Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place

Abstract

This article focuses on the inclusion of a Civil War battle site, Honey Springs, in two bus tours of Oklahoma’s historic Black towns. I explore why tours devoted to Black communities visit the site of a historic military event, and how each tour does so differently. Looking at a conventional state-sponsored tour narrative of the battle site and an alternative tour narrative, I argue that the two are distinct in how they position the relationship of blackness to America. The conventional narrative focuses on the details of the battle, placing Black participation and relevance to the war story on the sidelines. Ultimately, I argue that the two tours demonstrate public struggles over the place of blackness in the nation’s history.

Keywords:

• Black towns
• Civil War
• heritage tourism
• race

Acknowledgments

I thank the contributors to this special issue, audience members at the 2015 bi-annual Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora conference, and Kamela Heyward-Rotimi for helpful comments and questions on earlier drafts of this work.

Notes

Battlefield Protection Study: Honey Springs Battlefield Park, Oklahoma, Prepared by State of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Historical Society in cooperation with the American Battlefield Protection Program, the United States Department of Interior, March 3, 1991.

Battlefield Protection Study, 1991; Karen Hanna and R. Brian Culpepper, Honey Springs Battlefield Park: Master Plan Report. Prepared for Battlefield Protection Program and Oklahoma Historical Society, The Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas, 1997.

Honey Springs National Battlefield and Washita Battlefield National Historic Site Act of 1994. H.R. 4821. 103rd Cong., 2nd session.

“African American History and Culture in Oklahoma.” https://www.travelok.com/article_page/african-american-history-culture-in-oklahoma (accessed October 7, 2016).

Ibid.

Many would disagree with the characterization of the territory as “cheap land” without providing the political context of land in Indian Territory at this time.

Between 2004–08, I went on many Black town tours run by different public and private tourism outfits and I observed how Black history and the story of the nation have comingled—not always compatibly. In my larger work on contemporary Black towns, I am exploring how tour itineraries and narratives do not stay fixed in geographically and officially designated Black towns. Tours are seemingly boundless and include content that moves across demographics, place, space and time, incorporating content about Oklahoma’s cities, non-Blacks, and present-day events as primary features of the tour rather than as secondary references. I see dimension of the tours as a way that tours locate Black towns, as Black places, either more prominently in the nation or very separate from it. That is, tours either affix Black history to the story of the nation or they keep the two stories apart.

Athinodoros Chronis, “Co-Constructing Heritage at the Gettysburg Storyscape,” Annals of Tourism Research 32 (2005): 386–406; Catherine Palmer, “Tourism and the Symbols of Identity,” Tourism Management 20 (1999): 313–21.

David L. Butler, “Whitewashing Plantations: The Commodification of a Slave-Free Antebellum South,” International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration 2 (2001): 163–75.

Ibid.; Lynell Thomas, “‘Roots Run Deep Here’: The Construction of Black New Orleans in Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives,” American Quarterly 41 (2009): 749–68.

Ibid. See also articles by Towns and Guerron Montero in this issue.

Larry O’Dell, “All-Black Towns,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed August 7, 2016).

The policy was known as the General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly referred to as the Dawes Act after the head of the commission, Henry Dawes. As Clara Sue Kidwell and Alan Velie (2005:48–49) argue, vis-à-vis Native Americans, the purpose of the allotment policy was to divide the area into private ownership and “subsume Indian Territory under the United States … [reconstructing] the tribes as a state within the United States”: Clara Sue Kidwell and Alan Velie, Native American Studies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 48–49.

Mozell C. Hill, “The All-Negro Society in Oklahoma” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1946); Daniel Littlefield and Lonnie Underhill, “Black Dreams and ‘Free’ Homes: The Oklahoma Territory, 1891–94,” Phylon 34 (1973): 313–22; O’Dell, “All-Black Towns.”

People of African descent who were formerly enslaved peoples by American Indians are typically called Freedmen. Throughout this article I use the term “freedpeople” instead.

O’Dell, “All-Black Towns.”

Many features contributed to southern Blacks’ perception of available land. News of the land runs reached Blacks in the south and enticed them to go West. Moreover, Black political activists and town speculators heavily recruited people to come from, populate, and develop Black towns. See especially: Crockett, The Black Towns (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 2014); Littlefield and Underhill, “Black Dreams” but also Kenneth Hamilton, Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

O’Dell, “All-Black Towns.”

Before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, there were no segregation laws, which made the region attractive to Blacks seeking to escape the racial hostilities of the south. However, once Oklahoma became a state in 1907 segregation became legal and the racial inequities and threatening environment that Blacks knew in the South followed them West.

Norman Crockett, The Black Towns; Quintard Taylor, “Black Towns,” in Encyclopedia of African American History and Culture, edited by C. Palmer (Detroit: MacMillan, 2006), 280–83; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Hill, “The All-Negro Society in Oklahoma.”

Perhaps the most well-known of Oklahoma’s Black towns, Boley stood out for its size, extensive businesses, institutional development, and relative wealth. The town continues to stand out today for its relative size and robust institutional resources relative to other existing towns.

Booker T. Washington, “Boley: A Negro Town in the West,” The Outlook 88 (1908): 28; R. Edgar Iles, “Boley: An Exclusively Negro Town in Oklahoma,” Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life 3 (1925): 231–35.

