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Oklahoma’s part-white Indians and part-black Indians had separate misgivings about the influx of African American settlers. Part-black Indians feared the influx might cause “pure” Indians to discriminate against their tribal claims, particularly claims of land allotments. Indeed, the Chickasaws did create a “colored committee” to determine the validity of tribal claims by part-black Chickasaws, with none other than “Alfalfa Bill” Murray among its panelists. At the other end of the spectrum, part-white Indians were concerned that the influx of African Americans might negatively impact their own tenuous status with the white ruling class.

Oklahoma’s statehood convention in 1906–7 marked the success of the combined opposition of whites and American Indians over African Americans. Soon after statehood became official, Edward McCabe returned to Chicago. There, however, he immediately set his sights on undermining Oklahoma Senate Bill No. 1 by suing the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway for not providing equal accommodations for black passengers. He lost, but his appeal of the decision eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. He lost there, too. During these defeats, McCabe’s extraordinarily energetic career began running out of steam. By 1911 Oklahoma’s Ada News reported that he had become a waiter in a Chicago area restaurant. He died quietly in 1920, so quietly that the event appears to have been noted only in the city where he was buried. “Mr. McCabe was a highly educated scholarly gentleman,” the Topeka Plaindealer wrote. “He never bartered or catered to the white man the rights of the colored race and always stood up for his people. For this we reverence and honor his name.… It is to be regretted that he died in needy circumstance and a charge on the public.”

Green McCurtain’s career had sputtered to an end as well. In 1910 Congress investigated charges of bribery involving McCurtain. He testified that he had ultimately rejected the bribe, and no evidence to the contrary was found. He passed away later that year. A wire-service obituary sent to newspapers nationwide began, “Green McCurtain, chief of the tribe of Choctaws Indians, who sprang a sensation before a congressional committee by swearing he had been offered one-fourth of the profits of a $10,000,000 deal after the sale of Indian lands, died yesterday. He was 62 years of age.” Fourteen paragraphs followed, all dealing exclusively with the bribery accusation.8

“Alfalfa Bill” Murray’s career did not sputter. He went on to become an Oklahoma congressman and governor. Upon his death in 1956, a wire-service obituary also appeared in newspapers nationwide. “William H. (Alfalfa Bill) Murray, one of the principal framers of Oklahoma’s constitution … died today at the age of 86,” it began, going on to recount his career as governor, his short-lived presidential bid in 1932, his feud with President Franklin Roosevelt over “constitutional safeguards of liberty,” and the election of his son, Johnston, as Oklahoma governor in 1950.9

These contrasting obituaries sum up the complex racial boundaries that came into conflict with the emergence of Oklahoma. The result of that conflict, however, was not complex. The whites won.

NEW JERSEY, NEW YORK

BERNARD J. BERRY

New Jersey Invades Ellis Island

Ellis Island is to be put up for sale for private commercial use. The little island … which for fifty years had been “God’s twenty-seven-and-a-half acres” for at least 15,000,000 immigrants, is scheduled to be sold to the highest bidder.… The decision to dispose of Ellis Island by sale put an end to the hope that the historic spot might be preserved as a public area. New York and New Jersey had each sought to obtain the island.

—NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 14, 1956

Nine months prior to this decision to sell Ellis Island, the efforts of New York and New Jersey to obtain the island had taken a bold new turn. January 4, 1956, had been foggy in the New York metropolitan area. As reported in the New York Times,