February 22, 2022 • 24 mins
Citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation, Eli Grayson talks about the various Native American tribes in Oklahoma as well as the history of Tulsa wealth.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves the Daily Podcast,
determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom of
financial stability, wealth and abundance. In eighteen they passed the
(00:20):
Curtis At Now I know we get into one. You
think about it is just two decades before and in
twenty one and they passed the Curtis Act, which was
the General Lawman Act. The Muskogee Creek Nation and the
four other tribes had to divide up its lands equally,
except in the Choctaw and Chickensaw Nation. That was a
(00:42):
little worse for black people because they're enslaved. Black people
called freedman, only received forty acres, and yet the Indian
and their intermarried white husbands received three hundred and twenty acres.
I think about it, you and then you're gonna marry
a white man from Kentucky. He comes and lives in
(01:05):
a tribe, he's been there two weeks, he gets to
get three hundred and twenty acres. You have been enslaved
by these people for two hundred years and you only
get forty acres. That was in the Choldtown, Chickasaw Nation
and the Semino Nation. Cherokee Nation. In the Muskogee Creek Nation,
each tribal member, black or red or white got one
(01:27):
hundred and sixty acres. This started in January of eight
He just rest that was because of the Congressional Act.
It was a Congressional Act of Congress. It's called the
General Allotment. Well it's not. It was it was the
final disposition of the Five Civilized Tribes because upon that
they were going to create the state of Oklahoma. And
(01:49):
the only way to do that was still in the
tribal governments, and nobody would be subject to a tribal
government to be subject to one state government. And so
in nine hundred it day nineteen o one, they passed
the Five Civilized Tribes Citizenship Act. They put the tribal
members black, white, or red under the uh UH the
(02:13):
what we call the territorial courts. They ended our tribal courts,
you know, and they were just kind of getting people
ready to be on the one state now in this division,
because this is important, you gotta think about it. And
I'm only gonna speak from the from the Creek perspective.
The enslaved people and their descendants received one hundred and
(02:38):
sixty acres starting in eight ended April nineteen o six,
That one hundred and sixty acres totaled one million, ninety
four thousand, two hundred and forty acres. That's roughly about
eight thousand black people one million, ninety four thousand, two
hundred and forty acres. Then you have the Indian population
(03:02):
that we call the by blood members. A quarter of
those Indians had some African ancestry. And it's important to
say this because in the negotiation for statehood was that
all the members of the five tribes would have when
(03:22):
the new state happened. We have voting rights, we have
all these rights that white folks have in other states.
And when they when when the members of the Senate
were here during the Conditions of Indians and Indian Territory interviews,
they were asked, the black man, the black Creek, don't
you want to become an American, but you want to
(03:45):
live like the people in the States. And every black
person they interviewed said, no, no, no, no, we find
brother we glory in being creek. Were satisfied is the
word they were used. No, We're satisfied because we know
how black people are being treated in Arkansas, which is
(04:05):
just next door, and how they're being treated in Texas,
which is just down south, and how they're being treated
in Kansas. We already know that game. We're cool, no
thank you, but they forced in any way. They forced
it on us anyway, and it ended up happening. And
sure enough, even though as statehood in eighteen o seven,
(04:29):
the black people in the Creek Nation owning one million
and four thousand, two dred and forty acres and a
quarter of the Bible blood Indians having some African ancestry,
immediately the first law that was passed, even though their
landowners you can't vote. You may be landowners, which you
(04:51):
can't vote. You have no say in how we elect
this government, even though you're the landowners. Think about this also,
think about the women have the a lot tease in
Indian territory were females, they had no right to vote either.
So you had a small classification of white Indians in
(05:14):
our tribe who could vote because they could pass its
whites at that point, and then you have all of
these black and then they made the Indians white that
the only people that they didn't allow to vote were Negroes,
not Indians. Not white people and the tribe. The black
people in the tribe, though they owned all of that land.
(05:38):
That's just in the Creek Nation got Choctok, Chickasaw, Cherokee,
and Seminar Nation. So literally a third of eastern Oklahoma
owned by black people. As statehood, they have no say
on how the government is gonna run. And it was
part of the scam because the federal government said, yes,
you will. But when they are allowed to state to
(06:01):
pass this constitution and started passing its first laws on
the docket was the gym Crow laws. And that the
Greenwood area comes about because of Tulsa in the Townsite
Act of Mayo nineteen hundred. Okay, so this is that mouth.
