Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  Creating and building up these towns offered more opportunities for Black Americans, but it also provided comfort. In all-Black towns, they were safe from the violence and prejudice they were used to enduring from white people, and they could support one another by patronizing businesses owned and operated by other Black people. These efforts intensified as Oklahoma gained statehood and Jim Crow laws were passed. Black Oklahomans participated in education activism early on, organizing groups such as the Oklahoma State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs in 1910, which collaborated with other organizations to establish schools in Boley and Taft. Black women advocated for Black public libraries in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and the Prince Hall Masons, a Black fraternal organization, worked with their women’s group, the Order of the Eastern Star, to support college scholarships.

  These all-Black towns were not only a great success for the time in which they existed, but they also set the stage for the Black Oklahomans who would one day establish Tulsa’s remarkable Greenwood District. However, their towns eventually began to die out for a number of reasons, including white people who banned them from leasing land or working in their counties and also barred them from obtaining loans.

  From the Indian Removal Act to land runs, and the oil boom to eventual statehood, Oklahoma saw its fair share of activity in the century after it was acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. Despite the state’s commitment to segregation and inequality, Black Oklahomans found ways to not only survive but also thrive. This was a theme that would follow Black Americans through the forthcoming decades and one that had defined them since chattel slavery was abolished.

  Mother remembers running down the street, six months pregnant with me, dodging bullets that were dropping all around her. She said that it was a miracle that she escaped alive and that I was later allowed to come into this world.

  —Julius Warren Scott,

  Tulsa Race Massacre survivor

  2

  To Be Black in America

  On January 1, 1863, four million enslaved Black Americans in captured Confederate states were set free through President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Back in 1854, during Lincoln’s Peoria Speech, he’d declared, “If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”

  But as much as he may have personally hated slavery, Lincoln was initially quick to correct people who said the American Civil War was about abolishing the longstanding institution. His August 1862 editorial in the Washington, DC, newspaper the Daily National Intelligencer plainly stated: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

  The Emancipation Proclamation sounds like an all-mighty document that immediately changed the lives of enslaved Black people in Southern rebel states, which had seceded from the Union beginning in 1860. But the executive order, issued in September 1862, was more of a symbolic gesture; the law said nothing about enslaved people in states and territories that were not part of the Confederacy, and no people were actually freed after the decree because the law was not constitutional. However, it did further clarify the aim of the Northern states in the war: It was no longer solely about preserving the Union. Now they were fighting a war of freedom.

  Hearing the call for liberation, Black people—who had previously wanted to serve in the Union army but were banned by the government—began signing up to fight and entered combat after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863. About 200,000 Black Americans enlisted in the army and navy, despite the unequal pay, rules that prevented them from serving as officers, and the fact that they were forced to use secondhand uniforms and equipment.

  While the Union and Confederate armies were battling each other in the last year of the Civil War, Lincoln was busy getting the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed in Congress—the law that would officially abolish slavery throughout the United States. The Senate passed the bill in April 1864, but the House of Representatives did not pass the amendment until nine months later, in January 1865, while the war raged on. Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and died the next morning, just days after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union army, but his legacy lived on through the symbol of the Emancipation Proclamation and the freedom afforded by the Thirteenth Amendment.

  Lincoln also had a plan for Reconstruction, a period meant to reunify the country after the war. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, also known as the Ten Percent Plan, was issued in December 1863 and allowed any Confederate state with 10 percent of voters who swore allegiance to the Union to build new state governments and revise their state constitutions. It also protected the physical property (excluding enslaved Black people) of former plantation owners and pardoned all Southerners, except for top-level Confederate officials and military leaders, for secession from the Union.

  But the Ten Percent Plan didn’t lay out any citizenship rights or civil rights for Black people. In fact, it is believed that Lincoln’s plan was created to be particularly attractive to Confederate states because he simply wanted to end the war and thought terms that didn’t address Black citizenship would help persuade them to surrender. The strategy for what he apparently hoped would be a quick Reconstruction was never enacted, as the Ten Percent Plan was scrapped after Lincoln’s assassination.

  Radical Republicans in Congress believed Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan was much too lenient on the rebel states; the plan they formulated was focused on providing equality to freed Black Americans. However, they did not find an ally in Andrew Johnson, who became president in April 1865 upon Lincoln’s assassination and was a proud former slaveholder himself. Sometimes called an “accidental president,” Johnson is widely considered in recent years to be one of the worst leaders in the history of the United States. He certainly didn’t win over famous Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, leaving a bad taste in Douglass’s mouth when Johnson was sworn in as vice president in March 1865, a month before President Lincoln was killed. “Mr. Lincoln touched Mr. Johnson and pointed me out to him,” Douglass wrote about the ceremony. “The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion.” Douglass turned to a friend and said, “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.”

