All-Black Towns of Oklahoma

The turn of the twentieth century saw the terror against African Americans reach a kind of peak.  The withdrawal of Federal troops from the former Confederacy may have been finished in 1876, but it did not mean the automatic end of Black suffrage.  Rather it was an ongoing race war.  In September, 1906, for example, or at the very same time as many of the events in Stones from the Creek, the Atlanta newspapers reported four alleged assaults on white men by African Americans.  Thousands of white youths and men attacked the African American community, with the connivance of the police, and thirty to forty Black men were killed.  This race riot was triggered by African American insistence on continuing to vote, which can be seen by the immediate disfranchisement laws passed by the new administration of Governor Hoke Smith after he was elected six weeks later.

The same is true of the lynchings elsewhere.  They were no ritual humiliations of an already-subjugated group.  They were acts of war by the ruling whites against the subordinate and -- in many parts of the South -- majority Blacks.  The entire Jim Crow structure had to be created out of thin air.  Never forget that if whites truly did not want Blacks around them they would not have asked them to prepare and serve their food, clean their homes or care for their children.  Can any more intimate relation be imagined?

So the creation of the all-Black towns, many of them in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories was one form of resistance against the terror.  In the all-Black towns there would be no segregation and no disfranchisement.  There would be no firebombing of African American businesses.  The presence of large numbers of African Creeks and Cherokees in the Indian Territory made this land, which would become Oklahoma, look like a promising place for Black towns.  Some of the miccos (chiefs) in the Creek Nation even naturalized African Americans from the States as Creek citizens.

The fate of those towns is a story for a different day.  But when the fictional Ezekiel Payne (protagonist of "In the Midst of the Valley") his daughter Nessa and his Daddy moved to Boley, they were part of a historical
Black middle class that was trying to create a safe haven for their children.