Find of a Lifetime: A Lost African-American World on Film  /
September 13, 2006

unvisited attics and basements of libraries, newspapers, and even
police stations, rich discoveries await. Currie Ballard, a historian
cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the
daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities.

The film shows them thriving in the years after the infamous Tulsa
Greenwood district, which was known as the Black Wall Street of
America. Through the flickering eloquence of silent film we see a
people resilient beyond anyone’s imagining, visiting one another’s
country homes, parading through downtown Muskogee in some two dozen
Packards, crowding an enormous church in Tulsa not long after the
riots, during a gathering of the National Baptist Convention.

Indeed, this extraordinary archive exists because someone at the
circuit preacher, to document the glories of Oklahoma’s black towns,
sweeps wide to track black cowboys racing across a swath of ranch
the Ragsdale family, whose wells produced as much as a thousand
titles introduce the various segments.

incorporating names, dates, and places. And Reverend Jones even
traveled (as reflected in those 29 cans of film but not in the
Marseilles to film life there.

Ballard admits that he mortgaged his life away when the opportunity
institution to take it over and transfer the highly unstable film to
these people persevered and built anew. Perhaps someone out there,
watching this, right now, will take the lead.

For more information contact Wyatt Houston Day, a bookseller and
archivist working with Currie Ballard :


Bill Moyers: Look at these pictures. Those photographs are from one of
the most stunning new books you’ll read this year, Slavery by Another
Name. The author is Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the
Wall Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other issues
have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four times. His reporting on
U.S.Steel and the company’s use of forced labor was included in the
2003 edition of Best Business Stories, and his contribution to the
Journal’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special Headliner
Award in 2006. Welcome.

This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a
long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you
report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the
South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity
with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by
another name. And what was the result?

Douglas Blackmon: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the
end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the
generation of slaves who’d been freed by the Emancipation
Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended
slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic
freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the
Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in

Bill Moyers: They farmed?

Douglas Blackmon: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But
then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in
America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And
what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the
southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to
slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not
resurrect itself.

And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back
coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.

Bill Moyers: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.

Douglas Blackmon: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way
that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were
Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And
that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave
had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an
open road.

Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted
a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they
essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that
was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union
military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of
that. Still, that didn’t work. And by the time you get to the end of
Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and
passed laws that aren’t called Black Codes, but essentially
criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a
poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.

Bill Moyers: Such as?

Douglas Blackmon: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially,
it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn’t prove at any
given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there
were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The
only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land
would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of
these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly,
they were only enforced against black people. And many times,
thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to
do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original
farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a

Bill Moyers: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were
arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations,
railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And
this went on, you say, right up to World War II?

Douglas Blackmon: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced
buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear
that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on
this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and
these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.

Bill Moyers: You have a photograph in here I have literally not been
able to get this photograph out of my mind since I saw it the first
time several weeks ago, when I first got your book. It’s a photograph
of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a
Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time around 1932, which
this is hard to believe was two years before I was born.

Douglas Blackmon: Well, that picture was taken by a journalist named
John Spivak, who took an astonishing series of pictures in these
forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the
prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which
were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the
deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some of them were mining
camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a
journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no
particular shame in what was happening.

Bill Moyers: That’s a surprising thing.

Douglas Blackmon: Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates was
the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were
done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale.
People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were
work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a
lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber
camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know,
whipped. It was it’s just astonishing, the level of brutality.

Bill Moyers: You have a story in here of a young man who a teenager
who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the farmer he was working
for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times
with a leather strap. And he died a week later. But that’s not a
unique story in this book.

Douglas Blackmon: No, that was incredibly common. And there were on
the there were thousands and thousands of people who died under these
circumstances over the span of the period that I write about in the
book. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition,
and from outright homicide and physical abuse.

Bill Moyers: You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice
would never had been heard, had you not discovered it, resurrected it,
and presented it. He’s the chief character in this book. Green
Cottenham, is that is.

Douglas Blackmon: Yes, that’s right.

Bill Moyers: Tell me about Green Cottenham.

Douglas Blackmon: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s born to a
mother and a father who, both of whom had been slaves, who were
emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine, a young man and a
young woman who’ve just been freed from slavery. And now they have the
opportunity to break away from the plantations where they’d been held,
begin a new life. And so, they do. They marry. They have many
children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.

He’s born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of hostility and
oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in
the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of
the 20th century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave black
Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the
allies, the white allies of the freed slaves, have abandoned them. And
so, right at the before of the 20th century, whites all across America
have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn’t be
brought back. But if African-Americans are returned to a state of
absolute servility, that’s okay.