(06:22):
And I don't know if you guys can see this
or not. Okay. So this is the railroad track, the
milling track that came through way before Tulsa even existed.
There was nothing here this area here north of the tracks,
and here is the beginning of Greenwood here. But actually
in our history area right here where the tracks actually
(06:46):
being north into the Cherokee Nation, was an early Black
community called hodges Bins where Creek freedman had actually settled
because they didn't want to work in the Cherokee Nation
when the railroad was coming through. One of the conditions
of the railroad being built through the Creek Nation was
that it had to be Creeks that build this. They
can bring other people in, we have to use our workers,
(07:08):
at least some of them had to be all workers. Well,
the freeman themselves refused to go work into the Cherokee
Nation because just ten years before that railroad went through,
the Cherokees had slaughtered a number of black people and
one of the Civil War battles, and they remembered that
and they won't forget that. So they at night they
(07:29):
came back into their settlement because they didn't trust being
in the Cherokee Nation after dark. So anyway, when this
started after nineteen hundred to be sold to white people,
and on and on, the black people that started to
come here just like white people. There are two classes
of black people in Oklahoma. There's the Native Blacks, which
(07:51):
are the freedman and Indians with African ancestry some African ancestry.
And there are the state Blacks, black people who graded
here from Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, New York, Chicago, anywhere. They
were not from here. The native blacks have been here
on the trail of tiers. They're at the beginning, and
(08:12):
so they didn't immigrate here. They were part of society.
But the state blacks that started to come here, like
Stratford and and Girly and others, and so many others
before them, came in with the whites. You gotta remember
that black people were still labor for those days. You know,
the buildings going up in New York, the buildings going
(08:34):
up in Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and on, and
the houses built all through the South for a century
or two were built with black hands. They had the
skills to do that. And even in Tulsa early days,
we didn't have Mexicans like we did we do today today.
You know, you want some build around here. Now, out
of ten times when you hire a contractor, he's gonna
(08:57):
bring a whole bunch of people from South America Mexico
here to do the work while he makes the money. Now,
back in those days, those people were not here. Black
people were the labor and they were paid for it. It
It wasn't enslavement. It was actually skills that were needed.
And when you look on the US population census in
(09:17):
nineteen ten, for example, for the Tulsa area, the black
population wasn't that big because Tulsa, but I'm not talking
about freedman. I'm talking about state blacks where it was
not that big because Tulsa hadn't started the boom yet.
It was just at the discovery of the Glimpool, which
is just south to Tulsa, that the the influx of
(09:40):
whites and blacks started to come here. In nineteen ten.
The Tulsa population was twelve thousand and so people in
nineteen twenty and seventy eight thousand people in nineteen twenty,
about twelve thousand of those people having to be African Americans,
not African Creeks, not African chocola, not even though some
(10:01):
Freeman lived in those communities. The majority of people were
from the States. And when you look on the population census,
you have uh enlisted their names, their wives names, the kids,
enlist their ages, enlists the origins, what state they were from,
what state their parents are from. Enlists with their occupations,
(10:24):
enlist their value of wealth, and in the eighteen twenty
it also says that they served in World War One.
You know so it's got that in there too. So
when you look at the census, you'll see very few people.
You do see some that were from Oklahoma, meaning that
they were born and Indian Territory, and they were probably
(10:44):
a member of one of these tribes, but for the
most part, everybody is from somewhere else. And then you'll
notice something very peculiar there in the construction business or
they're they're working in the oil and gas fill or
their building houses, or their bricklayers or their is that
they got skills and white people desired that because they
(11:04):
were building just as fast as Greenwood was. And what
what was happening in Greenwood was that black people were
working for wife folk, mainly building their mansions around Tulsa
because of the oil and gas boom and all the
high rises that were going up in Tulsa at the time,
the big buildings on and on, and they would get
(11:25):
their checks and because of the gym crow loog, you
can only live and spend money in your community. Tulsa
thrived because i mean the Greenwood community thrived and started
growing because of that. And when that man who was
working on a high rise got his check and he
went back to his community and started cash that check
(11:46):
and start spending that money in Greenwood. That dollar stayed
in Greenwood before it left. It just kept recirculating. He
needed a haircut, and haircut guy needed a shirt that
that guy that makes the shirt needed material. I mean,
it just goes on and on and on. But guess
what all of them needed food and food at that
(12:07):
time didn't come from California, and damn sure didn't come
from Mexico. It was grown locally who owned the land.
