10
Building the Promised Land in Oklahoma
1893
Moments before noon on a hot and dusty day in September 1893, more than one hundred thousand men, women, and children lined up along the northern border of the Oklahoma territory like racers at the start line. They were “boomers,” property seekers who had journeyed from across the country to the West in order to participate in what was shaping up to be the country’s largest land run. More than a year earlier, the federal government had purchased 6,361,000 acres from the Cherokee tribe in the former Indian territory of Oklahoma and promised to open the land up for settlement to homesteaders on a first-arrive basis at exactly noon on September 16, 1893.
They began arriving almost a year before the run was to begin, in wagons and on the backs of horses and donkeys, camping along the Kansas-Oklahoma border. The camps were crowded, as farmers were facing hard times due to drought, declining profits in the agricultural sector, and an economic depression in 1893(later known as the Panic of 1893). The overriding mood in the camps was one of desperation. Tens of thousands of boomers lived in tents and makeshift houses. Those who came early in the year endured Oklahoma’s brief but frigid winter, followed by thunderstorms and tornado-like winds in the spring, and a hot and humid summer. Death seemed to linger in the air, due to outbreak of disease and food and water shortages. Gunfights and brawls between boomers were regular occurrences.
Among the frontiersmen was a twenty-five-year-old African American man named Ottowa W. Gurley. Gurley was well built, with a square jaw and broad shoulders. He had mahogany skin, angular features, and curly dark hair that he parted at the side. Like the other boomers, Gurley dreamed of a better life. He was the son of slaves, born on Christmas Day in 1868 in Huntsville, Alabama, to John and Rosanna Gurley. He grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on a farm with his family and attended public grammar school. Afterward he became a teacher and then later an employee of the United States Postal Service. He was ambitious yet pragmatic, and the government’s public land handout in Oklahoma seemed like just the type of opportunity he’d be remiss to pass up.
At noon sharp on September 16, a cannon fired, marking the start of the run. The boom of the gun set off a stampede into the territory, as boomers sprinted across the Oklahoma border onto the state’s green prairies and red sandy soil, kicking up clouds of dust. The boomers carried with them posts with their surnames written on them. When they found an available plot of land, they could lay their claim to it by driving the stake into the ground.
When they entered the Cherokee outpost, many found that most of the better land had already been taken by outlaws called “Sooners” who had sneaked into the territory early and squatted on the best areas. Nonetheless, thousands of boomers, black and white, planted their flags in the land that day and applied for their land permits.
Gurley traveled south for more than fifty miles through a forest of scrubby oak trees to a large prairie filled with thousands of tents of other boomers. There, Gurley staked his claim to a plot of dirt. Five days later, the area was incorporated as the town of Perry, Oklahoma, and Gurley was given the rights to the plot where he planted his flag.
AFRICAN AMERICANS HAD BEGUN TO RELOCATE TO THE FORMER Indian territory in Oklahoma as soon as it was open for settlement in 1889. The Central Oklahoma Emigration Society, an organization funded by Robert Reed Church, helped thousands of African Americans emigrate to Oklahoma to escape oppression, lynching, and terror in Memphis. These individuals were joined by groups of black homesteaders from Arkansas, Kentucky, Virginia, Washington, D.C., New York, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, all seeking greater freedom and opportunity in an America where African Americans were beginning to face violent backlash for the gains they had made during Reconstruction.
They were led in establishing themselves in Oklahoma by Edward P. McCabe, an enterprising African American from Troy, New York. McCabe was thin, with straight hair, skin the color of sand, and a handlebar mustache. He wore three-piece suits, spectacles, and bow ties. Before the land runs, he had lobbied the US government in Washington, D.C., to make Oklahoma an all-black state. When his requests to establish a black Oklahoma were denied, he moved to the territory during the land runs in 1889 and began establishing a movement to build all-black towns in the state. Twenty-five miles south of the town of Perry, he built an all-black town and called his land of promise Langston. He was not alone in organizing a black town; between 1890 and 1900, black boomers in Oklahoma established more than thirty such towns. “McCabe proposes to establish at Langston a distinctly Negro city and has for months, through colonization societies, been working in the Southern states to secure a population for this new black Mecca,” a New York Times article stated in 1891. “There are nearly 200 persons already there, and not a white face is to be found in the place.”