And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment. And then,
in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he’s arrested, standing outside a
train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested
him couldn’t remember what the charge was by the time he brought him
in front of the judge. So he’s conveniently convicted of a different
crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being
sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal
mine outside of Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and
then dies under terrible circumstances.

Bill Moyers: You write, 45 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, Cottenham was one of thousands of men working like a
slave in these coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.

Douglas Blackmon: Slope number 12.

Bill Moyers: What was slope number 12?

Douglas Blackmon: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of
Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing
city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring
into the place.

But there’s this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men,
the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were
experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in
factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works
just as well as slaves out on the farm.

The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the
1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green
Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were
sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly
brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and
malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible

Bill Moyers: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown

Douglas Blackmon: It’s just miles away. In fact there are just two
places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything
is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that
if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if
you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
depressions where these bodies were buried.

Bill Moyers: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to
proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken
backs of re-enslaved black men.

Douglas Blackmon: That’s right. When I started off writing the book, I
began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had
metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places
where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied
very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most
prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the
modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this
practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on
the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing
hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought
millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated
entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced
workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of
old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who
controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse
trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for
another, or two men. And-

Bill Moyers: And yet, slavery was illegal?

Douglas Blackmon: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a
really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that
because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of
bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of
Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks
that we stand on.

Bill Moyers: Didn’t this economic machine that was built upon forced
labor, didn’t these Black Codes, the way that black life was
criminalized, didn’t this put African-Americans at a terrific economic
disadvantage then and now?

Douglas Blackmon: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the
results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through
this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-
Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years
of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up
buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in
the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black
Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic
infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it
possible for white farmers to become successful.

And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they
were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went
on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly
less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the
way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.

Bill Moyers: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could
grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just
happened to our part of the country?

Douglas Blackmon: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for
that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven’t
wanted to know as a country. We’ve engaged in a in a kind of
collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.

And the official history of this time, the conventional history tended
to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again
and again, and to focus instead, on the idea, on a lot of false
mythologies. Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation
became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and all sorts of
crimes being committed by African-Americans right after the Civil War
and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at
the arrest records from that period of time, there’s just no
foundation for that. And the reality was there was hardly any crime at
all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious
charges, so they could be forced back into labor.

Bill Moyers: Another reason — I just think, as you talk — another
reason is that anybody who raised these allegations or charges, or
wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists.
If it had been from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a
different take.

Douglas Blackmon: Well, I think there’s some truth to that. Anyone who
tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete
excoriation among other white Southerners. But that’s also what’s
remarkable about the present moment. And one of the things I’ve
discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that
there’s an openness to a conversation about these things that I think
didn’t exist even ten or 15 years ago.

Bill Moyers: What has been the response to it? Americans don’t like to
confront these pictures, these stories.

Douglas Blackmon: They don’t. But over and over and over again I’ve
encountered people who’ve read the book, who e-mailed me, or they come
up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African-
Americans, who African-Americans know this story in their hearts. They
may not know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale of
things were. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened.
And so, people come up to me and say, “Gosh, the story that my
grandmother used to tell before she died 20 years ago, I never
believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in
Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to
me. And now, it does.”

Bill Moyers: It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many
of the African-Americans retiring today, were children.

Douglas Blackmon: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And so, again,
these are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that
connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure
of our society today.

Bill Moyers: Does it explain to you why there might be so much anger
in the black community among, let’s say, African-Americans who are my
age, 73, 74, who were children at the time this was still going on?

Douglas Blackmon: Well, there’s no way that anybody can read this book
and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental
cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for
instance. I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The
judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became
primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating
blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not
the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an
unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still
percolates among many, many African-Americans today.

40 Acres and a Mule
BY Gerene L. Freeman  /  01 November 2003

Did you know that “40 Acres and a Mule” was not actually promised to
freed slaves after the Civil War? Well here is the real story of what
happened and how the phrase “40 Acres and a mule” became such a catch
phrase for African Americans?

almost a year prior to the ratification of the 13th Amendment the
Freedmen’s Bureau was created by Congress. Originally the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, the Freedmen’s Bureau was
responsible for, among other things, “the supervision and management
of all abandoned lands . . .the control of all subjects relating to
refugees and freedmen from rebel States.”

