Chapter Objectives

Chapter Overview

In the period following statehood, many Oklahomans experienced hardship. The First World War and the flu epidemic devastated families. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan signaled growing racial tensions. Many Oklahomans had hopes of owning land and improving their economic status, and many were able to do so. At the same time, the system of tenant farming prevented other Oklahomans from owning their own land.

In 1904, three years before Oklahoma became a state, California M. Taylor, along with her husband, father, and brothers, traveled from Houston, Texas, to the newly founded all-Black town of Boley in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Indian Territory. Like other African American families who moved to All-Black towns in Oklahoma, Taylor’s family was attracted to the many opportunities people said were available. According to local newspaper editor Oniel H. Bradley, Boley was full of possibilities. It was a place where men could be “business men, professional men, farmers, merchants and wage earners,” and women could be “true mothers.” Oklahoma in general and All-Black towns in particular offered the promise of independence and prosperity to African Americans from all across the country. Boley served as a significant location in the struggle for Black civil rights, particularly voting rights activism, from the Progressive Era through the 1930s.

FIG. 7.1

Businesswomen and clubwomen in Boley

Businesswomen and clubwomen like California M. Taylor, and the women in this photo, standing in front of their home, contributed to Boley’s early success. Boley is the largest and one of thirteen remaining All-Black towns in Oklahoma. Taylor moved from Houston to Boley with her family in 1904 and worked as a notary public, a pharmacist and drugstore manager, and remained active in Boley’s branch of the NAACP.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

The same could be said of many groups who came to Oklahoma shortly before and after statehood. The same year that California and her family settled in Boley, an article in another Oklahoma newspaper, the Lawton News Republican, offered a sunny outlook on the future of farmers in southwest Oklahoma: “The farmer is busy and prosperity is before him, and everything looks good.” In the first years after statehood, many Oklahomans continued to see the new state as full of possibility. Optimism persisted, even when it was unjustified.

In the decade following statehood, the status of African Americans grew worse, not better. And they were not alone. Indigenous people, women, and poor tenant farmers experienced less opportunity, fewer rights, and greater economic hardships during the early 1900s. The confidence of Progressivism faded. The possibilities for women gave way to backward-leaning restrictions. The promise of Oklahoma as a place where African Americans could exercise the basic rights of citizenship cracked and then shattered. Poor white tenant farmers flocked to Oklahoma hoping to one day own a small self-sustaining farm of their own while they toiled under ever rising rent and unbearable poverty. Indigenous people experienced ongoing attacks on their culture and their sovereignty.

The land dispossession of Indigenous people did not end with allotment and land runs. In the decade following statehood, dozens of corrupt land speculators, opportunists, and Indian agents successfully schemed to steal more Native land. The promise of Oklahoma came at the expense of Indigenous people. As it turned out, that promise came true for only a small minority of those who called Oklahoma home in the decade after statehood. Nevertheless, Oklahomans persisted in their efforts to forge better lives for themselves and their families. They sought safety, economic stability, and opportunity.