The Black Towns

In the years between the Civil War and Oklahoma statehood, African Americans looked at Indian Territory and saw something rare in the American South: a place where Black people might govern themselves. The Five Civilized Tribes had owned enslaved people before the war, and the treaties of eighteen sixty-six required them to extend citizenship to the freedmen they had held. In that uncertain stretch of land, where federal jurisdiction was still being worked out and where white supremacy had not yet been legally entrenched by a state legislature, African Americans began building towns.

By nineteen twenty, historians count more than fifty all-Black towns and settlements across Indian Territory and the new state of Oklahoma, more than anywhere else in the United States. They had mayors, city councils, newspapers, banks, schools, and churches that belonged entirely to their communities. They had names: Boley, Langston, Clearview, Taft, Rentiesville, Tatums, Red Bird, Lima, Vernon.

Boley was the largest and most celebrated. Booker T. Washington visited in nineteen oh five and wrote about it for Outlook Magazine in nineteen oh eight, praising it as one of the most enterprising Black towns in the country. It had a cotton gin, two banks, colleges, and a newspaper. It elected its own all-Black police force and city council. It was, Washington wrote, proof of what Black Americans could accomplish when given the chance to build without interference.

Oklahoma statehood in nineteen oh seven brought Jim Crow. The first bill the new state legislature passed segregated railroad cars. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and systematic exclusion from credit followed. Boley declared bankruptcy in nineteen thirty-nine. Many of the other towns shrank or disappeared as residents left for northern cities in the Great Migration.

Thirteen of the original all-Black towns are still incorporated today. Their populations are small. Their histories are not. They were the most concentrated expression of Black self-determination in American history, built not because the country offered the opportunity, but because a brief window in one territory's legal chaos made it briefly possible to try.