African Americans in Oklahoma were disfranchised in 1910 after a grandfather clause voting amendment was added to the state’s constitution. Immediately, blacks from across the state gathered in African-American strongholds like Boley, the largest of approximately thirty-two all-black towns in the state, to fight disfranchisement. Several months later, Laura and L. D. Nelson, a black mother and her teenaged son, who lived on the outskirts of Boley, were lynched. A crowd of onlookers posed near their bodies for a local photographer. Images of the double lynching circulated widely throughout the South.
In this paper, I argue that brutal physical violence like that committed against the Nelson family was an extension of the political violence committed against black Oklahomans in the years following Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Scholars have chronicled the stripping of black rights and perpetration of violence against blacks in Oklahoma, but have not looked at the relationship between the two. Both political and physical violence, were designed to send the message that Oklahoma was “a white man’s country.” For white supremacists living near Boley, this was an especially important message to articulate. They had long feared the steady influx of African Americans to their county. According to one commentator, the county risked becoming the “little Africa of Oklahoma.” In the eyes of white supremacists, disfranchisement alone would not be enough quell black political power. Instead, extreme physical violence was needed to punctuate political violence. Rather than directly attack the armed and defensible black stronghold of Boley, however, whites aimed their violence at the impoverished and socially isolated Nelson family. Still by ensuring wide circulation of the resultant photographic trophy of their crime, they ensured their message would be carried near and far for years to come.