A third of the land was owned by freedman. And
when the all moneys that were being made, none of
it was made in Tulsa. Tulsa has no drilling rigs
in Tulsa none. It's all in the rural areas. And
(12:30):
a third of that land was owned by black people.
You hear stories about Sarah Rector, the richest black girl
in America. She's running around no shoes on, and the
family that had gotten her oil and gas letes had
already built two mansions in Double A. CP had to
come get her in nineteen fourteen, it's in the Crisis magazine.
(12:51):
They had to take her up to Kansas and created
a birth certificate that made her white. So she started
collecting money. She ended up a bench really going to Tuskegee,
becoming a very successful businesswoman, you know. And her oil
and her allotment was over in the drum Right area
in the Cushion oil field, which was one of the
(13:12):
major oil fields of that time, you know. So that
that was the wealth that generated everything. Because there's no
manufacturing here. There's no nobody's making cars and Tulsa, nobody
making books, are are making telephones or whatever. It was
(13:34):
simply agriculture first in the whole state, and then oil production,
and then right after that gas pipes started to be used.
Then it became natural gas, but not initially so by
agriculture by far. Because the World War One, the people
(13:56):
white people over in Europe killing each other. They can't
grow crops because they have blown up everything over there.
The American crops were extremely valuable. And where the freedman
allotments are. I'll show you this matter, and I like this.
(14:17):
This is the Miskoging Nation. This little map here the
six hundred and fifty four acres. See this little yellow
dot right there, that's that. That's the six acres. This
is the Arkansas River. This is that same area. Here.
(14:42):
The blue is the land that the Black people in
the Creek Nation on the freedman. The red is the
by blood. And remember a quarter of them were actually
having people that have some African ancestry. That blue represents
one million, ninety four thousand, two hundred for the acres.
(15:02):
And if you notice, this is Muskogee County, this is
Wagner County. Here, this is Tulsa County. Here, this is
Creek County. What most of the oil and gas was
and and over in Creek County because the when the
allotments happened, there was such there was surplus. There was
there was so much land that it had. It was
(15:23):
too much and there was not enough citizens. So Congress
passed the law that allowed the newborns people born aufter
the first cutoff day, and miners who were not included
to being rolled for allowments. We call them newborns and
miners on the roads. They were given the surplus lands.
(15:44):
And the surplus lands, ironically were allotments areas of lands
that nobody wanted because it was all black Jack and
natural gas will kill you trees, black Jack trees, post
Stoke and black Jack's Artists area. You cann't grow anything
because unless you cleared out the forest to do it.
(16:05):
So nobody wanted to do that. When you alone the
Arkansas River, you had all this clear land I was
fertilized for by the buffalo for thousands and thousands of years,
and it can grow anything. Those are the lands the
freedman got mainly because there are three tribal towns, Canadian Colored,
Arkansas Colored and North Fork Color. WHI always in that area.
(16:30):
When you look at this mouth and look at the
town side of Tulsa and the mount of land. Oh,
and the fact that the these children were given the
worst of the lands, which actually turns out to be
the best of the lands because of what was underneath it.
So that's what was creating the wealth, you know, and
(16:50):
you have savvy black people who were members of the tribe.
We think about Buck, Cobra Franklin, everybody. You know, you're
down at the Greenwood Culture Center and the Reckons Afliation
Park and there's a stature of Buck over Franklin. It's
a choked our freeman, choked out freeman. His brother was
a principal for one of the Creek Color schools, the
(17:11):
muskoge Creek people. Though the schools were separate for freedman
in Black Indians, they were still as sophisticated as the
Indian schools. Tallahassee Mission, one of the first colleges for
black people, were right here in the Creek Nation that
was west of the Mississippi River. It's called Tallahassee Mission.
(17:33):
My grandfather went there. Excuse me when my great grandfather
went there. My grandfather happened to be in the first
class at Lengthston University back in the early eighteen nineties.
