequoyah, this hope was eventually squashed by the Curtis Act, which abolished tribal courts. This meant enforcing laws and court rulings of the Five Tribes of Oklahoma was defunct, and residents of Indian Territory were now held to federal law. Per this act, the United States president had to approve all tribal legislation passed after 1898.

  President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Oklahoma Enabling Act into law in the summer of 1906. The act was in favor of single statehood, combining both territories into one state. The president was a Republican, and he and the Republican-controlled Congress believed it would be detrimental to the country if Indian Territory joined the Union as a Democratic state like its neighbors, Arkansas and Texas. The territories were tasked with drafting a state constitution, and also needed to set up one government. In September of the following year, both territories voted to establish a single statehood, and two months later, President Roosevelt made it official: Oklahoma joined the Union as the forty-sixth state on November 16, 1907.

  * * *

  When US Political Parties Switched Sides
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br />   Sometimes contemporary politicians will make reference to the Democratic Party having been the “proslavery party,” and Republicans as “the party of Lincoln.” While these descriptions are partially true, they lack vital context.

  Back in the late 1800s, Republicans primarily controlled states in the North and were the party responsible for helping implement state universities, a national currency, and the transcontinental railroad, among other initiatives. The Democrats controlled the South at that time, where they opposed post–Civil War Republican laws that protected and expanded the rights of newly freed Black Americans.

  This all began to change in the 1930s, with the presidency of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who passed the New Deal to offset the detrimental effects of the Great Depression. The New Deal was a set of federal relief programs, such as welfare and infrastructure development, that favored bigger government, which had been, historically, a component of the Republican agenda. But FDR’s progressive ideas were preceded by a Democratic presidential candidate named William Jennings Bryan, who, though he lost the election in 1896, ushered in traditionally Republican ideals of government involvement to attain social justice—a bid to win over states in the rapidly expanding West.

  And thus began the realignment of political party views, wherein Republicans came to favor small government (meaning little to no government interaction in American lives) and Democrats supported social service programs funded by the federal government. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, signed off on both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Over the next decade, white Southerners began to support the Republican Party in greater numbers, particularly in the wake of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, wherein Republicans implemented the “Southern strategy,” using overtly racist and faith-based appeals to win over white voters in the South who were appalled by the dismantling of Jim Crow laws.

  * * *

  Even before Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907, it had begun to put Jim Crow laws into place.

  Originating in the South after the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, and the “Black codes” that preceded them, were a collection of various state and local legislation that enforced segregation in nearly all aspects of American life. They were used to subjugate Black Americans, who had recently gained their freedom from slavery, and forced them to live as second-class citizens. The name “Jim Crow” comes from a character in minstrel shows, a white man dressed in blackface who imitated and insulted Black Americans and their culture. Though the man who was responsible for the infamous character died a few years before slavery was abolished, Jim Crow laws would haunt Black people for the next century.

  Oklahoma began by dividing white children and Black children into separate schools as early as 1897. Trains and streetcars were next; in 1908, these transportation companies were required to offer separate cars for both races. Fines for violating the law were steep, running as high as $1,000 for businesses that did not comply, $25 for passengers who did not sit in their assigned cars, and $500 for conductors who did not enforce segregation. That same year, the state declared it against the law for Black Americans to marry anyone “not of African descent.” If a Black person and a white person fell in love and ignored the law, they could be forced to pay $500 and sent to prison for up to five years. (This law was later expanded in 1921 to ban marriage between Black Americans and Indigenous people.)

  The segregation laws grew over the next fifty years to include separate telephone booths (Oklahoma was the first state to implement this law), separate spaces in public libraries, separate boxing matches, separate health care and social service institutions, separate restrooms for people who worked in the mines, and even separate marching bands in parades, among others.

  Through this legislation, Oklahoma developed a culture that was intolerant of the mere existence of Black Americans. And white Oklahomans readily enforced these laws, even though Black people had been living there since it was known as Indian Territory. Black Americans first made their way to Oklahoma with the forced migration of the Five Tribes. Several of the tribes, though they themselves were oppressed by white colonizers, also enslaved Black people and brought them to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.

  The Cherokee Nation held the most enslaved people among the Five Tribes; by 1860, they reportedly owned 4,600 Black people. While this form of chattel slavery was similar to that practiced by white people, meaning the enslaved were forced to work long, difficult days tending to farmland, or in house jobs as servants and maids, the Cherokee used them in other ways, too. Black people were often made to serve as translators or interpreters if their slaveholders could not speak English, so that tribes could communicate and do business with white people.

