Forgotten But Not Gone: The Black-Native History and People Surrounding The Tulsa Race Massacre
This article is an adaptation of a LATTO thought’s ongoing three-part series on the shared histories of Black and Native peoples in America. Listen to the episodes on your favorite podcast app today.
“The Creek Nation and the Cherokee Nation join at Greenwood and Archer, right where the Tulsa riots occurred,” reflected Darnella Davis, member of the Muscogee Creek nation, descendent of the Cherokee Freedmen, and author of Untangling a Red White and Black Heritage. A year after the murder of George Floyd and in the wake of an overdue surge in the Movement for Black Lives, May 31, 2021, marked the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Yet while the story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District and its destruction by an angry white mob has taken a necessary nationwide spotlight, the unrecognized story surrounding the fabled ‘Black Wall Street’ reveals how Greenwood sat in the crosshairs of two of America’s most foundational racial schema: blood quantum and the one-drop rule. A historical omission that invisibilizes the Indigenous people — white-skinned, tan-skinned, dark-skinned, and Freedmen alike — whose land helped enable Greenwood’s success. In fact, the full story of Greenwood is a longer, more complex chain of events that, if left obscured, eclipses tribal Freedmen’s present-day fight for civil rights.
Counting ancestors, procuring land
What became Oklahoma, until the early twentieth century, was Indian Country. It was home to several Great Plains tribes — some of which were relocated there, some that remained on their homelands — as well as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole tribes who were removed from the southeast in the 1830s. In order for Oklahoma to become a state in 1907, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was tasked two decades prior with ‘breaking up the tribal mass’ of these western Indian Territories.
The Dawes Act of 1887 gave the BIA the authority to document all Native peoples living on tribal reservations and discern how much ‘Indian blood’ ran through their veins. It was a bureaucratic solution for stripping Indigenous people of land and sovereignty, and it was backed by the racial calculus of blood quantum.
“It’s hard to talk about blood quantum concisely,” said Kim Tallbear, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples Techno Science and Environment at the University of Alberta and member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. “It’s basically a fraction on a piece of paper that counts ancestors.”
The BIA recorded individuals living on tribal reservations as full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, or 1/6 blood quantum, which was based on the genocidal idea that Indigenous people were members of a ‘vanishing species.’ This in turn gave the U.S. and its settlers justification in procuring Native lands.
The Dawes Rolls contain meticulous logs of who was in what tribe and how much land they would be allotted depending on how much ‘Indian blood’ was in their body. Those that were ‘full-blooded’ were sent to a significantly reduced reservation set aside for their ancestral tribe which was protected by federal law and thus not available for settler colonization. By 1892, the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation, for example, was reduced from 3.5 million to 530 thousand acres by way of the Dawes Act.
Anyone with half or less of an assigned blood quantum — ‘mixed-bloods’ — was assumed to be at least partly ‘civilized’ and thus were individually allotted acreages of land, the sizes of which varied tribe to tribe. While more land was assigned to ‘half-blooded’ individuals, it also was harder, at least on paper, for settlers to purchase it. Whereas individuals with less ‘Indian blood’ were assigned smaller, more fungible land allotments. Of course, the actual proceedings were never applied consistently across all Indigenous peoples — a common feature of BIA and U.S. legal interaction with Native tribes.
Land was a primary driving force behind the use of blood quantum and the one drop rule in Oklahoma, a state that necessitated pedigree as a pretense for property, wealth, and social capital. While ‘full-blooded’ Indigenous peoples were effectively exiled to an economically deprived and smaller reservation without any form of tribal sovereignty, ‘mixed-blood’ Indigenous individuals received between 40 to 120 acres of land, free and clear of debt — incorporated land upon which the U.S. would eventually levy taxes, thus adding pressure for unsuspecting or cash-poor individuals to sell their allotments
But while the logic operating underneath blood quantum was that the more Native an individual was, the less they’d be able to function within capitalistic society, another racial paradigm quickly wrinkled its implementation: the one-drop rule.