The fact of it is is that the Indian tribe,
the Creek Nation, educated anybody that wanted to be educated,
including women. My grandmother went to New York Commission, her
(17:59):
mother went to New York New York Commission. Her husband
went to You Follow Mission. These are all high educated
schools within the Creek Nation that was sophisticated enough to
produce people like Buck Over, Franklin and Coody Johnson. You
ever want to read a story about a phenomenal black man,
(18:21):
James Coody Johnson, google him. He would blow your mind.
He was Attorney general. He was born a Creek freedman.
He was a Attorney General for the Seminar Nation. This
brother was dealing with the Senate in Washington, d c.
Just like the white people were anyway, And he used
to hold the there, the equivalent of June tenth that
(18:43):
black people hold today. Black people here used to celebrate
the Treaty Day, which was the day that that free
that freed them. It should be said to somewhere in
your film that when black people were freed here, it
was a year after everything went down in the States
and Emancipation Proclamation had no effect here. Nita really did
(19:05):
the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendment. It had to be a
treaty with a foreign Indian nation that actually freed them.
And in this land that you're on today, it was
June fourteenth, eighteen sixty six, and the Cherokee Nation was
July nine, eighteen sixty six, and the Chalco Nation April
(19:25):
eighteen sixty six. Seminar Nation May twenty one, eighteen sixty six,
a year after everything went down in Gavison, Texas on July.
On June nine, eighteen sixty five, slavery went on another
year here. So anyway, Coote Johnson would hold the freedom days.
(19:45):
He was talking about the treaties and Black people from
all five tribes who celebrate with fire works and all
of that. It pretty much died out in the nineteen thirties.
People just as as people went into another generation, kind
of like the millennials, they stopped celebrating those old things.
(20:05):
They remembered them, they would pass those stories on, but
they were replaced, particularly in the Black Creek community, with
the African American stories and the way of doing things.
So June Tent became popular, although the Fourth of July
and those other Americans holidays have replaced a lot of
the holidays that we're here and then the Indian tribes
(20:28):
kind of become became insular and that we have our
ceremonies and holidays, but we don't advertise them. We know them,
we know where to go, we know where to do.
They're usually places that are not unknapps, but we know
about word of mouth how to get there. And they're
celebrated with our cameras And a matter of fact, you
(20:48):
can't even film a photograph a real Creek ceremony. They
would break your camera because it's that's sacred to them.
If you think about our people on the Trail of tears,
they have we have fires for each one of our
ceremonial grounds that have never been out. As long as
(21:11):
people can remember, that fire has never gone out. There's
one person that's in charge, born to being charged of
that fire. That fire was still lit on the trail
of tears. That fire was lit in Alabama. It was
still burning a thousand years before that. It was still
(21:33):
going and it's still going today. And so when we
have those ceremonies around those fires, they're not to be
filmed because they're not for books, they're not for documentaries,
on and on. It's part of our religion of respecting
our God and how we we worship and stuff like that,
(21:54):
you know. So, and black people were part of that.
Black people who became members of our trial were part
of those ceremonies. Unfortunately, when our tribes kicked them out
in the nineteen seventies, they start excluding them from those
ceremonies and in anywhere we are to day. So, but
(22:16):
the wealth of Greenwood, well, greenwood started, oh, you know,
it's partant to know that. When you get north of
here into the Cherokee Nation where most of Greenwood was
eventually built, it was built on a Cherokee Indian lot
and named Mary Turley, who often is confused with ow Gurley.
(22:37):
So I've challenged them many times when they say that,
go lick it up. You can go down to the
title office. You can come to the tribes whatever and
you can see the original lotteas and who bought those,
about those lots or how that land was actually so
because our lot teas are the first people on the deed.
(22:59):
And it's easy to research because there's websites now you
can go to you don't even have to go down
to the Title office. You can just do it online
if you if you don't want to travel there. The
hestans Plat map shows every Creek citizen that was given
the land, where it's located, the description of the land,
so forth and so on. Cherokee Nation the same way,
(23:21):
and that I was suspend when I first heard that
story about Girly buying forty acres and I was actually
with a group of Indian people and we heard that.
Thank you so much for tuning in Money Moves audience.