Also according to Section 4 of the First Freedmen’s Bureau Act, this
agency “shall have authority to set apart for use of loyal refugees
and freedmen such tracts of land within the insurrectionary states as
shall have been abandoned or to which the United States shall have
assigned not more than 40 acres of such land.”

Introduced into Congress by Thaddeus Stevens this portion of the
Freedmen’s Bureau Act was defeated by Congress on February 5, 1866 “by
a vote of 126 to 36.” Lands which had been distributed to freedmen
were reclaimed and returned to the previous owners.

It should be noted that there is no mention of providing the freedmen
with a mule (or any other type of animal) in any portion of this
legislature. So the question remains in part unanswered. What is the
origin of the promised 40 acres and a mule?

The second possibility for the basis of the ‘promise’ has to do with
the efforts of the War Department to furnish accoutrements for the
thousands of freedmen who assisted General Sherman in his triumphant
march across Georgia. According to Claude F. Oubre in his book Forty
Acres and a Mule, General Tecumseh Sherman, acting under an edict from
the War Department, issued Special Field Order No. 15. Promulgated on
January 16, 1865, after Sherman had conferred with 20 black ministers
and obtained the approval of the War Department, Special Order No. 15
provided that:

“The islands of Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the
proclamation of the President of the United States.”

The land was then divided into 40-acre tracts. Sherman then issued
orders to General Saxton to distribute the plots and processory titles
to the head of each family of the freedmen. There were no mules
included in the order, so where did the “and a mule” come from?
Shortly after Stanton left, Sherman’s commissary man came to him
complaining that he had a large number of broken down mules for which
he had no means of disposal. Sherman sent the useless animals to
Saxton for distribution along with the land.

“By June, 1865 approximately 40,000 freedmen had been allocated
400,000 acres of land.” However, by September, 1865 former owners of
the land reserved by Sherman “demanded the same rights afforded
returning rebels in other states.”

After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became President. One of
his first acts was to rescind Special Military Order No. 15 because of
the constitutional violations that it created. Former slave owners
were then exempted from the initial general amnesty given to them, and
instead secured special pardons from President Johnson, who broke the
promise made to the freedmen when he ordered the processory titles
rescinded and the land returned to the white plantation owners.
Johnson gave little or no regard to the fate of the former slaves

From the viewpoint of the former slaves, who believed that they were
owed this property, their eviction from land was seen as another
example of ill treatment. The illegality of the promise was not their
concern, but from that late war incident grew an urban legend that
survives into the present day.

Dismayed, like many, Saxton wrote Oliver O. Howard (Commissioner of
the Freedmen’s Bureau) stating:

“The lands which have been taken possession of by this bureau have
been solemnly pledged to the freedmen. The law of Congress has been
published to them, and all agents of the bureau acting under your
order have provided lands to these freedmen . . . . I sincerely trust
these colonists by driving him from the home which he was provided. It
is of vital importance that our promises made to freedmen should be
faithfully kept . . . . The freedmen were promised the protection of
the government in their possession. This order was issued under great
military necessity with the approval of the War Department . . .  More
than 40,000 freedmen have been provided with homes under its promises.
I cannot break faith with them now by recommending the restoration of
binding as a statute.”

Saxton’s pleas were to no avail. The freedmen were ultimately
summarily removed from the land. There were however, numerous
individuals and organizations which believed the freedmen were
entitled to land. Their conviction in this belief was not easily
thwarted. Between 1865-9 countless alternatives for solving this
matter were proposed and presented to Congress as well as President
Johnson. The motivations for these proposals were as varied as the
propositions themselves. They ranged from a sincere belief that the
freedmen were entitled to land, to fear of violence, resistance to
social, economic and political equality, concern about miscegeny,
attempts to purge the country of the burden of freedmen on the doles,
economic gain and to eliminate any competition they might present for

For instance, quartermaster M.C. Megis devised a plan which would
enable the freedmen to secure land in the South. Simply put he
suggested that:

1) As a condition of receiving pardons, southerners, whose net worth
exceeded $20,000 and were not recipients of an automatic pardon as a
result of Johnson’s amnesty proclamation, give to each head of family
of their former slaves from 5 to 10 acres of land.
2) The freedmen would receive full title to the land with the
stipulation that the land could not be alienated during the life time
of the grantee.

