Celebrating Black History Month 2006
The Black West
(Page 3 of 3)

In 1889 another great land rush to Oklahoma attracted ten thousand of people of color. Most came from the Deep South and fled mounting violence hoping to see their women and children protected, gain an education and other opportunities. Leaving home in kinship and friendship caravans of a hundred or more people, this travel arrangement provided women a protective, comforting blanket. Since these large caravans included many skilled artisans, the early days of settlement was smoother for Black towns than for white towns. Residents did not have to solicit or wait for missing artisans, as did white communities. The simultaneous arrival of so many families and friends also insured cooperation, minimized conflict and spurred town growth and spirit.

The political career of Edwin P. McCabe charts the ebb and flow of power brought by the Black migrations. In the 1880s, at the height of the Black migration to Kansas, Republicans twice nominated and elected McCabe state auditor, only to denied him a third term. In 1890 he arrived in Oklahoma, helped found Langston City the next year, and championed Oklahoma as a Black refuge from racist violence. He planned to settle a black majority in each congressional district and set his eyes on Oklahoma's territorial governorship. Within eight years Langston City boasted a public school, later a college, and within a decade had virtually eliminated illiteracy among its 15 to 45 year old men (5%) and women (6%).

Boley, Oklahoma, formed in 1904 on land owned by Abigail Barnett, a Black Indian, in two years had a school with two teachers, and later a high school that sent half of its graduates to college. In 1908 Booker T. Washington called Boley "striking evidence" of "land-seekers and home-builders . . . prepared to build up the country." By World War I a thousand Black people lived in Boley, and two thousand ran nearby farms.

Between 1890 and 1910 32 all-Black towns sprouted in Oklahoma. Men ran the governments but women organized community events, built schools, churches and self-help societies and planted middle class values. Then, in 1907 Oklahoma entered the Union as another white supremacy state, the first to segregate telephone booths. Blacks towns still elected local officials but not national or state officers, and Oklahoma fell under the bigoted hand of the state's justice system. Segregation laws and declining agricultural prices spelled ruin, and most Black towns became ghost towns. McCabe's political goal sputtered to earth and he left for Chicago where in 1920 he died in poverty. But his dream lived on in Black migrants' resounding victories over illiteracy.

Women remained a major staple of Black community strength. They put up the walls and nailed down the floors of frontier schools, churches, and self-help societies. In 1864 women in Virginia City, Nevada began the First Baptist Church with a new bound Bible and a dozen hymnbooks. These pioneers went on to demand public education for their children, to begin literary societies, and in 1874 held a Calico Ball for the 374 Blacks living largely in western Nevada.

In Montana, in 1888 Black women started a St. James Church and the next year a Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1924 31 delegates assembled in Bozeman as representatives of Montana's Federation of Black Women's Clubs. In Denver, Colorado in 1906 the Colored Women's Republican Club proudly reported a larger percentage of Black women voted in the city election than white women. By 1910, and largely due to the efforts of women, illiteracy among African Americans in California, Oregon and the Mountain States had been reduced to less than 10%. Even in western prisons 87% of Black women inmates could read and write.

In many locales Black women were so rare that Black bachelors would meet incoming stagecoaches and trains seeking a marriage partner. Western women were far more likely to marry than their sisters in the east. In Arizona mining towns it was married Black women who, distressed by the single men who disturbed the peace at night and on weekends, formed the “Busy Bee Club.” Their strategy was to contact Black churches and newspapers in the east and arrange for the transportation of mail order brides-to-be for unmarried miners. Young women, promising to wed the men who paid their fare, boarded trains for Arizona. Young brides survived tense wedding days to meet the challenges of frontier family life.

Other Black towns sprouted. California gave birth to Albia, Allensworth, Bowles, Victorville, and Texas produced Andy, Booker, Board House, Cologne, Independence Heights, Kendleton, Oldham, Mill City, Roberts, Shankleville and Union City. The last high plains Black settlement was Dearfield, Colorado, founded in 1910 by Oliver and Minerva Jackson and settled by 700 poor, older women and men with little capital and scant farming experience. During World War I Dearfield prospered only to be struck by water shortage and searing winds and finally toppled by the post-war agricultural depression.

Black farming communities had marched into battle without the necessary weapons. Black pioneers, having less capital than whites, were unable to purchase the large acreage required for survival. Unable to get easy credit, they became less able to weather economic and natural disasters. And like rural whites, in the age of the automobile and movies, the jobs and bright lights of cities constantly lured their young.

The West produced unusual and distinguished women and men of color. In 1866 Cathy Williams dressed as "William Cathy" and served for two years as a soldier in the Buffalo Soldiers. Barney Ford built a palatial Inter-Ocean Hotel in Denver and then another in Cheyenne, Wyoming. An African American cowpuncher named Williams taught a New York City tenderfoot named Theodore Roosevelt how to break in a horse, and another Black cowboy named Clay taught movie star Will Rogers his first rope tricks. Mifflin Gibbs rose from a California bootblack to start the state's first Black newspaper, graduated college and became a judge in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In Texas, Sutton Griggs at 26 became a Baptist minister and a published novelist, and went on to write seven books of fiction and essays. Born a slave in Texas, Lucy Gonzales Parsons became the first prominent socialist revolutionary of color, an advocate for the wretched of the earth and a voice for the working class in the United States. As editors of the popular Seattle Republican, Susan and Horace Cayton became wealthy and leading citizens of the new state of Washington. Six foot, 200 pound Mary Fields ran a restaurant and laundry in Cascade, Montana, and in her sixties as "Stagecoach Mary" delivered the U.S. Mail and drove a stagecoach. In 1898 widow May Mason of Seattle rushed off to the Yukon, Alaska gold rush and returned with $5,000 in gold and a $6,000 land claim. Oscar Micheaux wrote seven novels, including two fictionalized autobiographies of his life in South Dakota, and as a pioneer movie producer wrote 45 films that cast his people as cowboys, detectives and doctors.

African American pioneers were a hearty breed and they had to be, for they faced more than their white counterparts. To live at peace on the frontier, they had to survive the raging storms of nature and man, and overcome the bony hand of bigotry.

With undaunted spirit, raw courage and a dogged persistence, Black pioneers added a new dimension to western life. They more than earned a right to ride off into the sunset and across the pages of history books.

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