If you want more or a recap of this episode,
(23:41):
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Hey, Money Movers, Welcome back to Money Moves the Daily Podcast,
determined to give you the keys to the Kingdom of
financial stability, wealth and abundance. In eighteen they passed the
(00:20):
Curtis At Now I know we get into one. You
think about it is just two decades before and in
twenty one and they passed the Curtis Act, which was
the General Lawman Act. The Muskogee Creek Nation and the
four other tribes had to divide up its lands equally,
except in the Choctaw and Chickensaw Nation. That was a
(00:42):
little worse for black people because they're enslaved. Black people
called freedman, only received forty acres, and yet the Indian
and their intermarried white husbands received three hundred and twenty acres.
I think about it, you and then you're gonna marry
a white man from Kentucky. He comes and lives in
(01:05):
a tribe, he's been there two weeks, he gets to
get three hundred and twenty acres. You have been enslaved
by these people for two hundred years and you only
get forty acres. That was in the Choldtown, Chickasaw Nation
and the Semino Nation. Cherokee Nation. In the Muskogee Creek Nation,
each tribal member, black or red or white got one
(01:27):
hundred and sixty acres. This started in January of eight
He just rest that was because of the Congressional Act.
It was a Congressional Act of Congress. It's called the
General Allotment. Well it's not. It was it was the
final disposition of the Five Civilized Tribes because upon that
they were going to create the state of Oklahoma. And
(01:49):
the only way to do that was still in the
tribal governments, and nobody would be subject to a tribal
government to be subject to one state government. And so
in nine hundred it day nineteen o one, they passed
the Five Civilized Tribes Citizenship Act. They put the tribal
members black, white, or red under the uh UH the
(02:13):
what we call the territorial courts. They ended our tribal courts,
you know, and they were just kind of getting people
ready to be on the one state now in this division,
because this is important, you gotta think about it. And
I'm only gonna speak from the from the Creek perspective.
The enslaved people and their descendants received one hundred and
(02:38):
sixty acres starting in eight ended April nineteen o six,
That one hundred and sixty acres totaled one million, ninety
four thousand, two hundred and forty acres. That's roughly about
eight thousand black people one million, ninety four thousand, two
hundred and forty acres. Then you have the Indian population
(03:02):
that we call the by blood members. A quarter of
those Indians had some African ancestry. And it's important to
say this because in the negotiation for statehood was that
all the members of the five tribes would have when
(03:22):
the new state happened. We have voting rights, we have
all these rights that white folks have in other states.
And when they when when the members of the Senate
were here during the Conditions of Indians and Indian Territory interviews,
they were asked, the black man, the black Creek, don't
you want to become an American, but you want to
(03:45):
live like the people in the States. And every black
person they interviewed said, no, no, no, no, we find
brother we glory in being creek. Were satisfied is the
word they were used. No, We're satisfied because we know
how black people are being treated in Arkansas, which is
(04:05):
just next door, and how they're being treated in Texas,
which is just down south, and how they're being treated
in Kansas. We already know that game. We're cool, no
thank you, but they forced in any way. They forced
it on us anyway, and it ended up happening. And
sure enough, even though as statehood in eighteen o seven,
(04:29):
the black people in the Creek Nation owning one million
and four thousand, two dred and forty acres and a
quarter of the Bible blood Indians having some African ancestry,
immediately the first law that was passed, even though their
landowners you can't vote. You may be landowners, which you
(04:51):
can't vote. You have no say in how we elect
this government, even though you're the landowners. Think about this also,
think about the women have the a lot tease in
Indian territory were females, they had no right to vote either.
So you had a small classification of white Indians in
(05:14):
our tribe who could vote because they could pass its
whites at that point, and then you have all of
these black and then they made the Indians white that
the only people that they didn't allow to vote were Negroes,
not Indians. Not white people and the tribe. The black
people in the tribe, though they owned all of that land.
(05:38):
That's just in the Creek Nation got Choctok, Chickasaw, Cherokee,
and Seminar Nation. So literally a third of eastern Oklahoma
owned by black people. As statehood, they have no say
on how the government is gonna run. And it was
part of the scam because the federal government said, yes,
you will. But when they are allowed to state to
(06:01):
pass this constitution and started passing its first laws on
the docket was the gym Crow laws. And that the
Greenwood area comes about because of Tulsa in the Townsite
Act of Mayo nineteen hundred. Okay, so this is that mouth.