President Johnson chose not to adopt this recommendation. However,
according to Oubre, Megis’ proposal may have been the inspiration for
Thaddeus Stevens’ confiscation plan (one of the many he proposed for
black reparations). Just and well thought out I feel had it been
approved Stevens’ proposal may have provided a more equal distribution
of wealth. The primary points of Stevens’ ‘confiscation plan’
according to Oubre are as follows:

1) The government would confiscate the property of all former
slaveholders who owned more than 200 acres of land.
2) The property seized would have been allocated to the freedmen in
lots of 40 acres.
3) The remaining land would be sold and the monies would be used to
remunerate loyalists whose property had been seized destroyed or
damaged as a result of the war.
4) Any remaining funds would be utilized to augment the pensions of
Union soldiers and to pay the national debt.

Yet another proposal suggested that the government transport the
freedmen west and colonize them along the route of the Union Pacific
Railroad. It was argued that to do so would prove beneficial for the
railroad as well as the freedmen. The freedmen would have their land.
The railroad would have both an accessible labor force and someone to
protect the trains from Indian attack Additionally, adopting this
particular proposal would also bode well for the government.
permitting it to keep its promise to provide land for the freedmen.
Simultaneously, according to Carl Schurz sand John Sprage, “this plan
would serve to remove some of the “surplus” black [people] from the

The American Missionary Association requested, to no avail, that
President Johnson reserve the land promised to the freedmen. If that
was not a suitable option they further petitioned that the freedmen be
provided with transportation to homestead lands in the west and
provided with rations enough to sustain them until crops could be

Concerned with the burgeoning African American population in Virginia,
Orlando Brown proposed, that some 10,000 African American soldiers
stationed in Texas, might be provided with a land bounty in Texas if
they remained there and sent for their families. A similar proposal
was made by “Sergeant S.H. Smothers, an African American soldier from
Indiana serving with the 25th Army Corps in Texas.”

But President Johnson seemed to be determined to make sure that
freedmen received no land. He mercilessly vetoed any proposal having
to do with providing land to the freedmen that reached his desk.
Finally, Congress overrode his veto and passed a bill to extend the
life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. However, it contained no provision for
granting land to the freedmen, other than to provide them access to
the Southern Homestead Act at the standard rates of purchase.


“A natural or Quasi-experiment is a naturally occurring instance of
observable phenomena which approximate or duplicate the properties of
a controlled experiment. In contrast to laboratory experiments, these
events aren’t created by scientists, but yield data which nonetheless
can be used (commonly through the use of instrumental variables) to
make causal inferences. Natural experiments are a common research tool
in fields where artificial experimentation is difficult, such as
economics, cosmology, epidemiology, and sociology.”

Although over 140 years have passed since slaves were emancipated in
the United States, African-Americans continue to lag behind the
general population in terms of earnings and wealth. Both
Reconstruction era policy makers and modern scholars have argued that
racial inequality could have been reduced or eliminated if plans to
allocate each freed slave family “forty acres and a mule” had been
implemented following the Civil War. In this paper, I develop an
empirical strategy that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in
policies of the Cherokee Nation and the southern United States to
identify the impact of free land on the economic outcomes of former
slaves.  The Cherokee Nation, located in what is now the northeastern
corner of Oklahoma, permitted the enslavement of people of African
descent.  After joining the Confederacy in 1861, the Cherokee Nation
was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to
claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain.  To
examine this unique population of former slaves, I have digitized the
entirety of the 1860 Cherokee Nation Slave Schedules and a 60 percent
sample of the 1880 Cherokee Census.  I find the racial gap in land
ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is
smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States.
The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate
into smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than
in the South.  Additionally, the Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute
levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen.
These results together suggest that access to free land had a
considerable and positive benefit on former slaves.

Melinda C. Miller
email : millermc [at[ umich [dot] edu

bad times for thousands of black Indians battling for tribal
BY Brendan I. Koerner  /  September 2005

capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

respected Native American and a skilled diplomat who acted as a
liaison between tribes and local townsfolk. “He knew sign language and
rancher,” says Stick’s great-grandson, Leslie Ross, a 56-year-old
retired civil servant whose greatest joy is recounting the Stick
trivia he learned from his family in Muskogee. “And he was sheriff at
one time, too. He was pretty renowned in Tahlequah.”

when an emancipation treaty freed them from bondage and granted them
were embraced by the Cherokee as equals, and often married the
offspring of their former masters. Like Stick, they identified with
local cultures, spoke tribal languages, and took part in tribal
religious rites.

