Good Morning POU!
This week’s post will be an excerpt from the book Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires.
The posts will tell the story of Ottuwa Gurley (sometimes spelled Ottowa or Ottawa) and the founding of Greenwood, Oklahoma which would become known as “Black Wall Street.”
According to lore, on a hot day in June 1865, at the end of the Civil War, a group of Union soldiers on horseback rode into Oklahoma from Texas and convened groups of enslaved African Americans in clearings in the woods on plantation fields. In the thick, dust filled summer air, they hold the gathering of African Americans that slavery was over. Oklahoma was vast, filled with frontier towns, farms and Indian settlements. More than 5000 African Americans lived in the territory in bondage. Despite what they were told, African Americans in Oklahoma would not be liberated until much later.
They had been enslaved not by white men, but by the Indians of the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes who ruled the region. The people of the five major tribes of Oklahoma fought with the Confederacy during the war and were slow to surrender to the Union even after Robert E. Lee and the rest of the Confederacy laid down their weapons. Standhope Uwatie, a Cherokee Confederate Brigadier General and commander of the Confederate Indian Calvary was the last rebel commander to lay down arms on June 23, 1865. Even after that, the Indian rebels continued to fight for months; braves raided Union camps in Oklahoma every few weeks, and Indian slave holders defied federal law and continues to hold African Americans as slaves. Their resistance was born out of their attachment to the institution of slavery and their hatred of the US government.
Standhope Uwatie
Indians in the southern states began enslaving African Americans as early as the 18th century after they were introduced to the practice by white settlers. For the majority of Indians their entanglement with slavery began when they became the first victims of it. In the colonies of Georgia, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama, Indians were held as slaves alongside African Americans. Later as the practice of enslaving Indians declined in the early 1800s, member of the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes began to show up to slave auctions to purchase trafficked Africans. As they shifted from pelt hunting to farming as their main source of income, plantation slavery became normal in Indian communities. In the 1830s and 40s, Indians were displaced from the South by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. Federal troops removed tens of thousands of Indians, forcing them to relocate to Oklahoma. At the end of the journey they reached undeveloped patches of land that the government called Indian Territory. The Indians translated the name into Choctaw and called their new home Okla Humma, meaning “land of the red people.”
The area was also home to thousands of African Americans who made the journey as slaves. They fought outbreaks of whooping cough, typhus, dysentery and cholera, all the while being given inadequate rations of food and water by the federal troops who chaperoned their removal. The African American slaves who made the journey, sometimes in chains, were assigned the bulk of the manual labor and were often the last to receive a bite of food or sip of water. As a result, they had the highest mortality rate during the deadly trip. For the Indians and African Americans who survived the march, it would become known as the Trail of Tears.
Three decades later when the Civil War began, the five tribes pledged allegiance to the Confederacy. They joined the rebels to defend their rights as slaveholders and exact revenge on the federal government. During the Civil War, the Confederacy failed to send weapons or reinforcements to Oklahoma. As a result, the Indian rebels were massacred when they had to do battle with Union fighters. Nonetheless, at the war’s end, they refused to surrender.
Later in 1865, the leaders of each tribe were summoned to Reconstruction conferences in Arkansas and Washington DC to negotiate the terms of surrender. First, the government demanded that the surrendering tribes sign a new peace treaty with the US government. Second, they were to emancipate their slaves and give them tribal rights. Last, they were to cede roughly a quarter of their land as reparations to the federal government for having joined the Confederacy.
Slowly, at the end of 1865, more than 5000 African Americans in the territory were set free. Upon emancipation, they began to advocate that the confiscated Indian land be broken up into 40 or 60 acre parcels and given to them to start farms. All over the country, emancipated African Americans and their allies in the Union Army and the Radical Republicans in Congress advocated that African Americans be given 40 acres of land and a mule or plow.
In anticipation of this happening, African Americans began taking up residence on Indian lands, living in shantytowns made up on old slave quarters and canvas tents.
Almost as soon as they began squatting on the ceded Indian land, bands of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians with war paint smeared on their cheeks and carrying whips began riding into the encampments on random nights, raiding and pillaging homes. They looted and smashed and dragged black men out of their homes to publicly whip or lynch them as women and children watched. Despite these intimidations, the dreamers in Oklahoma remained, hoping that any day the government would give them the right to petition to be given the land.