(06:22):
And I don't know if you guys can see this
or not. Okay. So this is the railroad track, the
milling track that came through way before Tulsa even existed.
There was nothing here this area here north of the tracks,
and here is the beginning of Greenwood here. But actually
in our history area right here where the tracks actually
(06:46):
being north into the Cherokee Nation, was an early Black
community called hodges Bins where Creek freedman had actually settled
because they didn't want to work in the Cherokee Nation
when the railroad was coming through. One of the conditions
of the railroad being built through the Creek Nation was
that it had to be Creeks that build this. They
can bring other people in, we have to use our workers,
(07:08):
at least some of them had to be all workers. Well,
the freeman themselves refused to go work into the Cherokee
Nation because just ten years before that railroad went through,
the Cherokees had slaughtered a number of black people and
one of the Civil War battles, and they remembered that
and they won't forget that. So they at night they
(07:29):
came back into their settlement because they didn't trust being
in the Cherokee Nation after dark. So anyway, when this
started after nineteen hundred to be sold to white people,
and on and on, the black people that started to
come here just like white people. There are two classes
of black people in Oklahoma. There's the Native Blacks, which
(07:51):
are the freedman and Indians with African ancestry some African ancestry.
And there are the state Blacks, black people who graded
here from Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, New York, Chicago, anywhere. They
were not from here. The native blacks have been here
on the trail of tiers. They're at the beginning, and
(08:12):
so they didn't immigrate here. They were part of society.
But the state blacks that started to come here, like
Stratford and and Girly and others, and so many others
before them, came in with the whites. You gotta remember
that black people were still labor for those days. You know,
the buildings going up in New York, the buildings going
(08:34):
up in Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and on, and
the houses built all through the South for a century
or two were built with black hands. They had the
skills to do that. And even in Tulsa early days,
we didn't have Mexicans like we did we do today today.
You know, you want some build around here. Now, out
of ten times when you hire a contractor, he's gonna
(08:57):
bring a whole bunch of people from South America Mexico
here to do the work while he makes the money. Now,
back in those days, those people were not here. Black
people were the labor and they were paid for it. It
It wasn't enslavement. It was actually skills that were needed.
And when you look on the US population census in
(09:17):
nineteen ten, for example, for the Tulsa area, the black
population wasn't that big because Tulsa, but I'm not talking
about freedman. I'm talking about state blacks where it was
not that big because Tulsa hadn't started the boom yet.
It was just at the discovery of the Glimpool, which
is just south to Tulsa, that the the influx of
(09:40):
whites and blacks started to come here. In nineteen ten.
The Tulsa population was twelve thousand and so people in
nineteen twenty and seventy eight thousand people in nineteen twenty,
about twelve thousand of those people having to be African Americans,
not African Creeks, not African chocola, not even though some
(10:01):
Freeman lived in those communities. The majority of people were
from the States. And when you look on the population census,
you have uh enlisted their names, their wives names, the kids,
enlist their ages, enlists the origins, what state they were from,
what state their parents are from. Enlists with their occupations,
(10:24):
enlist their value of wealth, and in the eighteen twenty
it also says that they served in World War One.
You know so it's got that in there too. So
when you look at the census, you'll see very few people.
You do see some that were from Oklahoma, meaning that
they were born and Indian Territory, and they were probably
(10:44):
a member of one of these tribes, but for the
most part, everybody is from somewhere else. And then you'll
notice something very peculiar there in the construction business or
they're they're working in the oil and gas fill or
their building houses, or their bricklayers or their is that
they got skills and white people desired that because they
(11:04):
were building just as fast as Greenwood was. And what
what was happening in Greenwood was that black people were
working for wife folk, mainly building their mansions around Tulsa
because of the oil and gas boom and all the
high rises that were going up in Tulsa at the time,
the big buildings on and on, and they would get
(11:25):
their checks and because of the gym crow loog, you
can only live and spend money in your community. Tulsa
thrived because i mean the Greenwood community thrived and started
growing because of that. And when that man who was
working on a high rise got his check and he
went back to his community and started cash that check
(11:46):
and start spending that money in Greenwood. That dollar stayed
in Greenwood before it left. It just kept recirculating. He
needed a haircut, and haircut guy needed a shirt that
that guy that makes the shirt needed material. I mean,
it just goes on and on and on. But guess
what all of them needed food and food at that
(12:07):
time didn't come from California, and damn sure didn't come
from Mexico. It was grown locally who owned the land.