Cherokee Nation. Leslie Ross has been denied citizenship in the tribe
on the grounds that he is not truly Indian. “They said I don’t have
Cherokee Nation,” says Ross, his usually calm voice swelling with
anger. “The thing is, there wouldn’t be a Cherokee Nation if it

cannot join Oklahoma’s largest tribes. Once paragons of racial
inclusion and assimilation, the Native American sovereign nations have
done an about-face and systematically pushed out people of African
descent. “There’s never been any stigma about intermarriage,” says Stu
Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in
central Oklahoma. “You’ve got Indians marrying whites, Indians
marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money.”

These are boom times for the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma – the
Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole – due in no small
part to the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act that allowed the tribes
to construct their own casinos. The Chickasaw’s net assets have more
mammoth WinStar Casinos complex in Thackerville. The corporate arm of
there’s the government reparations fund. In 1990, the Seminoles
received a $56 million settlement as compensation for the seizure of
the tribe’s ancestral lands in Florida almost 200 years ago.

living for the recognized members of the tribes who make their homes
allocates 25 percent of profits to the Cherokee government, which
distributes the money in ways designed to help end the cycle of
poverty – college scholarships, health care, and low-interest home
many of the ramshackle structures in Seminole County can sorely use.
porches that seem one gust of wind away from collapse.

Five Civilized Tribes have swelled, they’ve revised membership
guidelines to exclude the Freedmen.

Tribal leaders now insist that the Freedmen were never actually
citizens and that they will never attain the honor of membership
tribe established a rule requiring citizens to carry a Certificate of
Degree of Indian Blood. This federal document is available to anyone
whose ancestors are listed on the Dawes Roll – a 1906 Indian census
that excludes Freedmen. In 2000, the Seminoles expelled all 2,000
black members and denied their families a cut of the reparations money
– never mind that their ancestors joined the tribe in the 18th
have considered themselves Indian for generations.

most celebrated case, a black tribal leader named Sylvia Davis filed
stipend from the Seminole reparations money. But US courts have
repeatedly refused to meddle in Indian affairs, noting that the
sovereign nations determine their own membership criteria. Davis
suffered a serious – and perhaps final – setback last year, when the
Supreme Court refused to consider her appeal of a lower court’s ruling
administration filed a brief on behalf of the tribe.)

emerging from an unlikely place – the front lines of genetic science.
Last year, several Freedmen leaders were approached by a molecular
company he had recently founded to sell DNA testing services to
amateur genealogists, Kittles promised to reveal any customer’s
Mende of Sierra Leone.

Kittles heard about the Freedmen’s plight from a friend at the
University of Oklahoma and wondered how the black Indians’ genetic
makeup would compare to other subsets of the African-American
population, such as the isolated residents of South Carolina’s Gullah
Islands. He visited the 2004 conference of the Descendants of the
Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes, an organization dedicated to
ending “discrimination against people of mixed Indian African
descent,” and offered free DNA tests. There are many light-skinned
tribal citizens with less than 1 percent Indian genetic material; most
Kittles’ test in hopes that science would succeed where rhetoric,
litigation, and historical documents have failed.

“It’s important that we be able to establish that we are Indian
people, not just African people who were adopted into the tribe,” says
Marilyn Vann, who is suing the Cherokee Nation for citizenship. “If
you’re the average tribal member, you don’t want to be discriminated
against because you look Indian. So how can you discriminate against
other people just because they have some African features?”

“I have something for you.” A linebacker-sized man with a shaved head
with hundreds of fuzzy photocopies bearing lists of names and numbers
the third annual meeting of the Descendants, the highlight of which

When he’s not working in a nearby xanthan gum factory, Graham
Descendants. He specializes in helping African-Americans who believe
their Native American roots have been obscured by a combination of

age sons could benefit from federal scholarships reserved for Native
recognition as a Creek because that’s how he has always identified
himself. Graham fondly remembers his late father, Theodore “Blue”
Creeks in traditional dress would gather for sacred ceremonies. Blue
spoke Creek fluently and handed down some knowledge of the language to
his son. During one of his citizenship hearings with Creek Nation
tribe’s ancestral language. “My nation won’t accept me because of skin
color,” he says, shaking his head.

Graham leafs through documents that he believes will demonstrate his
ancestors had considerable Creek blood. He shows me a handwritten
the Creek National Council, recognizing Blue as a fellow citizen. “I
have known Theodore Graham since 1946 as a Creek Indian,” the note
reads. “He was traditional and spoke our language fluently. I always
assumed he was Creek decent [sic].” Graham also dredged up documents
eighth Indian – 12.5 percent.

