Slavery to Liberation- The African American Experience, 2019a

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CHAPTER 7
“It is Our Freedom that Makes Us Different” 1 :
Freedom and Identity in Post-Civil War Indian Territory
and Oklahoma
Leroy Myers
University of Oklahoma
INTRODUCTION
Decades after the Civil War, an 89-nine-year-old Lucinda Davis recalled her life as a
slave in Indian Territory during the tumultuous 1860s. She had a Creek Indian owner
and lived in the Creek Territory, located in the eastern portion of present-day
Oklahoma. Her parents, also owned by Creeks, had different masters. 2 At the war’s
end, and like many formerly enslaved people, Davis reunited with her parents. But
unlike the majority of emancipated slaves, freedom for former Creek slaves like the
Davis family meant full membership in the Creek Nation. Full membership provided
exclusive rights to tribal land and participation in the nation’s political culture. For
Lucinda Davis, full membership allowed her to marry, own property, build a home, raise
children, and freely live within Creek tradition.
However, while the Davis family experienced full Creek citizenship most African
Americans like A.G. Belton suffered from racial violence in the Deep South. In 1891,
Belton proclaimed that “times are hard and getting harder every year we as a people
1
Portions of this essay appear in Leroy Myers “Land of the Fair God: the Development
of Black Towns in Oklahoma, 1870-1907” (MA Thesis, University of Oklahoma, 2016).
See “Interview with Miss Charles Emily Wilson, Black Seminole, Texas, 1992.” Quoted
in Kenneth W. Porter [Alcione M. Amos and Thomas P. Senter, eds.] The Black
Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1996), xii.
2
Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 13, Oklahoma, Adams-Young.
1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,
https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn130/. (Accessed January 30, 2018.)