Southesque: On Oklahoma's Disputed Southern Status

Depending on who you ask and how tied to rigid ideas of regionalism they may be, Oklahoma is either very much "the South" or it technically "isn't the South" at all. Of course, Oklahoma wasn't a "slave state" in the traditional historical sense, but if you search not all that deep into the recesses of Oklahoma's past (and present, really), a case could quite easily be made that Oklahoma is very much a Southern-American state through and through. While the states that the majority of Americans with a passing knowledge of our nation's history would consider to be "the Deep South"—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina—have histories that are undeniably Southern, Oklahoma's status has always been a point of debate. Oklahoma does indeed have a deep history of its own separate from—and parallel with—that of "the Deep South." 

While the aforementioned states, in addition to a few others, were locked in an incredibly bloody battle with the supposedly less racist, "morally superior" North to retain their precious way of life, most of present-day Oklahoma was an open, grossly undeveloped land mass. This was around the time that the U.S. government placed numerous Native American tribes onto what would become "Indian Territory" through forcible removal from their own lands in the Southeastern part of the U.S. Among these tribes were the Apache, Comanche, and Wichita tribes, as well as the "Five Civilized Tribes"— deemed more civilized than other Native Americans because they enslaved trafficked Africans—the Chahta, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminoles. 

During Reconstruction, but before Oklahoma gained statehood, white settlers began flocking to the territory in the Land Rush of 1889 to take advantage of its natural resources and stake their claim on land that was effectively sanctioned by the state via the Homestead Acts that were passed in the latter 1800s and early 1900s. The "Sooner State" moniker for Oklahoma came about during this time, which was always something I just found so offensive: that a white man could essentially steal someone's land twice over and all that happens is the U.S. government passes a series of laws to make it legal retroactively, while also slapping a cute little slogan behind the egregious act. Essentially, the already very small plots of land that the dozens of established and newly arrived Native American tribes were given were shrunken in size even more to accommodate this. White settlers were officially allowed into the Territory courtesy of the Land Run Act of 1889. Black Freedmen who had been released from their bondage at the hands of the Five Civilized Tribes and those newly freed from "the Deep South" all flocked to the new territory in brave determination, seeking to make new futures for themselves and their families during this time period as well. 

Prominent African-American land surveyor/politician/businessman Edwin P. McCabe was very instrumental in the wave of Black migration to Oklahoma Territory. McCabe had major aspirations in making Oklahoma an all-Black state, which never came to fruition. McCabe had established the town of Langston City, which still holds the only operational HBCU in the state, Langston University, hoping to make it the epicenter of the dream he had for Black statehood. Dozens of all-Black towns sprung up during the pre-statehood era in search of freedoms that they had sadly never known. My own family has its ties to this fascinating history: My great-grandfather, whom we often called by his last name, Hutton, had briefly grown up in the all-Black town of Huttonville before he and his family moved to Tulsa sometime before he reached his adolescent years. 

As hardline, white male politicians took over power in Oklahoma upon statehood in 1907, the first law that they passed in the newly formed state was Jim Crow legislation, effectively killing thousands of Black inhabitants' hopes of making Oklahoma a truly safe and prosperous homeland for themselves and their descendants. There was one notable outlier, though: in my hometown of Tulsa, ironically enough, due to those oppressive segregation laws, the Black community was able to keep its financial earnings and wealth internally, leading to the world-famous Historic Greenwood District (more widely known as Black Wall Street). 

What is less documented is the conspiracy at the state and local levels to suppress the atrocity, the "urban renewal" efforts in the 1960s-'70s that economically destroyed Black Tulsa a second time, and the lack of educational opportunities and political death that so many Black communities across the country have suffered. As a final miserable blow, the same white institutions (or descendants thereof) that still had the blood on their hands decided to co-opt that history and cash in on it as the 100th year anniversary of the Massacre was creeping closer, instead of finally making any material reparations to the community that never actually recovered. 

I remember vividly growing up with pride and gratitude that I lived in a neighborhood with Blackness and heritage all around but was also puzzled and saddened that there was an unspeakable, resigned comportment in how we all lived our everyday lives in relation to the blatant stagnation our community had been stuck in for decades. 

In my mind, the major throughline from the "Deep South" to Oklahoma is the racial terrorism that Black folks have endured in the Sooner State, which was not any different than what Black Americans faced in former slave states during the Reconstruction Era, well through two-thirds of the 20th century, and, more covertly, the sociopolitical (and literal) death perpetrated against us today. While the 1921​​ Tulsa Race Massacre (one of the largest instances of racialized violence against Black Americans in this nation's history) obviously tends to be the main historical focus when we revisit Oklahoma's dark, racist past, there are actually multiple shades and variations of white violence, oppression, and subjugation that are deeply embedded in the core of Oklahoma's identity. 

One particular event that occurred 10 years before the Massacre that sits inside of me and constantly tears at me was the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son L.D. in the town of Okemah. The actual circumstances of what led up to this heinous murder aren't completely clear. Needless to say, the facts are ultimately irrelevant, as no justification was ever truly needed to warrant the slaughtering of people not ever meant to be freed, according to whites in Oklahoma then and now. Much like too many stories to count, Laura, her son, and her 2-year-old daughter (whose final fate is still unknown) were extracted from a local jail by a white mob heavily determined to destroy their lives. There was speculation that Laura was also raped by the mob before her death. Laura's brutalization in multiple forms and the submerged nature of this event, and countless others, is deep in the collective memory of Oklahomans—despite all of the photographic evidence in the form of incredibly disturbing, but not at all uncommon, postcards of the gruesome commemoration of what took place—and takes up permanent residence in my gut, heart, and mind. 

There are a multitude of Southerness markers that Oklahoma easily meets, which leaves its status as irrefutable, for better at times and for worse other times. To just name a few, there was the toothless but still very charming grin of the older Black gentlemen always hanging out outside and inside of businesses, chatting about whatever with others in the most entertaining ways. Add in the crunchy greens (collard or mustard, depending on family preference), macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes (or yams, again, depending on preference), cornbread, and the chitlins that some kids wouldn't touch that were included in every family gathering. Toss in the need to keep your family's "dirty laundry" in-house and the fact that children without adequate "home training," or those who even remotely seemed to be disobedient, had to be dealt with swiftly through the occasional whupping, while no one ever recognized the commonalities with our ancestors' enslavement that this punishment had in the most generationally harmful ways. In the end, this all isn't inherently Southern but inherently American, really. Was there some unmentioned prize to be won over a state's Southernness status anyway? 

Famed folk musician and Okemah native Woody Guthrie penned a song called "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son" about the Nelson family lynching several years after it had occurred. Historians have determined that his father was most certainly in attendance as a willful spectator on the day that Laura and her son were murdered. Those two opposing realities standing side by side, going down the same historical route, are indicative of the great hypocrisy of Southern life and one that is always worth defiantly remembering and deciphering.

I've gone the majority of my life with a deep ambivalence towards being connected to Oklahoma, the South, and what I saw as the inherent irredeemability of it all. When others couldn't quite pinpoint the origins of my accent and mistook it for anywhere but Oklahoma, I often felt a strange but comforting sense of pride. I wasn't that. I was something else altogether. I wasn't quite sure what I was but at least it was not that. However, as I saw Black folks from a variety of other Southern localities be able to find and embrace their own pride and joy in the midst of all that hideous, imposing, continual pushback to all that we were, I figured that surely I could do the same. To accept your connection and history with a place does not denote agreement and acceptance of all that it is and has been.