Then he flips to his trump card. It reads, “Creek Nation, Creek Roll,
Card No. 191.” The date stamp: Approved by the Secretary of the
the Interior, McGilbray was 35 years old. In a column headed “Blood,”
the notation says “Full.” “See, this is my great-great-grandmother on
my mother’s side,” Graham says.

only acceptable way to document Native American heritage. The Dawes
Roll was the brainchild of a patrician Massachusetts senator, Henry
Laurens Dawes, who wanted to “civilize” Indian territory by ending
communal land ownership and allotting 160-acre plots to individual
compared the Dawes Commission, which oversaw the roll’s creation, to

The task of enrolling the Indians was assigned to white clerks
dispatched from Washington. They set up vast tent villages in Oklahoma
towns and sent word through tribal officials that anyone interested in
were deluged with applicants, including scores of Caucasians claiming
counted 18,636 people “of Negro descent in the Five Tribes.” With no
ability to speak any Native American language, the clerks often relied
on the eyeball test. Those who fit the stereotype – ruddy skin,
straight hair, high cheekbones – were placed on the “blood roll.” The
roll noted each person’s “blood quantum,” the fraction of their
parentage that was ostensibly Native American. That number was
sometimes based on documentation, but often, given the lack of
accurate records and the language barrier, it was nothing more than
crude guesswork.

Those with obvious African roots were sent to a different set of
listing of blood quantum. Contemporary Freedmen believe the
segregation was part of a government conspiracy to steal Indian land.
their land without clearing the transaction through the Indian Bureau.
That made the poorly educated Freedmen easy marks for white settlers
as little as $15.

Even when a man had an Indian grandparent and should have been
on the Freedmen Roll. The eyeball test sometimes assigned siblings to
blooded women married to black males suddenly became Freedmen with no
much. Freedmen and Indians continued to live in relative harmony –
until money and politics entered the picture.

clerical error motivated by racism or incompetence, or both. “To this
should have the right to reclaim their heritage,” says Anissia Vo. Her
Muskogee, has spent the last four years documenting her heritage and
struggling to get recognition from the Creek government. “My great-
someone telling you, ‘We don’t care what you were yesterday – from now
acknowledge our existence.”

believe that Graham is related to McGilbray. Which is why Graham
turned to science in search of irrefutable evidence. His test reveals
that he’s genetically 9 percent Native American. If the tribes insist
them what’s in his blood.

Searching for obscure ancestors once meant combing through the bowels
those who obsess over matters such as whether their heavy tooth enamel
indicates Creole roots, genetic tests are a quick way to separate
scientific fact from family fiction.

“Ninety percent of the people interested in Native American ancestry
are people who look as European as could be,” says Tony Frudakis,
chief scientific officer of DNAPrint Genomics, a Sarasota, Florida,
genetic testing company. “They think they might have a Native American
ancestor three or four generations back. We call it the American
Indian Great-Grandmother Princess.”

DNA tests works fine for amateur genealogists, but they’re hardly
foolproof. Two of the three on the market – Y chromosome and
mitochondrial DNA – are limited in scope. The Y chromosome test looks
have shown an ability to identify Native American gene lines, false
negatives are a big problem.

to the Freedmen. DNAPrint’s AncestryByDNA looks across all 23 pairs of
chromosomes for mutations that seem to indicate one ancestry or
another. The company uses proprietary statistical software to estimate
what percentage of a person’s genetic material originated where – 85
African, 20 percent Native American, and 20 percent European. “Chief
6.25 percent],” Leslie Ross says, “and my DNA test said I’m 3 or 4

But even the best tests have large margins of error. “If you show a
possibility that it isn’t indicating Native American ancestry,”
Frudakis says. People with these levels of Indian blood may simply
30 percent Native American heritage, for reasons that are not yet
totally clear to scientists.

databases grow, it may be possible to identify ancestry by region –
can already name the African tribes an African-American customer
descends from. Still, linking Freedmen to particular tribes remains
tricky because of all the intermarrying that has occurred over the

Even if the testing companies could narrow a person’s origins to a
the Indian tribes show no inclination to accept it – or even consider
it. “Our citizenship laws require you to have a Cherokee ancestor who
was on the Dawes Roll. Can a DNA sample prove that?” says Cherokee
spokesperson Mike Miller. “If I did a DNA test, it might show that I
say, I have German ancestry and I would like to be a German citizen.”

It’s a crude analogy. Germany’s citizenship laws don’t require
could become a naturalized German citizen someday. The Freedmen have
no such chance.