The U.S. government’s Negro-Indian problem
By the time the Curtis Act of 1898 enforced the Dawes Act onto the Five so-called “Civilized Tribes” — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole nations forcibly relocated to what would become Oklahoma — the BIA had begun segregating tribal rolls even further. While the two most consequential categories on the Dawes Rolls were ‘full-bloods’ and ‘mixed-bloods,’ folks who had dark skin, coarse and coiled hair, or were known to have been freed from enslavement within the Five Tribes were segregated into an entirely different list: the Freedmen Rolls.
“There were lots of cases of Creeks only speaking Muskogee Creek and instances where one sister was deemed ‘Indian’ and the other was a ‘Negro’ depending on how they looked,” said Davis. “When allotment comes along, federal policies shaped their identities, contrasting from how they thought about themselves.”
While African chattel slavery was adopted at different times by each of the Five Tribes, the extent to which the BIA recategorized Native people using the one-drop rule revealed how slavery in the Five Tribes was not at all the same model as antebellum slavery. The Creeks and Seminoles, for example, were so interwoven socially, politically, and economically in spite of slavery, that the BIA had an incredibly difficult time determining who was to be listed on the Freedmen Rolls versus the Citizen-by-Blood Rolls, regardless of whether or not the person in question was emancipated after the tribes signed treaties with the U.S. government in 1866.
“If you look at the Seminole, the very nation itself is a kind of conglomeration of different people. And the way in which people nominally enslaved by the nation lived was quite different from what was going on in slave states like Virginia [and] the Carolinas,” said Ariela Gross, the John B. and Alice R. Sharpe Professor of Law at USC’s Gould School of Law. “There were slaves who lived in separate towns, who planted and cultivated fields in common, who owned livestock, who only paid a kind of annual tribute [to the Seminole nation]. And there were these military alliances between Seminoles and Black Seminoles in the 1820s and 1830s. So I don’t think it’s at all wrong to look back at that and say, well, you actually have a very different experience of slavery.”
However, for the largest Native American tribe, the Cherokee, slavery slowly came to mirror the familiar, dehumanizing practices forged by the antebellum south.
“One of the first laws that came in 1824 made it illegal to free your slave in order to marry her,” said Marilynn Vann, the founder and President of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association, member of the Cherokee nation and descendant of the Cherokee Freedmen. “Eventually, there were laws that a Black slave couldn’t learn to read and write. In the 1839 [Cherokee] constitution, a person with African ancestry, even if he was recognized as a citizen, wouldn’t be able to hold office.” And as more and more Cherokee intermarried with white settlers, Black codes respectively became more and more prevalent.
Nonetheless, marrying enslaved African people and treating such wives, husbands, and the children born from their marriages as tribal kin, even within the confines of chattel slavery, was not totally eliminated. As a result, the Cherokee and Creek Freedmen were allotted land which was far less regulated than their lighter-skinned kin — Freedmen's land was much easier to sell and, therefore, easier for white land grifters to cheat them into poor deals. While reparations promised to emancipated Black U.S. citizens during Reconstruction were delayed in perpetuity, some Black Natives and Freedmen were given their due recompense.
But the ramifications of Black and Native mixing inside the rapidly expanding U.S. empire wouldn’t be felt until Oklahoma statehood arrives at the turn of the twentieth century.
The vision of a free black west
While the south and north’s response to Reconstruction after the Civil War was a white insurgency and political violence committed by the Ku Klux Klan and Confederate sympathizers, the west offered Black U.S. citizens hope for a prosperous and peaceful future. One of the more famous for trying to implement the vision of a free Black west was E.P. McCabe, an attorney and land agent who was one of the first African Americans to attain political office in present-day Kansas and who founded Langston, Oklahoma.