  Although some historians claim that the Indigenous people who enslaved Black people treated them more as indentured servants—a fixed term of slavery in which the enslaved often retained some rights—enslavement is enslavement. They were not free, nor were they treated as if they were free, as evidenced by the Slave Revolt of 1842, the largest rebellion of enslaved people in Indian Territory history.

  On November 15 of that year, more than two dozen enslaved people in Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, decided enough was enough. At the Joseph Vann plantation, the enslaved waited until sleep had settled over the farm, then locked the slaveholders and overseers—supervisors who ensured the enslaved people “stayed in their place”—in their homes. The enslaved Black men, women, and children took all kinds of things that would help execute their rebellion: horses and mules, guns and ammunition, food, and other supplies. At sunrise, they headed out on their journey, stopping to pick up more enslaved people in Muscogee (Creek) Nation. The destination? Mexico, where they would be free.

  Their trek was not without incident; at one point, the escapees fought Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) pursuers, a battle that ended with two enslaved people dead and twelve captured. The rest of the group traveled on, managing to defend themselves against a duo of slave hunters in the Choctaw Nation—ultimately killing them. But, unfortunately, the story does not end with their freedom: Although nearly forty people had joined the rebellion, they were eventually outnumbered by their pursuers. Two days after the escape, the Cherokee National Council, afraid that word of the rebellion would spread and influence other enslaved people to revolt, approved a Cherokee militia of eighty-seven men, whose mission was to capture the fugitives and bring them back home. The runaways eventually lost their way and were caught by the militia near the Red River on November 28, after nearly two weeks on the run.

  The remaining rebels were shuttled back to Webbers Falls in early December. Five of them were given a trial, found guilty of the two murders in Choctaw Nation, and executed. The rest of the group was sent back to their slaveholders. The Cherokee people believed the rebellion was sparked by free Black Seminole people, who were armed and lived nearby, at Fort Gibson, and so shortly after the runaways were caught, the Cherokee Nation passed “An Act in regard to Free Negroes,” which forced all free Black Americans, with the exception of those who’d been formerly enslaved by the Cherokee people, to leave Cherokee land by January 1, 1843.

  After the American Civil War ended in 1865, all enslaved people in Indian Territory were finally given their freedom; additionally, the Native Nations were ordered to provide land to the newly freed Black people. And from there, Black Oklahomans began to start businesses, and also purchased farmland.

  For a time, they lived in relative harmony with their white neighbors in the post–Civil War Indian Territory. The state’s land runs took place during this period of peace between Black and white Oklahomans, and perhaps explains why Black Americans were allowed to participate. Though the numbers have been debated for years, the 1890 Territorial Census of Oklahoma estimated around three thousand Black people lived in the state at the time, though only forty-two had joined the land run that year. However, some historians believe that the numbers of both white and Black homesteaders were inflated;
the government wanted to promote the success of the newly settled land but also didn’t want white people to think too many Black people were living there.

  Meanwhile, Black Americans continued to flood into Oklahoma, primarily claiming land in Canadian, Blaine, and Kingfisher Counties. According to Lizzie Robinson, who traveled to the state in 1889 with a “train load of colored folk,” most Black Boomers “built dugouts and small log houses to live in. They lived hard.”

  Around fifteen hundred Black Americans participated in the 1891 land run, which opened territory that had belonged to the Sac and Fox Nation. They came from Langston, an all-Black town named for John Mercer Langston, an African American congressman from Virginia. Their run was organized by Edward P. McCabe, an attorney and politician from Kansas who had founded Langston and whose goal was to make Oklahoma a majority-Black state that would not be controlled by white people. About a thousand Black people from that group ended up acquiring land. McCabe also ran a newspaper called the Langston City Herald and hired people to circulate it through Southern states, hoping to attract more Black Americans to the territory.

  All-Black towns, also known as freedmen’s towns, were far from a rarity in the United States at that time, but they were especially abundant in Oklahoma. Black Americans, finally free from enslavement and looking for opportunities to start their lives anew, began moving into Indian Territory in 1865; by 1920, they had created more than fifty towns or settlements. These towns were also populated by the people formerly enslaved by members of the Five Tribes. Though some were short-lived, the following thirteen still exist today: Boley, Brooksville, Clearview, Grayson, Langston, Lima, Red Bird, Rentiesville, Summit, Taft, Tatums, Tullahassee, and Vernon.