African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens by Celia E. Naylor

Author:Celia E. Naylor [Naylor, Celia E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, history, United States, 19th Century, Native American Studies
ISBN: 9780807832035
Google: jUiCIl6htNwC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2008-11-15T00:11:48.288524+00:00

Black Exodus to Oklahoma

Following the Reconstruction era, the status, rights, and position of freedpeople within Indian Territory and the United States generated a great deal of controversy and speculation. One particularly pressing question involved the possible separation or relocation of tribal freedpeople to the United States’ recently acquired Oklahoma District or Unassigned Lands. Located west of Indian Territory, the boundaries of the Unassigned Lands were the South Canadian River on the south, the Indian Meridian and the Pawnee reservation on the east, the Cherokee Outlet on the north, and the Cimarron River and the ninety-eighth meridian on the west. In terms of current Oklahoma cities, the Unassigned Lands ranged from Stillwater to Norman and from Choctaw to El Reno. Viewed initially as a site for the resettlement of tribal freedpeople and possibly for other Indian nations, the Unassigned Lands attracted the attention of white homesteaders, as well as African American nationalists and separatists in the United States. What began as the migration of black exodusters to Kansas and Arkansas in 1879 finally led to the conception and creation of all-black towns in Oklahoma. The new citizens who settled on “surplus” lands of Indian nations in Oklahoma territory changed the sociopolitical landscape of this area forever. Even as citizens of the Five Tribes continued to challenge the federal government’s attempts to compromise the sociopolitical integrity of their respective nations in the late nineteenth century, they also struggled with the changing demographics of the region as successive waves of European Americans and African Americans migrated to the area with dreams of a new life.

In the South, the postwar economic depression, exacerbated by a heightened level of social discontent and mayhem, served as a key motivating factor for the search for a new home outside the limits of the southern United States. As Mozell C. Hill argues, “while the westward trek of Negroes in search of freedom, which culminated in the establishment of all-Negro communities in Oklahoma came later, it was, nevertheless, closely related to the great westward march of whites.” Indeed, Hill maintains that “Negroes and whites who left the South had several things in common. First, both racial groups, dissatisfied with the Old South, were yearning for a better place to live. Secondly, both had an abounding faith in the frontier where land was free and opportunities unlimited. And finally, both groups were racially intolerant toward each other, believing that separation of the races was not only expedient and desirable, but, indeed, absolutely essential.”29

Some African Americans’ westward migration from the South to Oklahoma Territory occurred in two or more stages. During the 1870s and 1880s, African Americans from the South participated in the “Great Negro Exodus” to Kansas and Arkansas—two states that served as promising black homelands.30 Articles in African American newspapers throughout the country actively encouraged black migration from the South to the West. “For colored men to stay in the rebel-ridden South,” one article stated, “and be treated like brutes is a disgrace to themselves and to the race to which they belong.

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