The Racial Frontier: Black Towns in Oklahoma

Oklahoma, in its earliest organized forms, consisted of over forty independent Native American Nations, though they arrived through a complex process. Native American migration predated European contact but by the mid eighteenth century Native American nations saw their lands being progressively threatened by Euro-American settlement. Migratory push/pull factors such as warfare, famine, and encroachment resulted in movements of native cultures for centuries. However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Native American migratory patterns began to be forced and regulated on European terms. Treaties, lands sales, and forced relocations onto predetermined reservations changed the way Native Americans would relate to the land and their environment, as well as, intertribal relations. By the 1820s and 1830s most Native American nations had ceded their lands east of the Mississippi River to the newly created United States by treaty or ultimately through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 further defined ‘Indian Territory’ as “all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi and not within the states of Missouri, Louisiana, or Arkansas Territory, or any other organized territory.” Over time, this vast reserved land shrank to the limits of Eastern Oklahoma as the insatiable demand for cheap land for white settlers increased.

Unlike the black/white dichotomous experience of the South, Oklahoma became a foreshadowing example of the diversity of the American West. While the South experienced a period of multiracialism before removal, through segregation, the South never experienced the cultural diversity seen in Oklahoma. Oklahoma, both politically and demographically, would develop...

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...he vast majority of Oklahoma’s black towns developed.

Works Cited

"Indian Removal Act, May 28, 1830." In Documents of United States Indian Policy, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 52-53.; and "Trade and Intercourse Act, June 30, 1834." In Documents of United States Indian Policy, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 63-68. The term ‘Indian Territory’ is not seen in any of these documents but is of later creation.

Mozell C. Hill, “The All-Negro Communities of Oklahoma: The Natural History of a Social Movement,” Journal of Negro History 31 (July 1946), 254-68.

Joseph Taylor, “The Rise and Decline of a Utopian Community, Boley, Oklahoma,” Negro History Bulletin 3 (March 1940), 92; and Joseph Taylor, “Mound Bayou – Past and Present,” Negro History Bulletin 3 (April 1940), 105.