Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [10]
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