Black Residents in Communities Across Texas, Oklahoma and Other States Faced Violence and Displacement During the Decades Following the Civil War
In 1908, at the height of white supremacist terror and segregation, about 1,000 Black residents of Oklahoma fled north. They were driven from their homes.
In 1909, the entire Black population of Sapulpa, Oklahoma were removed by force from their homes that were burned down. Many of these Oklahoma Black residents had already run from Texas’ white supremacists a few years before only to find that wherever they established a “safe” segregated area to live they were terrorized or burned out. In 1910, another attack took place in Slocum, Texas and has been called the Slocum Massacre.
All white supremacists had to do was make a false claim that a white woman had been abused and entire segregated Black areas were destroyed and people killed. Racist Whites called Black areas “N” Town and this made it a target for any fanatic to come in and destroy or murder Black folks.
Segregation Offered No Safety
One must remember that Native Americans were being attacked as well by killers and was part of the conspiracy to remove Blacks and Native People from white society, not just to segregated areas but completely if possible. When opportunity presented itself, Native People and Blacks were chased out of specific areas. Segregation did not make Black people “safe,” for it gave racists a specific target to lynch, burn out, or expel Blacks from areas that some racists wanted to steal.
The word “settler” comes to mind here, as it actually meant racist white settler who was hell-bent on stealing land in any way possible. According to the oral history of Minnie Jones Himes in 1937, and even before the 1900s, Blacks in Duncan, Oklahoma were run out of the area and seven were hanged, and their bodies left hanging to rot and, “left there for a long time.”
Forced Labor Continued After Slavery
According to historical records, all of the Black people were run out of Geary, Oklahoma in 1869 except a Black cook that racists needed to cook their food. It is interesting to note that Adolph Hitler studied the racism and ethnic removal of minorities in America before he began his own tale of terror. While some thought they were in heaven, because they were not bothered at times as Black businessmen in a segregated community, outside of their comfortable existence, slavery and brutality existed well into the twentieth century.
Blacks were arrested for anything and fined for vagrancy violations and forced to work off the debt to made the warden of the prison wealthy. Blacks were viewed as items or property to be used or discarded under Jim Crow law. In Georgia, in 1921, 56 years after the Civil War, the John S. Williams plantation still operated as a slave farm. The slaves on this farm were murdered by an Uncle Tom slave in the most horrific way on orders from his racist master.
Black Codes Replaced Slavery
The ideas of slavery and hatred are still with us. Forcing Blacks to work for free took place in areas were Black business people thought they were better off than their brothers and sisters. Peonage laws and segregation were the tools of Jim Crow law and were used to replace slavery. These acts came into being after the Civil war to help the plantation owners who lost their slaves recoup their riches.
These attempts were called “Black Codes.” Black codes helped to segregate Blacks into specific neighborhoods in order to have a supply of people to provide labor and a specific place to allow the KKK and others to vent their hatred because they lost the Civil War.