Black statesmen — wealthy businessmen like O.W. Gurley and J.B. Stradford, the two foremost accredited ‘founders’ of Tulsa’s all-Black Greenwood District — were emboldened by McCabe’s efforts, forging their own paths to Indian and Oklahoman territories at the start of the land rush, and eventually became advocates of McCabe’s vision, oftentimes recruiting Black folks from the south to move out west. But, of course, there already was a sizeable Black population in the region — Black Natives had been in Indian Territory long before then, and their land allotments were pivotal in the unfolding story.
“There were many Black towns in Oklahoma,” Davis continued. “The reasons why Black businessmen could be prosperous was because that’s where the allotments of Cherokee Freedmen and Creek Freedmen were situated.”
In fact, when J.B. Stradford came to Tulsa County in 1906, the land he purchased that became the fabled Black Wall Street was from a Cherokee woman, Mary Turley, who was ‘1/2 Cherokee by blood,’ per the Tulsa County Clerk office. And while Turley was not documented in Tulsan records as a ‘Negro’ or ‘Freedmen,’ her land sale to Stradford was nonetheless an important signifier of the overlap between Black and Indigenous people in Oklahoma.
“You know, if you look at a map of Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory, which now makes up Oklahoma, the eastern part of the state is Indian Territory,” said Eli Grayson, former president of the California Muscogee Creek Association, Creek by blood and a descendant of the Freedmen of the Creek Nation. “A third of all of that land was allotted to people of African descent, whether they were Black Indians or Freedmen. Much of the Black part of the land, of the Freedmen land, was up and down the Arkansas River between Tulsa and Muskogee. And that’s where a lot of the agricultural profit in Oklahoma was being produced during those days.”
The intersectional subjectivity of Black Natives is what granted all Black people in the United States hope for a better future. Over fifty all-Black towns and cities like Bowley and Muskogee began growing out from the land allotted to Black Natives — Freedmen and blood relatives alike — from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to as far as 1920. Stradford and Gurley’s ventures in their Tulsan neighborhood were not the sole, prominent example of Black enterprise in Oklahoma, but rather are representative of significant development in the long history of Black folks in Indian Country.
“And so money is made off their land,” Grayson continued. “And when they needed to shop for furniture or go into town for the weekend, they went into either the Muscogee area or the Greenwood area. And because Oklahoma’s economy back in those days was agriculture and oil and gas production, if you were a landowner, you did really well.”
And it is here on the stage set forth by Indian removal, Black emancipation, land allotment, and Jim Crow where the story of Greenwood’s rise and fall begins.
More Jim Crow than most southern constitutions
“In my family, both families,” said Davis, “My father’s side, the Cherokee side who were the Freedmen, who had looser restrictions on their land, and my mother’s side of the family, the Creeks — still own parts of the original land in Oklahoma. But when Oklahoma became a state in 1907, Jim Crow really arrived with a big thud.”
In 1896, coinciding with the Oklahoma land rush, the U.S. Supreme court solidified the one-drop rule as a means of slotting people — Natives and U.S. citizens who had ‘one drop of African blood’ in their bodies — into the ‘Negro’ category per the racist ideologies of Jim Crow. Any distinguishing characteristics of a person’s identity — phenotype, family members, social circles — were subject to being racialized, thus barring them from public and private establishments. Such identifiers were key to the power dynamics that grew from the Oklahoman soil.
“That state constitution is more Jim Crow than most southern constitutions are, and introduces segregation in every way,” said Gross. “There were immediate consequences. People on the Freedmen Rolls were thereby automatically defined as ‘Negro’ for the purposes of the Oklahoma constitution.”
Oklahoma wasted no time infusing Jim Crow into the newly incorporated state. The first act passed was nicknamed ‘the coach law,’ because of the coach cars that state legislation segregated into ‘whites only’ or ‘colored only.’ However, Oklahoma had a foreseeable problem enforcing racial segregation. Many Black Natives could conceivably claim to be Indian, not Negro, and use their Native identity to resist Jim Crow discrimination. This, however, is conjecture based on what preceded Oklahoman legislation decades prior. In the censuses predating statehood, many Indigenous families suffered a swift legal erasure of their Native identities by way of the one-drop rule.