  Johnson’s political legacy supports Douglass’s assessment. He consistently fought both Radical Republicans and more moderate politicians on every progressive policy, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, established to provide social services including health care, education, food, housing, and legal aid to freed Black Americans. The bureau was also committed to helping formerly enslaved people find new homes on land that had been abandoned or seized during the Civil War.

  And though the House of Representatives overrode him, Johnson also vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was Congress’s first legislation on civil rights and granted citizenship to “all persons born in the United States”—excluding citizens of the Native Nations. The act was in part a response to the “Black codes,” racist laws in Southern states that limited the freedom and job opportunities of Black Americans in the post–Civil War nation, while also punishing them for falsified crimes such as “vagrancy” if they were unemployed. (Sound familiar? They’re a close relative of Jim Crow laws.) Johnson, who believed in states’ rights, did nothing to curtail the discriminatory laws, forcing Congress to take action. In fact, his commitment to white supremacy was plainly stated in an 1866 letter to the governor of Missouri, in which Johnson wrote: “This is a country for white me
n, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men.” It should be no surprise, then, that Johnson also opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided the formerly enslaved with “equal protection” under the Constitution.

  Despite President Johnson’s persistent opposition to equality and voting rights for freed Black Americans, Congress moved forward with its plans for Radical Reconstruction, drafting the Reconstruction Acts of 1867–68. These acts included:

  Sending federal troops to all the rebel Southern states—with the exception of Tennessee, the first to be readmitted to the Union in July 1866—so they could be ruled under military law.

  The revision of rebel state constitutions with both Black and white delegates present at the convention where the rewriting would take place.

  A commitment to Black suffrage (i.e., giving Black men the right to vote), and the requirement for rebel states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before they were readmitted to the Union.

  The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, granted Black men the Constitutional right to vote, guaranteeing they would not be prevented from casting a ballot “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

  The Reconstruction laws and amendments passed by the Radical Republicans were groundbreaking, but the Fifteenth Amendment was an absolute game changer in terms of democracy. Not only could Black men now vote, but since there was nothing preventing them from running for political office, they could help elect Black people, as well.

  And that’s exactly what they did.

  The former Confederate states saw record numbers of Black men running for political office—and winning. Elected in 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi was the first Black US senator; that same year, Joseph Rainey, who was born into slavery in South Carolina, was elected by the state as the first Black man in the House of Representatives. By 1877, around two thousand African Americans held positions in local, state, and federal office in the rebel states, just twelve years after the end of the Civil War. These unprecedented numbers of Black leaders are largely credited for the dismantling of the Black codes.

  The first Black US Senator and US Representatives, in the 41st and 42nd Congress, L to R: Hiram R. Revels, Benjamin S. Turner, Robert C. De Large, Josiah T. Walls, Jefferson F. Long, Joseph H. Rainey, and Robert B. Elliott

  This enraged proslavery white Southerners, who were furious that the source of their labor and wealth had been set free and were now enfranchised. They believed the racist notions that had allowed slavery to thrive for centuries: that Africans and African Americans were unintelligent, wild, incapable of leadership, and fit only for hard manual labor and domestic work. Or, if they didn’t truly believe this in their hearts, they behaved as if they did, perpetuating the system of white supremacy the United States had been built upon.

  Now that slavery was illegal and they saw Black Americans making political, social, and economic gains, they felt victimized. Since the founding of the United States, racists have felt threatened by laws meant to expand justice and equality—they see the legislation as a roadblock to their own success, rather than something that provides people with the human rights they’ve always deserved. Further, they were nervous about the political alignment of poor white people and freed Black people.

  Poor whites resented the “planter elite,” or wealthy plantation owners; too poor to have purchased enslaved people prior to the Civil War themselves, they didn’t benefit from slavery. This likely stung even more due to the lie of white supremacy that told them they were entitled to whatever they wanted simply because of their skin color. Some were so disillusioned that they began to associate with freed Black people; in reality, poor Southern white people often had more in common with Black Americans at the time than either of them did with the well-off white men who’d held the vast majority of political and economic power in the country since its inception. They also benefited from some Reconstruction policies, such as the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave any American citizen—Black and white alike—a “fair chance” by allowing them to buy land.