A third of the land was owned by freedman. And
when the all moneys that were being made, none of
it was made in Tulsa. Tulsa has no drilling rigs
in Tulsa none. It's all in the rural areas. And
(12:30):
a third of that land was owned by black people.
You hear stories about Sarah Rector, the richest black girl
in America. She's running around no shoes on, and the
family that had gotten her oil and gas letes had
already built two mansions in Double A. CP had to
come get her in nineteen fourteen, it's in the Crisis magazine.
(12:51):
They had to take her up to Kansas and created
a birth certificate that made her white. So she started
collecting money. She ended up a bench really going to Tuskegee,
becoming a very successful businesswoman, you know. And her oil
and her allotment was over in the drum Right area
in the Cushion oil field, which was one of the
(13:12):
major oil fields of that time, you know. So that
that was the wealth that generated everything. Because there's no
manufacturing here. There's no nobody's making cars and Tulsa, nobody
making books, are are making telephones or whatever. It was
(13:34):
simply agriculture first in the whole state, and then oil production,
and then right after that gas pipes started to be used.
Then it became natural gas, but not initially so by
agriculture by far. Because the World War One, the people
(13:56):
white people over in Europe killing each other. They can't
grow crops because they have blown up everything over there.
The American crops were extremely valuable. And where the freedman
allotments are. I'll show you this matter, and I like this.
(14:17):
This is the Miskoging Nation. This little map here the
six hundred and fifty four acres. See this little yellow
dot right there, that's that. That's the six acres. This
is the Arkansas River. This is that same area. Here.
(14:42):
The blue is the land that the Black people in
the Creek Nation on the freedman. The red is the
by blood. And remember a quarter of them were actually
having people that have some African ancestry. That blue represents
one million, ninety four thousand, two hundred for the acres.
(15:02):
And if you notice, this is Muskogee County, this is
Wagner County. Here, this is Tulsa County. Here, this is
Creek County. What most of the oil and gas was
and and over in Creek County because the when the
allotments happened, there was such there was surplus. There was
there was so much land that it had. It was
(15:23):
too much and there was not enough citizens. So Congress
passed the law that allowed the newborns people born aufter
the first cutoff day, and miners who were not included
to being rolled for allowments. We call them newborns and
miners on the roads. They were given the surplus lands.
(15:44):
And the surplus lands, ironically were allotments areas of lands
that nobody wanted because it was all black Jack and
natural gas will kill you trees, black Jack trees, post
Stoke and black Jack's Artists area. You cann't grow anything
because unless you cleared out the forest to do it.
(16:05):
So nobody wanted to do that. When you alone the
Arkansas River, you had all this clear land I was
fertilized for by the buffalo for thousands and thousands of years,
and it can grow anything. Those are the lands the
freedman got mainly because there are three tribal towns, Canadian Colored,
Arkansas Colored and North Fork Color. WHI always in that area.
(16:30):
When you look at this mouth and look at the
town side of Tulsa and the mount of land. Oh,
and the fact that the these children were given the
worst of the lands, which actually turns out to be
the best of the lands because of what was underneath it.
So that's what was creating the wealth, you know, and
(16:50):
you have savvy black people who were members of the tribe.
We think about Buck, Cobra Franklin, everybody. You know, you're
down at the Greenwood Culture Center and the Reckons Afliation
Park and there's a stature of Buck over Franklin. It's
a choked our freeman, choked out freeman. His brother was
a principal for one of the Creek Color schools, the
(17:11):
muskoge Creek people. Though the schools were separate for freedman
in Black Indians, they were still as sophisticated as the
Indian schools. Tallahassee Mission, one of the first colleges for
black people, were right here in the Creek Nation that
was west of the Mississippi River. It's called Tallahassee Mission.
(17:33):
My grandfather went there. Excuse me when my great grandfather
went there. My grandfather happened to be in the first
class at Lengthston University back in the early eighteen nineties.
