Speaking Truth to Power (4 page)

Both sets of my grandparents were like thousands of blacks, some former slaves and some barely a generation from slavery, who arrived in Oklahoma with hopes of greater opportunity. The history of the area, a place of aspirations often unrealized, is a complex one. Much of it had formerly been Indian Territory, and served as the home of the Cherokee,
Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Creek tribes after the Louisiana Purchase and their relocation to the land in the 1830s. Blacks came with each of these tribes, either as slaves or as freedmen. For example, blacks made up 37 percent of the tribal roll of the Creek Nation. They had also been prominent in the tribal leadership of the Seminole tribe and constituted two separate bands of the Seminoles. Prior to 1889, the five tribes, and later approximately seventy additional relocated tribes, existed together on the land despite differences in language, culture, and tradition. But in 1889 the government opened the “unassigned” land to settlement by whites and divided the area into Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. And it was the settlement of whites within the boundaries which opened the door for statehood in 1907.

In addition to the blacks who came to Oklahoma Territory with the relocated Indians following the Civil War, a number of black freedmen had relocated to Oklahoma from the South to escape the harsh treatment they’d received there. In the late 1800s the antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells encouraged groups of black settlers to leave Tennessee and relocate in southeast Oklahoma, then part of Oklahoma Territory. Several viable black townships sprang up with the help of the railroad. The best known is Boley, Oklahoma, which, in its prime, boasted a post office, two banks, and its own city government. Prior to statehood in 1907, rumors that the federal government might set aside all or part of Oklahoma Territory as a freedmen state encouraged even more blacks to come. These talks reportedly went all the way to the secretary of state in Washington.

By this time, however, what had been Indian Territory had been opened to settlement by non-Indians, first with the opening of the Cherokee strip and subsequently with the land run of 1892. And many of the whites settling into Oklahoma Territory politics were southern expatriates. When these individuals negotiated statehood for Oklahoma with the federal government, they promised the federal government the protection of rights of Indians and blacks in lieu of establishing a freedmen state. According to the terms of the Enabling Act, under which Oklahoma was admitted into the Union, territory officials agreed not to pass
any laws which would violate the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. But in 1907 when the nation granted Oklahoma statehood, neither the letter nor the spirit of those protections was honored.

Legislators passed countless provisions at the state level to institute the same kinds of Jim Crow laws in Oklahoma that existed in the southern states. For example, the state legislature amended the Oklahoma constitution to include a “grandfather clause.” Such a clause granted the right to vote to those whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote prior to the granting of the right to vote to black men under the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Such clauses effectively disenfranchised blacks because their black grandfathers had never been eligible to vote prior to the amendment’s passage and their white grandfathers were not legally recognized as part of their lineage. This type of provision stood in the way of black political participation in Oklahoma until challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court by
Guinn v. United States
in 1915 and
Lane v. Wilson
in 1932, in both of which cases it was ruled unconstitutional.

My mother’s family traveled the segregated trains from Arkansas to Wewoka, Oklahoma, to arrive there in 1914. My mother remembers her excitement “at being lifted onto the train by Brother John” (her sister Zodia’s husband), but of the segregated conditions only allows that “that’s just the way things were. If we wanted to travel, we had to travel in the ‘colored’ car.” But by 1914, in
McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway Co.
, black residents in Oklahoma challenged the kind of segregated facilities
Plessy v. Ferguson
had legalized. Black attorneys in Oklahoma also successfully challenged the systemic exclusion of blacks from juries in
Hollings v. Oklahoma
, in 1935. Nevertheless, segregation and racial violence and threats were a part of the life my grandparents found in Oklahoma.