“You find these Indians on the 1900 census in the tribe listed as ‘Indian, Indian, Indian’ next to their family’s name, all the way down,” Grayson continued. “But by 1920, when Jim Crow had really taken on, and the KKK had started running the government in Oklahoma, you find all of these Indians that were Indian on the two previous censuses are now ‘Negro,’ all the way down.”
Jim Crow ideology recategorized Indigenous people according to federal, and eventually state, racial logics, a strategy intended to quell Black upward mobility. What the KKK and state legislators did not anticipate, however, was how to land allotment coupled with Jim Crow segregation would actually create a cycle of wealth in the very communities white power was bent on dominating.
The powder keg
“One way to look at the Black community in Tulsa, is its sort of an all-Black town within a town,” said Hannibal B. Johnson, author of nearly a dozen books focused on these histories. “It exists in the context of the white-dominated city, segregated, buoyed economically by the relative wealth of the Freedman.”
Blood quantum allotted resource-rich land to thousands of Native Americans, a third of which were Black Natives. The one-drop rule flattened the ‘Negro’ category further to include non-U.S. citizens — Indigenous people who looked like they might have African descendants, Black kin who were never enslaved by the Five Tribes, and anyone listed on the Freedmen rolls. All of these folks were barred from accessing public and private establishments all throughout Oklahoma per its Jim Crow-infused legislation.
But because of how Black Natives’ agriculture, oil, and hospitality businesses boomed in conjunction with the dramatic increase of settlers throughout the region, a strong cycle of wealth persisted in Black neighborhoods, towns, and cities all throughout Oklahoma. And, in turn, communities like Greenwood were ironically strengthened by the very policies that attempted to strip land from Native Americans and squash Black upward mobility.
But the settlers who came into Tulsa, both white and Black, were predominantly working-class people who would become construction workers, oil riggers, and sharecroppers for the region. “The majority of people who lived in those urban communities came here for work. The Black Indians and the Freedmen, as well as the Indians and the white Indians, were landowners,” Grayson emphasizes. “And when [white workers] got here, they figured, ‘Oh, my God, the only landowners are either Indians, white Indians, Black Indians, or Freedmen, and if I’m going to sharecrop, I got a sharecrop from one of them.’ And if you were anywhere near Tulsa, chances are you’re going to be sharecropping from the Freedmen.”
Meanwhile, the tensions that the one-drop rule created — the white rage directed at Black affluence and the fear of miscegenation — were creating violent white lashes all across America. Tulsa was not different, but rather an intensification, due to the rapid development of Black wealth coupled with the enticement of Black land ownership.
“And so 1921 comes on the heels of Red Summer, 1919,” Johnson continued. “More than two dozen so-called race riots throughout the United States. These are largely assaults on Black communities as well.”
And as the Greenwood District enjoyed its continued economic climb, that rage finally reached Tulsa on May 31, 1921, when Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, was accused of sexually assaulting a young white woman, Sarah Page, in a hotel elevator that afternoon.
The aftermath
We now know the rest of this story. Over $2.5M worth of damages (in 1921) were accrued in one night. An estimated three hundred individuals, mostly Black, were murdered and disposed of in mass burial sites, one of which was found as recently as October 2020. Homemade turpentine bombs were dropped by white pilots operating crop dusters and decommissioned WWI fighter planes. Black people in Greenwood were forced out by the KKK and interned by the National Guard for several days as scapegoats for the violence. And Oklahomans, both white and Black, have since tried to forget the traumas and atrocities committed that terrible night.
But the other fifty-some Black towns and neighborhoods throughout Oklahoma did not get burned to the ground. They simply evaporated as more and more Freedmen were convinced or forced to sell their land allotments over the mid-1900s to amassing white settlers. And Greenwood itself didn’t peak as a Black business community until the 1940’s as the oil industry kept siphoning money back into the community that was built from its ashes.
