Black Towns, Black Futures

The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West

Karla Slocum

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469653983
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Afroamerikanische Geschichte

Some know Oklahoma's Black towns as historic communities that thrived during the Jim Crow era—this is only part of the story. In this book, Karla Slocum shows that the appeal of these towns is more than their past. Drawing on interviews and observations of town life spanning several years, Slocum reveals that people from diverse backgrounds are still attracted to the communities because of the towns' remarkable history as well as their racial identity and rurality. But that attraction cuts both ways. Tourists visit to see living examples of Black success in America, while informal predatory lenders flock to exploit the rural Black economies. In Black towns, there are developers, return migrants, rodeo spectators, and gentrifiers, too. Giving us a complex window into Black town and rural life, Slocum ultimately makes the case that these communities are places for affirming, building, and dreaming of Black community success even as they contend with the sometimes marginality of Black and rural America.

CHAPTER ONE

History Stories

It is hard to visit an Oklahoma Black town without encountering a narrative about the town’s history. In each town’s center, there is signage with information about the development of Black towns in the state and the origins of that particular town. In the 1990s, the Oklahoma History Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian and Oklahoma’s primary authority on state history, created those bold red and green signs, which continue to occupy a prominent place in each of the thirteen towns. “Nowhere else … did African American men and women come together to live in and govern their own communities,” the signs announce. “The All-Black towns were established on the rich topsoil of the new territory and state … [they] prospered until the 1920s but gradually declined under the pressure of Jim Crow laws … the Great Depression, and population flight from farm to city after World War I.”

The sign’s last sentence is the only part that mentions current conditions: “Today a few All-Black towns survive but all are remembered, a legacy of economic and political freedom.” And yet, while the statement about Black towns’ history from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century elevates the past as a way to define what Black towns were, the signs also define what Black towns are. The idea that all towns are embedded in the state’s memory (“Black towns survive but all are remembered”) is a signal that the Black-town past survives in the present. Additionally, the sign’s content and language draw on the currency of contemporary discourses about race, particularly narratives of Black success.

For many consumers as well as state producers of Black heritage narratives in the twenty-first century, much of the attraction of a story about Black history is the story’s emphasis on Black people’s prominence, triumph, or resilience in the past,¹ even if those stories also include struggle. Narratives of Black triumph and progress can mitigate the trauma of taking in a gritty account of struggle. Or they can provide empowerment to the narrative’s consumers, especially consumers from socially marginal groups.² As anthropologist Bayo Holsey reminds us, triumph narratives about a particular aspect of Black history “[transform] what might otherwise be a story of unadulterated misery that many would rather forget into a story that can be collectively remembered and celebrated.”³ Indeed, the History Center signs inform us that Black towns are marked by a number of noteworthy historic achievements. People who formed Black towns developed communities characterized by economic vibrancy and self-sufficiency (“they prospered until the 1920s”), freedom (“[they] governed their own communities,” and the towns are a “legacy of economic and political freedom”), a pioneering spirit (“established on … the new territory and state”), community (“they [came] together”), and security (because Black towns “declined under the pressure of Jim Crow laws”—a signal that, as a thriving community of Black people, they were safe from racial hostility until segregation laws were put in place). Perhaps these features hold sway because, on the one hand, stories of Black American success fulfill a post–Civil Rights yearning for examples in which obstacles to racial progress are not foregrounded. On the other hand, success narratives give Black people agency and affirm their worth, setting straight counterclaims about disorganized or deficient Black culture. Black scholars and activists have been significant contributors to the work of vindicationism, refuting narratives of Black deficiency with evidence of Black achievement.⁴

Oklahoma History Center’s Black-town sign in Tatums, Oklahoma. Photo by author.

Among academics, historians have given us the most in this area, helping to identify history as the most significant facet of Black-town existence.⁵ Others also have contributed to an affirmation of Black-town history as a story of success. They include people working for museums and libraries, historic preservation groups, and archivists who often document or exhibit Black-town history as a remarkable history. They also include town residents, particularly elders, who serve as local historians of Black-town life.