Just as the all-black townships emerged in the state, “sundown” towns, white towns with ordinances or de facto rules prohibiting blacks from their boundaries after dark, developed as well. Norman, Oklahoma, the site of the University of Oklahoma, was one such town. Henryetta,
Oklahoma, very near the all-black town of Wildcat, was another sundown town notorious in reputation for its harsh treatment of blacks who dared to violate the curfew. My Uncle George once recalled to me his misfortune late one afternoon of having his car break down at the outskirts of Henryetta. Reluctant to seek assistance, he eventually knocked on the door of a local residence. To his surprise, the people in the house were “quite friendly.” The men of the house helped him to repair his car but he was relieved to be out of town before dark. My uncle’s fear was warranted by the reputation of the town, if not by the attitudes of all of its residents.

Oklahoma certainly had its share of lynchings. From 1882 to 1968, 122 blacks are reported to have been lynched in Oklahoma. At least two of these lynchings were of women. In 1911 a black woman named Laura Nelson was lynched along with her fifteen-year-old son in Okemah, Oklahoma, a town some ten miles from Henryetta. She’d been accused of murdering a deputy sheriff who allegedly discovered stolen goods in her home. Members of the mob raped Miss Nelson before hanging her. And in 1914 a mob of white men lynched Marie Scott, a seventeen-year-old girl, alleging that her brother killed one of two white men who had previously assaulted her.

In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest race riots. Seventy-five people, mostly black, were killed as a prosperous section of town known as the Greenwood District was bombarded from the air. Accounts of these violent events vary. Some sources suggest that it all started when a mob gathered to lynch a black youth who had been accused of attempting to rape a white woman. Others suggest that this was only an excuse to destroy the source of affluence for blacks in Tulsa. Prior to the riots the Greenwood District had been dubbed the Black Wall Street. Over the three days of unrest blacks were rounded up and held in a camp at the fairgrounds, only to be released in the custody of a white person for the purpose of reporting to work. Few contemporaneous accounts of the riot exist, but modern accounts indicate that in addition to the seventy-five people who were killed, hundreds more were injured and thousands were left homeless. By 1923, two years after
the Tulsa race riot, the population of Oklahoma was approximately 2 million, of which 103,000 were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. Little of the story of the race riot in Tulsa is documented. The course material in the required Oklahoma history class I took in junior high school never mentioned it or the black townships as part of the state history.

This was not the Oklahoma that the Hills or Elliotts had heard about when they decided to leave North Carolina and Arkansas for better opportunities for their children. But it was the Oklahoma they got. They stayed on and, as blacks throughout the country did, learned to deal with the hardships.

M
y parents’ early lives were remarkably similar to my grandparents’. My mother, like hers, gave birth to thirteen children. And the rural and racially segregated conditions under which each raised her children were much the same. Yet there were differences as well. Erma Hill was born in 1911 in Arkansas, moving to Oklahoma at age three. She was thirteen years old when her parents left Wewoka and moved to Lone Tree, where she lives today. The timing of my mother’s life places her on the bridge between the slavery into which her father was born and the civil rights era during which many of her children came of age.

When my parents met in the 1920s at an interschool spelling bee, they were children. And they married only two years later. “I thought marrying was the thing to do,” my mother remarks with some regret. “I often say I was getting married when I should have been getting an education.”

At a time when children were defined by who their family or “people” were, my mother was the daughter of a deacon/farmer who had helped to bring life back into the floundering Lone Tree Baptist Church. My father, on the other hand, was the son of a farmer with a reputation for philandering who leased rather than owned large acreage worked by sharecroppers.

Just before my mother’s seventeenth birthday they gave birth to their
first child, a daughter, Elreatha. Following soon after was their first son, Albert, Jr., “June.” “I only wanted to have two children,” my mother once confided in me. But in 1931 there was little available reliable birth control. My mother became pregnant with her third child, my brother Alfred, or “Bubba” as we called him. At the time, my parents were living with my father’s family along with my father’s brother and his wife, my Aunt Sadie. “I refused to have another baby in my in-laws’ home.” My father found a small house and moved them to a plot of land within a few miles of his parents. The children came like clockwork, every two years. Two boys, Winston and Billy, were the fourth and fifth children. Then came my sister Doris, my mother’s second daughter. When the next child, Allen, was born, my parents’ small household was full with five boys and two girls. With the births of Joyce and Carlene, in the next four years, there was no space left. My father bought a four-room frame house and moved it onto a patch of land directly facing Lone Tree Mountain. The family remained in the frame house, perched on a small rising about a hundred yards from a creek and a wooded area. And as the family grew, so did the house.

