The All-Black Towns of Oklahoma. Once there were more than 50. Today, only a handful survive

They were founded around the turn of the century (1900) and became thriving self-sufficient communities. Then came the Great Depression.

Boley, OK (undated) photo credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

It was a pleasant spring Sunday morning in Boley, Oklahoma, cool but sunny. I arrived at St. John Baptist Church just a few minutes before services began and found a place in the second row of pews. There was room for probably 100 people, but when the service began with a rousing acapella rendition of a gospel song, there were no more than a dozen people in attendance. A woman with an astonishingly powerful, supple voice sang out as the rest of us clapped the rhythm and sang out in response.

St. John Baptist Church

 If I stumble

 Step aside, don't block my way

 I don't want nobody stumbling over me

 Heaven, Heaven is my goal

 In everyday

 Gotta keep on movin'

 Movin' in the right way

 All the while, the minister sat serenely, contemplatively, in a chair behind the podium until it was his turn to speak. As he rose to deliver his sermon, a few more people drifted in and sat down.

After the service, Rev. LuGrand gave me a brief history of the church. It was 107 years old and only moved to its current location a few years ago. He has been its minister for the past 29 years. When he arrived, he said, the congregation had seven members. Within four years, it had grown to 65 members but has since fallen off as the town's population continued to shrink.

"On a good Sunday, we probably have 25 to 30," he said in a soothing gentle baritone. Fortunately, the church's fortunes have been augmented by a robust social media presence. The service is streamed live on Facebook and draws viewers and contributions from around the world.

Rev. Elmer LuGrand

St. John Baptist Church is hanging on. And so is Boley, but barely. It was once the preeminent all-Black town in Oklahoma, maybe in the country. Today, its official population is around 1,100, but that's only because the official census includes inmates in a local state prison, to my mind, an extravagant way of defining residents. If you don't count the prisoners, there are about 500 residents in Boley, or maybe 600. No one knows for certain. 

Boley's main thoroughfare is Pecan Street. When I was there that Sunday and the following day, Pecan Street was all but deserted. There were few businesses of any kind, mostly just a few hulking old brick buildings, some in disrepair, some in partial collapse.

 "You can drive down the street and see," says Henrietta Hicks, 88, a native of Bolkey and its unofficial town historian. "We look like old Dodge City."

Pecan Street, Boley, OK

Pecan Street, Boley, OK

Compared to most of the other surviving all-Black towns, Boley is doing well. With the exception of Langston, which is home to Langston College, a historically Black college, all of the towns are rapidly declining in population and many or most of the people who live in them are older. Young people tend to leave, a trajectory that you don't need an actuarial chart to see is problematic.

One hundred years ago, there were more than 50 all-Black towns in Oklahoma. For nearly three decades, they thrived. Today, only 13 of the towns survive. Barely. Some have only a few hundred people. In some of them, the population can be counted in double-digits. Many of them are in danger of vanishing.

Farmers & Merchants Bank, Boley, OK in the early 20th century, photo credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

The story of Oklahoma's all-Black towns actually begins in the early 19th century with the infamous Trail of Tears.

In the 1830s, by treaties and under military threat, the Five Civilized Tribes that lived in the southeastern U.S. - Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole -- left their homelands in the southeast U.S. Most of them walked. Four thousand Cherokee -- an estimated fifth of their population -- died. More than 3,000 Creeks died along the way. In all, an estimated 100,000 native people from Michigan to Florida were forced from their homelands and resettled in the West.

Less well known is that the five major tribes of the Southeast had emulated white Americans and taken Black slaves. When they headed west, they took their slaves with them.

Following the Civil War, the slaves of Native tribes in the Indian Territory were freed. These freedmen, as they were called, tended to coalesce in rural communities throughout what's now eastern Oklahoma.

After the end of Reconstruction, many Southern Blacks fled to the Indian Territory thinking they would be free of the resurgent discrimination and violence in the former Confederate states.

"A lot of ex-slaves from the South considered Oklahoma a place where they could escape some of the atrocities they'd been experiencing in the South," said Larry O'Dell of the Oklahoma Historical Society. "That's why there were so many Black communities in Oklahoma."

Boley, OK, photo credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

There's an apocryphal story that at the train stop at Boley, where many Blacks had settled, two white men were debating whether Black people were capable of running and governing their own town. One white man said no, of course not. The other guy, seemingly being more open- minded about such matters, thought maybe they could. To test their competing theories, they agreed to invite the local Black people to give it a try.

 

Boley became a town in 1903 and almost immediately it took off. Businesses sprouted up on Pecan Street and industry nearby. A school system was set up. A post office was established. New churches opened up. People -- Black people -- poured in. 

"Boley was thriving," O'Dell said. "It had everything any other town in Oklahoma would have."

 In 1905, Booker T. Washington visited Boley. Afterward, he proclaimed it "the most enterprising and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States."  