It is true that historical narratives about Black towns often acknowledge challenges and do not paint a picture of a struggle-free Black community. Indeed, the Black-town-history story is a story of community-making in the midst of and against racial inequality and violence. Yet, ultimately, Black-town-history stories—as told by the Oklahoma History Center, but also by many scholars—are not stories that center on enslavement, lynching, or Black people pursued by the Klan. They are not stories of sharecroppers stuck in debt peonage, of menial wage-laborers barely able to eke out an existence, or undereducated Black people attending underfunded schools. They are not stories of people living in shacks, tenements, or ghettos. Instead, they are the stories of Blacks who mostly thrived. That is the Black-town-history story that you will hear from many sources, in many ways, and supplemented with many different anecdotes. The narrative counters the more pervasive Black-struggle narrative that has higher currency in the United States. The Black-town-history story is why people—as we will see—tour Black towns, work on revitalizing Black towns, and move to Black towns: to be consumers of and participants in Black greatness, which vindicates Black people and obstructs narratives of Black pathology.

Unspeakable Terror, Running for Their Lives

My mother’s story about Uncle Buddy’s ascent is a Black-town-history story that extends beyond him. The first part of the story, about his displacement and anger wrought by the racial hostility of the Deep South at the hands of a White man, is what eventually connects Uncle Buddy to a Black town. My research assistants and I heard this story arc multiple times, from people who lived in Black towns and also, like me, from people who heard it from their own parents about either their parents’ experience, their grandparents’ experience, or the experience of some other kin. I can’t say that we heard such stories from a majority of elders who talked of their family origins in a Black towns. But we heard it enough times for it to feel like a pattern. In the stories, Black towns are where people fled to, in search of a safer, better existence. Yet, for this part of the accounts, the emphasis is less on what Black towns afforded fleeing kin and more on the terror of the South that prompted urgent flight to the West. In fact, the South figures prominently as the starting point for a family’s move to a Black town in the West. The Deep South was the antithesis of the Western Black town because, in the stories we heard, it was where eventual Black towners encountered hostility due to their Black identities. Yet, unlike in the account that I was told about my great uncle, many of the racially charged Deep South encounters that people told my research assistants and me involved unspeakable terror. In my uncle’s case, the hostility involved a White barber taking away his livelihood. In several other cases that we heard, the hostility was so extreme that it threatened the life of an elder or deceased kin of the narrator. It was hostility so intense that it was difficult for the story narrator—talking about the near-death of their kin—to get out, or difficult for their parents to tell them about. In these stories, people are quite literally running for their lives and the lives of their family members. They faced the threat of being lynched. They witnessed or were involved in a murder. They were told or had credible evidence that they would be killed. The greatness of the Black town was its refuge from this terror.

In an interview, I first heard such an account from Mrs. Jessup, an elder in Wrightsville whom almost everyone I encountered insisted that I talk to. Due to her age and also her prominence in the community, she was considered a deep repository of knowledge about Wrightsville’s history. At the time of our interview, she was in her seventies, and she didn’t hesitate to accept my request to meet. She ushered me into her home and had me sit down in an armchair across from the large, tweed, La-Z-Boy-style recliner where she sat, looking relaxed. I would sit in that chair for two consecutive days, listening to her tell me about Wrightsville, late into the evening on a Tuesday and again on a Wednesday, when she finished up. That Tuesday was another scorching-hot day in Oklahoma. Mrs. Jessup had two standing fans turned up high and, as we spoke, she sometimes asked me to reposition one or both of them so that the air was circulating better and keeping her cool. “I don’t know why I feel so warm,” she commented, as she went on telling me stories, undeterred by the heat.

In telling her story of how her family came to Wrightsville and what she experienced as a resident, Mrs. Jessup wove in others’ stories, acknowledging that how people got their start in Wrightsville was not a uniform process. For her parents, educational opportunities took them to Wrightsville. But she recalled the story of the man considered the founder of her parents’ school, who was also her distant relative and ran a funeral home in town. He came to Wrightsville to escape threats to his life, she said. “See, what happened, uh, they [the man and his family] come from the south of Texas or somewhere, and one of them, when they got to Wrightsville, officially they changed their name ’cause I think there’d been a killing or something down there where they come, and running, you know. People would get away sometime.”