In addition to scholarly writings on Black towns, Black town newspapers were instrumental in drawing attention to and defining Black towns as spaces of remarkable economic and social progress. Newspaper ads helped recruit Black southerners to Oklahoma’s towns as places of freedom where there was land available for building homes, working independently, and joining a Black community. See Crockett, “The Black Towns.”

Crockett, “The Black Towns”; O’Dell, “All-Black Towns.”

Black town residents in their 50s and older, who I interviewed, mark the post–Civil Rights period as a moment when Black towns declined in population and the range of institutions also decreased significantly. Some believe that integration and the opportunity for Blacks to move into integrated suburban neighborhoods lured some residents away. To show the impact of this, people who I interviewed especially point to Black town school closings that resulted in Black town children attending public schools in neighboring, often predominantly White, towns. They also note this as a time when businesses began to close to such a degree that most towns possess no more than one or two local, formal businesses. This compares with the post-1930s period that many historians identify as the moment of sharp decline even though a town such as Boley, according to Hill (see “The All-Negro Society in Oklahoma,” 45) possessed more than sixty formal businesses in the mid-20th century.

While most tourism devoted to exploring Black town history (especially through bus tours) has been organized by public and private agencies located outside of Black towns, the towns hold events that draw in tourists regularly. Rodeos, festivals, and reunions are developed by town leadership and are controlled and occur in most towns on an annual basis. In some cases, these events draw in thousands of visitors, providing important revenue for the towns. They are also important avenues for former residents to return regularly to the towns. It is the narrative about Black town history generated through bus tours and museum exhibits that is developed and controlled by “outside” entities.

See for example: Edward Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). But also, Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Patricia Pinho, “African American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 35 (2008): 70–86; Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Kamari Clarke, “Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage,” in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, edited by M. Kamari Clarke and Deborah Thomas. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 133–53.

In this article, all names of individuals and agencies are pseudonyms. The Oklahoma Department of Tourism and Recreation and travelok.com are actual government entities.

Bus tours of Black towns often include stops that are not officially designated, rural Black towns. Such stops include Honey Springs and Fort Gibson but also monuments and buildings in major urban areas or medium-sized cities. In most cases that I observed, stops outside of officially recognized Black towns were at places of deep social and political significance in the state and nation. In this way, I argue, tours of Black towns spread out across a vast space and zone of significance, extending the geographic and social boundaries of Black towns. Tours that go across the state lift Black towns and tourists out of a temporal and spatial remoteness that, on the surface, the town are associated with.

The First Kansas Colored Infantry was made up of former and freed slaves who were recruited by a Kansas senator to fight in the Civil War. They were the first African American combat unit [see Ian Michael Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The First Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014)] and fought in battles across the west, in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Indian Territory [National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/fosc/learn/historyculture/firsttoserve.htm (accessed October 30, 2015)].

Fort Gibson Tourist and Interpretive Center. https://www.travelok.com/listings/view.profile/id.2825 (accessed October 27, 2016).

Ralph Jones, “Honey Springs, Battle of,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed October 30, 2015).

History is Alive in Oklahoma: Top Living History Events. https://www.travelok.com/article_page/history-is-alive-in-oklahoma-top-living-history-events (accessed October 30, 2015); Battle of Honey Springs Re-Enactment. http://www.travelok.com/listings/view.profile/id.17731 (accessed October 30, 2015).

The Honey Springs bi-annual re-enactment is a major “living history” event in Oklahoma, the largest in the state according to travelok.com. It takes place over two days on the anniversary date of the battle and includes a full re-enactment of the battle events as well as various demonstrations and performances of Civil War–era military life.

Dennis Hall, “Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of History,” Journal of American Culture 17 (1994): 7–11.

See St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1987).

Ivan Van Sertima, They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random Books, 1976).

Black Tulsans who were survivors of the 1921 race riot entered into protracted efforts to gain reparations for the losses to the community. Their efforts were unsuccessful. Additionally, Cherokee Freedpeople have pursued legal means to challenge their loss of citizenship in the Cherokee nation due to their race. These two major cases occurred and have been ongoing in some respects within 30 miles of Honey Springs.

Often referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes because they were considered to have adopted European cultural standards, these American Indian tribes were the Choctaw, Chicasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole.

John Bartlett Meserve, “The MacIntoshes,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 10 (1932): 310–25.

Ibid., 323.

Ibid.; Jerry L. Faught II, “McIntosh, John,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (2016), www.okhistory.org (accessed October 27, 2016).

Post Script: In fall 2016 the Oklahoma Historical Society will open a new, larger Honey Springs visitor center in the center of Rentiesville. By all news accounts, the town (the smallest Black town and one of the poorest) is excited to host the center and the Oklahoma History Society is pleased to have a new location for this expanded building. With the more explicit (geographic) layering of Honey Springs and Rentiesville through the new visitor center, how will Black towns be situated in the battle’s story?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karla Slocum

Karla Slocum is Associate Professor of anthropology and Director of the Institute of African American Research at UNC–Chapel Hill. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and she is currently completing a book manuscript on race, space, and the contemporary attraction of America’s historic Black towns.