What we lose in retelling this story without the context of Indigeneity and land allotment, however, is precisely why Greenwood was burned down in the first place, that the flat racial categories we are so accustomed to in fact broke, and continue to break, communities apart to bolster white wealth. We also lose the ability to see the thousands of Black Natives that today are still fighting for their citizenship rights within the Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek nations.
Forgotten but not gone
“It is an unjust, profound issue. We have to go outside of our nation to get assistance,” said Councilwoman LeEtta Osborne-Sampson representing the Caesar Bruner Band, one of two Freedmen bands in Seminole Nation. “I am a taxpayer, I work, and my money goes into federal funds so that this Seminole Nation can thrive. There will come a time when I’ll need that, and this tribe is going to tell me, ‘You cannot have it, because you are a citizen and not a member.’”
The destructive power of Jim Crow is not lost on the Black kin and Freedmen of Seminole Nation, a people whose legacy is in fact inextricable from the self-emancipated African slaves who joined forces with disparate Indigenous bands throughout the Floridian and southeastern regions of the North American continent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“The sad thing about John Horse,” Osborne-Sampson continued, “Is he’s a founder of some of the areas [in Seminole Nation in Oklahoma], and the people that were with him in battle — in Mexico and different areas — are estranged from our nation.”
John Horse was a Black Seminole who parlayed on behalf of the Seminole Nation and Chief Osceola circa the 1830s. After the U.S. captured Chief Osceola in 1837 during the Seminole wars that preceded the tribe’s forced relocation to the west, John Horse became a prominent war leader for the Seminoles. He later founded present-day Wewoka in Seminole Nation, named in honor of his wife, after he and other tribal leaders agreed to relocate the Seminole people to Oklahoma. This was the beginning of the whitening of the Seminole Nation, as John Horse and the Black bands who followed him down to Texas were forever cut off from the steadfastly recognized fifth tribe of America’s so-called civilized nations.
“And our people here in Oklahoma do not want to reside with [the Black Seminoles], but they do embrace the story.” Today, LeEtta Osborne-Sampson is attempting to achieve the same victory that just four years ago, in 2017, Marilynn Vann achieved for the Cherokee Freedmen: getting their Black kin — many of whom have retroactively been re-categorized as Freedmen regardless of their blood ties — fully restored as tribal citizens with voting rights, healthcare, and economic support from their nation. COVID-19 has only made that fight harder, but with recent news of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland approving the rewritten Cherokee constitution that repairs the lost ties to upwards of 8,500 Black kin, there is still hope that the same can one day be achieved for the Seminole Freedmen.
“I would say to [Sec. Haaland],” Osborne-Sampson continued, “is help us come together. You have to understand that the word Seminole is not my race. It’s a name given to us as runaways and wild people because of the vigor that we had to fight for our freedom. Can you imagine the Seminole Nation rising to its peak with all of its people under the same umbrella, and doing things so wonderfully? That we become an asset to America and not a liability.”
The story of Greenwood and, in a larger frame, the story of Oklahoma is a complex, painful story about bureaucratic genocide, land procurement, and anti-Black racism. What we lose in only thinking about Greenwood without the context of Indigeneity are the very racial mechanisms that ironically drove the success of over fifty Black towns throughout the state. We lose the example of how Indigenous communities tied together disparate people, only to be broken apart by the white supremacy that has seeped into what has been dubbed ‘Native nationalism’ slowly building since the end of the Civil War.
But just like the Indigenous nations they hail from, Black Natives are not gone. They didn’t vanish, unlike some of the towns they proudly built throughout Oklahoma. And if there’s a way to rethink what it means to repair the wellbeing of Black U.S. citizens, there is an example unfolding underneath our collective gaze in Cherokee nation. There is undoubtedly a future for Native peoples, as exemplified by the Augustine Band of the Cahuilla whose contemporary matriarch — Mary Ann Martin, a Black descendant of the originating tribal leader — single-handedly brought the band back from one to now sixteen members. But whether such a future that is inclusive of Black kin will be fully realized in tribes like the Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations is yet to be seen.