The fact of it is is that the Indian tribe,
the Creek Nation, educated anybody that wanted to be educated,
including women. My grandmother went to New York Commission, her
(17:59):
mother went to New York New York Commission. Her husband
went to You Follow Mission. These are all high educated
schools within the Creek Nation that was sophisticated enough to
produce people like Buck Over, Franklin and Coody Johnson. You
ever want to read a story about a phenomenal black man,
(18:21):
James Coody Johnson, google him. He would blow your mind.
He was Attorney general. He was born a Creek freedman.
He was a Attorney General for the Seminar Nation. This
brother was dealing with the Senate in Washington, d c.
Just like the white people were anyway, And he used
to hold the there, the equivalent of June tenth that
(18:43):
black people hold today. Black people here used to celebrate
the Treaty Day, which was the day that that free
that freed them. It should be said to somewhere in
your film that when black people were freed here, it
was a year after everything went down in the States
and Emancipation Proclamation had no effect here. Nita really did
(19:05):
the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendment. It had to be a
treaty with a foreign Indian nation that actually freed them.
And in this land that you're on today, it was
June fourteenth, eighteen sixty six, and the Cherokee Nation was
July nine, eighteen sixty six, and the Chalco Nation April
(19:25):
eighteen sixty six. Seminar Nation May twenty one, eighteen sixty six,
a year after everything went down in Gavison, Texas on July.
On June nine, eighteen sixty five, slavery went on another
year here. So anyway, Coote Johnson would hold the freedom days.
(19:45):
He was talking about the treaties and Black people from
all five tribes who celebrate with fire works and all
of that. It pretty much died out in the nineteen thirties.
People just as as people went into another generation, kind
of like the millennials, they stopped celebrating those old things.
(20:05):
They remembered them, they would pass those stories on, but
they were replaced, particularly in the Black Creek community, with
the African American stories and the way of doing things.
So June Tent became popular, although the Fourth of July
and those other Americans holidays have replaced a lot of
the holidays that we're here and then the Indian tribes
(20:28):
kind of become became insular and that we have our
ceremonies and holidays, but we don't advertise them. We know them,
we know where to go, we know where to do.
They're usually places that are not unknapps, but we know
about word of mouth how to get there. And they're
celebrated with our cameras And a matter of fact, you
(20:48):
can't even film a photograph a real Creek ceremony. They
would break your camera because it's that's sacred to them.
If you think about our people on the Trail of tears,
they have we have fires for each one of our
ceremonial grounds that have never been out. As long as
(21:11):
people can remember, that fire has never gone out. There's
one person that's in charge, born to being charged of
that fire. That fire was still lit on the trail
of tears. That fire was lit in Alabama. It was
still burning a thousand years before that. It was still
(21:33):
going and it's still going today. And so when we
have those ceremonies around those fires, they're not to be
filmed because they're not for books, they're not for documentaries,
on and on. It's part of our religion of respecting
our God and how we we worship and stuff like that,
(21:54):
you know. So, and black people were part of that.
Black people who became members of our trial were part
of those ceremonies. Unfortunately, when our tribes kicked them out
in the nineteen seventies, they start excluding them from those
ceremonies and in anywhere we are to day. So, but
(22:16):
the wealth of Greenwood, well, greenwood started, oh, you know,
it's partant to know that. When you get north of
here into the Cherokee Nation where most of Greenwood was
eventually built, it was built on a Cherokee Indian lot
and named Mary Turley, who often is confused with ow Gurley.
(22:37):
So I've challenged them many times when they say that,
go lick it up. You can go down to the
title office. You can come to the tribes whatever and
you can see the original lotteas and who bought those,
about those lots or how that land was actually so
because our lot teas are the first people on the deed.
(22:59):
And it's easy to research because there's websites now you
can go to you don't even have to go down
to the Title office. You can just do it online
if you if you don't want to travel there. The
hestans Plat map shows every Creek citizen that was given
the land, where it's located, the description of the land,
so forth and so on. Cherokee Nation the same way,
(23:21):
and that I was suspend when I first heard that
story about Girly buying forty acres and I was actually
with a group of Indian people and we heard that.
Thank you so much for tuning in Money Moves audience.
If you want more or a recap of this episode,
(23:41):
please go to the Bank Greenwood dot com and check
out the Money Moves podcast blog. Money Moves is an
i Heeart radio podcast powered by Greenwood Executive produced by
sun Wise Media, Inc. For more podcast on iHeart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio O app, Apple Podcasts, or
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