  Unfortunately, the goals and policies of Reconstruction soon began to lose steam. With heavy concentration in the South due to chattel slavery, freed Black people made up the majority of Republican voters in the former Confederate states; however, Black politicians were never able to achieve any sort of majority in state governments during Reconstruction, limiting their power and influence. Further, Democrats began to pass laws that made it difficult if not impossible for Black people and poor white people to vote or be elected, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements. Once the right to vote was taken away, those same disenfranchised Americans were also prevented from running for local office or serving on a jury.

  President Andrew Johnson is surely a mascot for the failure of Reconstruction; his racism and refusal to hold states accountable only served to undermine the tireless efforts of Congress. He was also the first president to be impeached—convicted of charges for a crime or misconduct while in office—after violating the Tenure of Office Act, which didn’t allow him to fire federal officials who’d been approved by the Senate without Senate approval. He narrowly missed being removed from office by the Senate in 1868—by one vote.

  There were other factors to blame for the mishandling of Reconstruction efforts, as well, including an economic depression in 1873, which led to widespread unemployment and bankruptcy; waning commitment to racial equality from white people, including Northerners, some of whom had fought alongside Black Americans in the Union army; and President Rutherford B. Hayes’s 1877 removal of the military from former Confederate states, which allowed white Southerners to start a decades-long campaign to disenfranchise and terrorize Black people through violence and other means.

  In Oklahoma, A. C. Hamlin became the first Black politician elected to the state legislature in 1908, just a year after the territory gained statehood. He represented a district in Logan County, which was primarily Black at the time. The son of formerly enslaved people, Hamlin saw success during his time in government: a law he wrote helped create the Industrial Institute for the Deaf, Blind, and Orphans of the Colored Race in the all-Black town of Taft, and he sponsored a bill that would enforce equal conditions for Black railroad passengers.

  But instead of seeing this as much-needed progress in the decades after Reconstruction, white politicians and constituents remained threatened by Black Americans gaining even an ounce of political power. The white politicians serving alongside Hamlin wasted no time in trying to ensure he would not be reelected—and that no Black legislator would follow in his footsteps—by passing laws that made it more difficult for Black Americans to vote. One of these efforts was the state’s Voter Registration Act of 1910, which included a grandfather clause that required a literacy test for all voters—except for those who were able to vote on January 1, 1866, as well as their ancestors and descendants. You know who weren’t able to legally vote until 1870? Black people. Therefore, the law excluded many Black Oklahomans from voting, as Black Americans had historically been lawfully prevented from learning to read and write or forced to attend inadequate, woefully underfunded schools. This crooked legislation also allowed voting registrars to turn away Black voters at their discretion, without ever giving them the test.

  Sure enough, A. C. Hamlin lost when he ran for reelection in 1910.

  Oklahoma’s Voter Registration Act was overturned by the US Supreme Court five years later in Guinn v. United States, but it was too late for Hamlin to try again for a second term. He died in 1912 at the age of thirty-one.

  As the gains Black people made during Reconstruction faded away or were overturned completely, tensions increased even more between Black and white Americans. Black codes and Jim Crow laws had become the rule of the South, and Northern states were home to plenty of racism and segregation, as well. White people had now seen what Black Americans could achieve when they were treated as equal citizens—and many of
them didn’t like it. They feared free, educated Black people; perhaps they were convinced that if Black Americans gained equality and political power, they would treat white people the same way they themselves had treated African Americans for centuries. Whatever the reason, violence and terrorism inflicted on Black Americans increased greatly in the years after Reconstruction—and no single organization was more responsible for or emblematic of this white supremacist resurgence than the Ku Klux Klan.

  The KKK was founded by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, immediately after the Civil War ended as a social club for those bitter about the new freedoms afforded to formerly enslaved Black people. Before long, there were branches of the Klan in nearly every former rebel state, and their influence was so widespread and their terrorism so violent that Congress eventually passed three acts to suppress the group. The KKK disbanded in the 1870s as Reconstruction ended; with Southern states left to their own devices and the subsequent surge of Jim Crow laws, the Klan’s work was being done. Black people were disenfranchised, unable to fully enjoy their freedom, and lived in perpetual terror of violence, especially lynching.

  However, the KKK reemerged decades later, due in large part to a film created during the rise of Hollywood cinema: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was one of history’s first blockbusters, and memorable scenes painted KKK members as heroes—heroes who were “saving” white women from Black men—instead of the violent villains they were, inspiring legions of white men around the country. So powerful was its influence that The Birth of a Nation was the first movie to ever be screened at the White House, during President Woodrow Wilson’s first term. Wilson, who segregated federal government offices to appease Southern conservatives, supposedly said about the film: “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true.”