When my parents moved there, Lone Tree was just a collection of small farms separated by anywhere from one-half to six miles of farmland, woods, and unpaved roads. Farms housing blacks or whites were interspersed throughout Lone Tree—a physical integration which belied the region’s social racial segregation. Blacks and whites paid few social visits to each other. Blacks only visited the “white” churches for funerals, and whites visited our “black” churches for the same occasions even less. No blacks or whites complained.

Except for the fact that my father owned the land on which it stood—a first in his family—the house was typical for most blacks in 1946 rural Oklahoma. It had no electricity or running water and its unpainted exterior was covered with tar paper for insulation. To make it home, my mother planted small plots of yellow jonquils and orange and black marigolds in the front yard and a half-acre garden immediately to the north of the house.

Along with the children who were big enough to do so, my mother
and father worked for seventy-five cents a day and dinner (a luncheon meal generally consisting of beans or peas and a baked potato) chopping cotton in the Oklahoma summers, with temperatures often reaching one hundred degrees. In the fall, sometimes in near-freezing weather, they worked picking cotton for one cent a pound. In sacks nine to twelve feet long, the adults and teenagers of my family could count on picking 150 pounds a day. When my father purchased a car, he hired himself out to haul pickers to various cotton fields in the area. He earned five cents for every hundred pounds pulled by those he hauled. Soon the members of my family were not only hiring themselves out for others but were busy working our own land, land on the creek bottom just south of our house. And when my brothers John and then Ray were born, my parents just built on another room.

For years my parents slept in a closetless bedroom with whoever was the baby at the time. The older girls shared a second room and the older boys shared the third. This sleeping arrangement accommodated our family as at first it expanded and then contracted, the children leaving home one by one. The births of John and Ray came at about the same time that Elreatha left home for college and Albert, Jr., for the army. Two years later, Alfred enlisted in the army.

In 1948 an unfulfilled need for cheap labor in oil pipeline construction opened up opportunities for blacks who until this time had been farm laborers. With Winston, Billy, and Allen old enough to handle the family farming, my father started helping to build oil pipelines at various locations in the Tulsa and Sand Springs areas. “I was used to earning no more than a dollar a day in the fields and that was seasonal. The construction companies offered forty dollars a week for a ten-hour day,” my father recalled. “To us that was big money.”

My parents added an expanded kitchen onto the house just in time for the birth of my sister Jo Ann in 1950. In the meantime Elreatha had married and given birth to my parents’ first grandchild, Lila. But then for the longest stretch since she started childbearing, my mother went without conceiving. It was only just before Jo Ann turned four that I was born. As they struggled to name me, my sisters Joyce and Carlene prayed
that I would be the last. As teens my sisters were a bit embarrassed by the fact that our mother, now in her mid-forties, had continued to bear children.

Outside the farm, with the introduction of a union, my father’s wages increased to seventy-eight dollars per week. But the boys were starting to leave home—Allen had just left to join the air force to become a paratrooper—and John and Ray, the only two now left, were too young at fourteen and twelve to handle the planting by themselves. By 1962, in order to keep the farm, my father had to leave the construction work and return full-time to farming.

About the same time that my father returned to full-time farming, the market price of cotton declined. In the late 1950s and 1960s there was less and less field work outside of the family plots. By the time I was nine, and big enough to be expected to pull cotton, relatively little was planted. By that time we only worked our own fields and thus I never hired out to chop or pull cotton. Our family crop went from cotton to peanuts. But peanuts, too, had to be chopped and harvested. And harvesting peanuts can be just as backbreaking. But above all, because the peanuts grow underground, it is dirty work—done in the often muddy fields of late autumn.