McCabe hired a half-dozen traveling salesmen and took out newspaper ads to promote black emigration to Oklahoma. Within a year, McCabe’s town boasted more than two hundred residents. For McCabe, Langston was the beginning of a black takeover of Oklahoma. He believed that if he could get enough blacks to resettle in Oklahoma, black towns could join together to take over the state and make it an all-black region. By 1892, Langston had twenty-five businesses, a doctor, and a school. By 1895, the residents had telephone service. In 1897, a black college was established there.
MCCABE’S REPRESENTATIVES CRISSCROSSED THE COUNTRY RECRUITING, appearing in black churches and meeting halls, boasting about the all-black towns where African Americans ruled. McCabe coordinated with the founders of other black towns in Oklahoma and in back rooms plotted together with them to one day take over the state. African Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida began to migrate to the towns in small numbers as lynchings and violence increased and some became tired of the hard life and low wages of sharecropping. In the Oklahoma towns, blacks had their own institutions and community, and it seemed as though at last they had found a life free from oppression and terror.
Gurley moved his wife, Emma, to Perry with him from Arkansas. After getting settled, he attempted to find work. He ran for county treasurer but was defeated, and instead took a job as principal of the school in the new town as conciliation. Perry was a frontier town located on a mile-long prairie. In Perry’s early days, its residents lived in and ran businesses out of tents and wood shacks. They supported themselves by operating cattle ranches and wheat farms, and they erected more than one hundred bars, restaurants, and shops in a business district in the center of the town. Gurley, seeing the wave of development in Perry, opened a general store, which was successful but did nothing to set Gurley apart from the other shop owners in town.
Perry was a multiracial place, with a large number of African Americans having settled there alongside white boomers and immigrants from Germany, Bohemia, and Russia. Edward P. McCabe attempted to establish an all-black town called Liberty near Perry in 1893, but the town failed to attract residents and proved to be short-lived.
MCCABE WAS STRUGGLING TO KEEP HIS DREAM OF A BLACK MECCA in Oklahoma alive. In the spring of 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The case, brought by a multiracial group of activists from New Orleans, brought a constitutional challenge to a set of laws passed by the Louisiana state legislature in 1890 that mandated separate but equal seating areas for blacks and whites on trains and buses. The Supreme Court, in a 7–1 decision, ruled to uphold the law and by extension confirm the right of states to pass racial-segregation laws. The ruling was the unofficial inauguration of the Jim Crow era, striking a final blow to the racially progressive epoch of Reconstruction.
In Oklahoma, white southerners moved into the territory and began to take over its government after the land run. They were led by William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, a white segregationist and lawyer from Texas. Murray resembled a vaudeville villain, with tanned skin, yellow tobacco-stained teeth, and a drooping mustache. He moved to Oklahoma in 1899 and intermarried with the ruling family of the Chickasaw tribe. Bill shared the Chickasaws’ hatred of blacks and opposed McCabe at every turn. “As a rule they are failures as lawyers,” he once said in a thinly veiled barb, adding, “It is an entirely false notion that the Negro can rise to the equal of a white man in the professions or become an equal citizen.” As he watched blacks build a town on the old Indian land, he lamented, “I appreciate the old time ex-slave, the old darky—and they are the salt of their race—who comes to me talking softly in that humble spirit which should characterize their actions and dealing with white men.” Under his leadership, segregationists began to pass racist laws and restrict the voting rights of African Americans with grandfather and great-grandfather clauses. McCabe sold his house to create a war chest to fight the racist laws in court. However, he lost repeatedly in court fighting Alfalfa Bill and his band of white supremacists and went broke from the legal expenses. In the end, he was forced to leave the state after running out of money. In his absence, the segregationists gained even more power in Oklahoma and Alfalfa Bill was elected to the state legislature.* The region’s small black towns followed McCabe’s decline; many shuttered and emptied out. The promised land, for the moment, was lost.