Clearview: One of Thirteen Surviving All-Black Towns

When the federal government forced the Five Tribes to accept individual land allotments in the eighteen nineties, most African American freedmen chose plots adjacent to one another. Cohesive Black communities grew out of those clusters, and by nineteen oh three one of them, in Okfuskee County on the Fort Smith and Western Railroad line, was formally platted as Clearview. The town was first designated Lincoln, and its main trading post, the Abe Lincoln Trading Company, opened in nineteen oh three.

Three founders, J. A. Roper, Lemuel Jackson, and John Grayson, formed the Lincoln Townsite Company and advertised the settlement. Within a year Clearview had a two-story hotel, a newspaper, a brick schoolhouse, and two churches.

At its peak Oklahoma had more than fifty all-Black towns, built by freedmen seeking mutual protection and economic independence after Reconstruction. Most eventually disappeared. Clearview is one of only thirteen that still exist, a small but surviving community in the Muscogee Nation territory, keeping a history alive that most Americans have never heard of. The census counted fifty six residents there in the year two thousand and forty one in twenty twenty.