Seminole chief who expelled the tribe’s black members in 2000, whether
he might reconsider his stance based on DNA tests, he huffs. “They can
claim all the Indian they want,” he says, “but they cannot become a
roll] as Freedmen. They’re separate.”

Not all tribal members reject the merits of the Freedmen’s cause.
the 1983 decision to rescind Freedmen’s voting rights – which he said
happened because many Freedmen were backing a progressive candidate
running for chief. Tribal leaders, he says, “colluded and drew up a
doing in regard to disenfranchising the Freedmen is all totally

third of the Freedmen applications had some documented Native American
helping black plaintiffs prepare to file suit in tribal courts. “I
tribe was profound,” he says. “They were perpetrating a genocide, a
paper genocide.”

Rick Kittles is one of the last speakers at the Descendants
about the underlying science. He describes how African genealogy is
relatively easy to trace because of the population’s high number of
polymorphisms – genetic variations unique to a particular group. Then
he gets down to business. He shows charts indicating that African
while European ancestry varied from 0 to 62 percent. “Native American
was surprising,” Kittles says as he presses the slide clicker to bring
was from 0 to 30 percent, for an average of just 6 percent – almost
identical to an East Coast African-American population.

Baltimore. “I expected it to be higher because of the experiences
you’ve had,” he admits. Then he offers a consolation.

He explains that many Freedmen display high levels of European
ironically, this might be exactly what links them genetically to the
white colonists starting in the 17th century, and there has been
who identify themselves as Native American have very high percentages

To prove this hypothesis, Kittles tells the attendees that more
testing is in order. “If genetics is going to help this cause, we
European ancestry,” he says, theorizing that they, too, will have high
levels of European blood. “I think that many of those so-called
purebloods aren’t so pure.”

dress. She leans forward in her seat. “I just want to thank you,” she
ancestry. “It’s true what my grandmother said, that I did have Native
American blood.”

prominent cheekbones, Scott has the sort of face that might have
she’s a descendant of the Perrymans, an illustrious Creek family with
“You know, the Dawes Commission would take brothers and sisters and
divide them up,” she says. “They went by how you looked, and a lot of
Scott trails off in a sad laugh. “I mean, they had no DNA testing back

With Graham’s assistance, she has pulled together copious documents
that attest to her family’s Creek lineage and plans to submit her
application for membership soon. The final piece she’d been waiting
genetic noise.

she expects her application to be rejected, considering that her
She seems both surprised and slightly offended: “I don’t see how they

phrases like biogeographical ancestry. No wonder. For centuries,
science has been hijacked to validate racist beliefs. Scientific
journals from the 19th century are replete with discussions of cranial
capacity and brain weight, measurements used to explain why blacks
social Darwinism, used to twist Darwin’s findings and shape Nazi

those who base their self-worth on being of “pure” racial stock
probably aren’t. Every family tree has a thousand branches. “The
technology will show how mixed we are,” Kittles says. “There is no
have significant European ancestry, too.”

Freedmen nowhere against a century-old document created by clueless
white bureaucrats and enforced by men the Freedmen once considered
brothers. The question is whether a tool created by molecular
biologists will have any more luck.

There are three types of DNA test designed to pinpoint genetic
Here’s what happens along the way.

The Y chromosome method searches for genetic markers on the Y
chromosome. A particular polymorphism, or variation, on the DYS199
hemisphere. So anyone with that polymorphism has Native American
the genome – so you may have Indian genes that don’t show up – and it
works only on males.

To determine maternal lineage, the mitochondrial DNA test looks for
polymorphisms in mitochondrial DNA. All humans have mtDNA, which is
and Native American genes along the maternal line, but not the
percentages of each.

The genome-wide technique scours the entire genome for “ancestry
informative markers” that indicate “biogeographical ancestry.”
Statistical software then analyzes the data to determine what
most expensive option, and it still can’t trace a Native American’s
roots back to a particular tribe.

There are three types of DNA test designed to pinpoint genetic
Here’s what happens along the way.

The Y chromosome method searches for genetic markers on the Y
chromosome. A particular polymorphism, or variation, on the DYS199
hemisphere. So anyone with that polymorphism has Native American
works only on males.

To determine maternal lineage, the mitochondrial DNA test looks for
polymorphisms in mitochondrial DNA. All humans have mtDNA, which is
and Native American genes along the maternal line, but not the
percentages of each.

The genome-wide technique scours the entire genome for “ancestry
informative markers” that indicate “biogeographical ancestry.”
Statistical software then analyzes the data to determine what
most expensive option, and it still can’t trace a Native American’s
roots back to a particular tribe.




