Freedom, Emigration, and the "African Pioneer" in Indian Territory

In 1913, Monroe Coleman and his cousin Elic Davis joined Chief Alfred Sam’s burgeoning back-to-Africa movement in hopes of leaving the new state of Oklahoma and claiming lasting freedom. They moved their families from Oklahoma to an impoverished camp of prospective migrants on Galveston Island, to await the departure of Chief Sam’s ship. Coleman was one of sixty who secured a prized ticket to the Gold Coast, but Davis, like hundreds of other black Oklahomans, was still waiting in Galveston for Sam’s anticipated next trip the following summer, when they received news of the failed African venture.  The land that Sam had promised never materialized, and Coleman soon returned home, but a lifetime of experience had already convinced these, and hundreds of other black Oklahomans that, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “geography is fate.”

Born on the brink of emancipation, Coleman and Davis grew up watching their parents’ generation move from plantation to plantation, from country to town, using their newfound “freedom” to find, in Nell Painter’s words, “real freedom.” As adolescents, they witnessed the foreclosure of opportunities across the South and were attracted to nearby Indian Territory. The subsequent moment of African American participation in the appropriation of Indian Territory was tellingly short-lived, ending abruptly with Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow segregation, and oil speculation. This paper narrates the post-emancipation migration and settlement of African Americans from the Deep South to Indian Territory and West Africa.  That so many migrants attempted to move decisively beyond the borders of the United States following Oklahoma statehood underscores the notion that part of what attracted African Americans to Indian Territory in the first place was its momentary status as a political and economic space on the margins, if not beyond the bounds, of U.S. oversight.