In November 1907, the state of Oklahoma was admitted to the union.

"When Oklahoma became a state, many African-Americans knew what was going to happen. They knew Jim Crow was going to come with it," O'Dell said, "The very first bill it passed was Senate Bill Number 1, which was a Jim Crow Law."

In the face of legal segregation and racial discrimination in Oklahoma and the rest of America, the Black towns were self-sufficient havens. Many towns actively recruited residents with advertisements in Black newspapers around the country.

Boley had 3 newspapers at one time, photo credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

"People came from everywhere, near and far," Hicks said. "What came with them were their good brains and they built this town on that." 

By the 1920s, 4,000 people lived in Boley. There were two banks, a newspaper, the post office, an elementary and high school, two colleges, two cotton gins, its own electric plant, an ice making facility and a hotel. 

In the face of the newly legalized segregation and discrimination, the Black towns became self-sufficient havens.

"For several decades, these all-Black towns provided their residents with lives free of the regular racial brutality and prejudice often experienced by Blacks living in racially-mixed communities," wrote Shirley Ann Ballard Nero in the pamphlet, Historically All-Black Towns. "Residents could depend on and support each other. Black-owned farms, schools and businesses took root."

Clearview, OK

The towns were not always paragons of civic virtue. John Hope Franklin, the late Duke University historian, was born in the all-Black town of Rentiesville in 1915. In his autobiography, Mirror to America, recounted how his parents, who had moved there from out of state, quickly became outcasts in the small town. They were Methodists in a town where Baptists held sway. His father was a Democrat when most people were Republicans, and he was a lawyer in a community of farmers. For some Rentiesville folks, Franklin said, that made him just a little too ambitious and too educated.

"This bastion of racial unity, this Eden where all were supposed to be sisters and brothers, was a travesty," Franklin wrote.

When he was 6, his family moved from Rentiesville to Tulsa.

John Hope Franklin, photo credit: Duke University

Starting in the 1920s, the state was hit with a succession of devastating blows. Cotton prices collapsed. The Great Depression. The Dust Bowl years that wiped out crops. Oklahomans -- white and Black -- fled West or North seeking work. The all-Black towns began to decline both in population and commercially. Some of them were simply depopulated and disappeared. One was literally blown off the map by a tornado. A few towns survived but their populations plummeted. The trend continued over the ensuing decades.

Boley H.S. Bears, 1970, photo credit: Oklahoma Historical Society

When Rev. LuGrand graduated from Boley High in 1977, he was one of 37 in his class. Two decades later, his daughter was the only one in her graduating class. In 2008, Boley High School closed.

After LuGrand left town, as did almost everyone in his class. But he returned several years later and became the minister at St. John Baptist Church.

"It's everything that I longed for," he told me. "The peace. The serenity. To not have to be concerned about violence. Having young grandchildren, it just gives me peace knowing they're safer here than they would be any place else. This is where I was planted, so this is where I wanted to grow."  

Henrietta Hicks

Hicks left Boley for Los Angeles when she was in her early 20s. After living there several years and working as a radiology diagnostician, she re-met a childhood friend from her hometown and they married. A few years later, they returned to Boley because of their son's asthma condition.

"I got in our house and I sat and cried for a week," she said. "This is the wrong thing. No street lights. No street signs. The nearest grocery store 12 miles away. Mud on your shoes when you go to church. Oh, I was devastated. I didn't like it at all. My husband walked in one day and said, 'You might as well get used to it.' I wanted to knock him in the head."

And now?

"I wouldn't want to live any place else," she said. "I came back to people that knew me, people that nurtured me."  

Today, Hicks, whose husband died 14 years ago, is the municipal judge. Her son and his family live nearby.

Shirley Ann Ballard Nero

I met Shirley Nero outside the cemetery on the road into Clearview, an all-Black town about 20 miles east of Boley.

She and a few other women were clearing the dead flowers from the gravesites.

I followed her into town in my rental car and we chatted at the community center, a low-slung building with an enormous mural painted on the side depicting highlights from Clearview's history. The walls are filled with black-and-white photos from the town's rich past.

Clearview, OK today

Photo of church believed to be in Clearview, OK, photo credit; Oklahoma Historical Society

About 100 years ago, Clearview's population peaked at around 600. Today, Nero says, 36 people live there. The main street that was once lined with small businesses is now empty. The only commercial establishment is a small cafe.

Nero, 72, was born and raised in Clearview. She was a history teacher. Her husband was a college president. For years, they lived elsewhere around eastern Oklahoma. When they retired, they moved back to her hometown.

"This is where he wanted to be and this is where I wanted to be," she told me.

She can foresee Clearview becoming a destination for visitors who was to experience the rich history of the all-Black towns of Oklahoma, and even as a place for people to move to. She and her husband are determined to stay.

"If we have just 10 people, we're still going to make it," she said. "I love this town."