The Eruption of Tulsa
BY Walter F. White  /  June 29, 1921

attempted to assault her in the public elevator of a public office
building of a thriving town of 100,000 in open daylight. Without
bothering with the slight detail of investigating the character of the
everlasting damage to the reputation of the city of Tulsa and the
State of Oklahoma.

cities where the likelihood of trouble between the races was as little
present possibility of devastating race conflicts where least

Tulsa is a thriving, bustling, enormously wealthy town of between
$65,449,985.90; almost $1,000 per capita when compared with the
Federal Census figures of 1920, which gave Tulsa 72,075. The town lies
and progressive businessmen who well exemplify Tulsa’s motto of “The
City with a Personality.”

presumptuous in achieving greater economic prosperity than they who
three colored persons in Oklahoma who are worth a million dollars
each; J.W. Thompson of Clearview is worth $500,000; there are a number
case where a colored man owned and operated a printing plant with
$25,000 worth of printing machinery in it, the leader of a mob that
set fire to and destroyed the plant was a linotype operator employed
killed while attacking the plant. Oklahoma is largely populated by
pioneers from other States. Some of the white pioneers are former
more typically Southern than Oklahoma. These have brought with them
sorely irks them to see Negroes making greater progress than they
themselves are achieving.

were “radical.” Questioning the whites more closely regarding the
nature of this radicalism, I found it means that Negroes were
uncompromisingly denouncing “Jim-Crow” cars, lynching, peonage; in
short, were asking that the Federal constitutional guaranties of
the whites who seek to maintain the old white group control naturally
do not relish seeing Negroes emancipating themselves from the old

properly be classed as such, are interested in making money and
secure officials who would protect them in their vice operations.
About two months ago the State legislature assigned two additional
clogged dockets. These judges found more than six thousand cases
awaiting trial. Thus in a county of approximately 100,000 population,
six out of every hundred citizens were under indictment for some sort

According to the statements of many prominent Tulsans, local police
officers directed traffic at the scene of the lynching, trying to
afford every person present an equal chance to view the event.
Insurance companies refuse to give Tulsa merchants insurance on their
thefts that a number of companies have canceled all policies on cars
for the law.

operating an elevator in the Drexel Building, stated that Dick
have occurred to the citizens of Tulsa that any sane person attempting
rather than an open elevator in a public building with scores of
people within calling distance. The story of the alleged assault was
newspapers. At four o’clock Commissioner of Police J.M. Adkison
reported to Sheriff McCullough that there was talk of lynching Rowland
Tribune, and numerous other citizens all stated that there was talk
Tuesday of lynching the boy.

In the meantime the news of the threatened lynching reached the
colored settlement where Tulsa’s 15,000 colored citizens lived.
Remembering how a white man had been lynched after being taken from
and proffered their services in protecting the jail from attack. The
numbering about 400 according to Sheriff McCullough. At 9:15 the
reaching the jail found the report untrue. The sheriff talked with
then–in the words of the sheriff–“all hell broke loose.” There was a
fusillade of shots from both sides and twelve men fell dead–two of
them colored, ten white. The fighting continued until midnight when
the colored men, greatly outnumbered, were forced back to their
section of the town.

Around five o’clock Wednesday morning the mob, now numbering more than
the Negroes and according to some were used in bombing the colored
stories of horror told to me–not by colored people–but by white
evening prayers before retiring in their little home on Greenwood
backs of their heads, blowing their brains out and spattering them

Another was that of the death of Dr. A.C. Jackson, a colored
Mayo brothers as “the most able Negro surgeon in America”; was
officer sent him under guard to Convention Hall, where colored people
under similar circumstances in defending his home. Dr. Jackson was
murdered by white ruffians.”

known. The figures originally given in the press estimate the number
between 150 and 200 Negroes is much nearer the actual number of
on Wednesday morning and never came out. Thirteen whites were killed
between 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. O.T. Johnson,commandant of
Thursday the Salvation Army fed thirty-seven Negroes employed as grave
others–men, women, and children–who were incinerated in the burning
dead Negroes being dumped into the Arkansas River, but that story
could not be confirmed.

What is America going to do after such a horrible carnage–one that
for sheer brutality and murderous anarchy cannot be surpassed by any
longer will America allow these pogroms to continue unchecked? There
is a lesson in the Tulsa affair for every American who fatuously
believes that Negroes will always be the meek and submissive creatures
that circumstances have forced them to be during the past three
hundred years. Dick Rowland was only an ordinary bootblack with no