The man’s story was part of Wrightsville lore that Mrs. Jessup, like others from her generation, had heard over the years. In part, this aspect of his story was known widely because, as a major business owner, he was known widely. And so, I suspect, this is the reason that his story circulated. Indeed, not everyone’s story of how they came to a Black town is widely known but, within families, stories were passed around. Mrs. Jessup told the man’s story with relative ease—in what came across to me as a matter-of-fact telling. She didn’t know all the facts since she told me that she thought “there’d been a killing or something.…” She saw escaping terror as a common narrative (“People would get away sometimes”) and so, in some respects, she spoke both about the man’s individual experience and also the experience of flight from Southern racial terror more generally. However, those who directly experienced unspeakable terror or, more likely, knew of it through their own immediate family, were apt to include more clarity and detail.

That was the case of Mr. Tinsdale of Newtown, who said that he often heard his grandfather tell stories of how he had to get out of Alabama (and ended up in Newtown) based on what he witnessed. “He left Alabama because he was—. He went down to the [cotton] gin to take a bale of cotton and a Black boy got into it down there with a White guy and they got to fighting and the Black guy took a single tree … off a wagon. [It’s] [w]hat they hook the mules to, and he h—, hit that White guy across the head.… And [t]hey lynched [the Black guy’s] whole family. And my granddad say, ‘I’m getting out of here.’ ”

Others had stories about threats made directly to their family, not merely what their family saw happening to others. Mrs. Logan, who describes herself as three generations removed from slavery (her grandmother was born enslaved), told us about what happened to her great uncle in Texas, which influenced her parents to move to Oklahoma and eventually settle in Kidder, a small Black settlement on the outskirts of Newtown:

My great uncle had hit a man, a White man down there, and so my grandmother, uh, he had been up in the, up in—. They had what they called a, what they—. It was a log—. You know, there was logging down there and what they did was cut wood and he was back up in those woods which was plenty of pine trees and stuff. And so, he was back up in there and they kept trying to get him out and he wouldn’t turn himself in, you know. And so, my grandmother went and talked him into turning himself in, and what he did was he came down and they hung him. And after they hung him then they were going to hang my grandfather and, and mess with the family so there was a gentleman out in Kidder.… He came there and brought my grandfather and them—he knew my grandfather and them—he came and went and picked them up and brought them back here in a covered wagon, back in the day, and brought them to Kidder.

And in Promise, Mr. Simms, age seventy-four, explained how his parents came to live in Promise through the experience of his grandfather who had a run in “down South” with a sharecropper who mistreated him. Mr. Simms struggled to get the story out, acknowledging that his parents similarly struggled to share the account and their childhood in the Deep South with Mr. Simms and his siblings:

If I can recall, my mother and father talking about their childhood, which they didn’t talk too much, especially my father. He didn’t talk too much about his childhood and, uh, he explained why. Uh, his daddy, they came outta somewhere in Louisiana. And, uh, uh, my, my great uncle, my daddy’s uncle, was a sharecropper. [A]nd, uh, the, uh, this has been years and years ago, now. This is, this is the way it, it was told to us children. His uncle, uh, at the end of the harvest the, uh, the White man that he was workin’ for, sharecroppin’ for, [gave them] so much percentage—of whatever it was he was raisin’, cotton or corn or whatever, and he would always, uh, oh, misuse, I mean [mis]treat, my great uncle, and my great uncle had children. My dad was … about six years, six or seven years old.… So, the end of the story went that my great uncle, uh, got so upset and he got tired of being mistreated, misused, and he shot this White, uh, sharecropping guy.… That was way back.… And, uh—then … [the family] got into problems and trouble—… as a result of what my uncle did and, uh, … according to my dad, he left. He didn’t even go back to the house—… They had bloodhounds and—well you’ve probably seen some of—… He, he knew that they, they was having problems with, uh, with the, uh, the White people because of what had happened.… But somehow, uh, … my father, along with his younger brother, somehow got on a freight train—if I’m remembering it correctly—and they came into, uh, Oklahoma.

Family members rising up against terror and then need...