An Overnight Millionaire: White Guardianship and Black Girlhood in Oklahoma, 1913–23

In September 1913, headline after headline recounted seemingly incredulous news: a young Black girl owed the largest income tax in the entire state of Oklahoma. At only 11 years old, Sarah Rector became an overnight celebrity thanks to the lucky strike of oil on her once-burdensome allotment. Although this fortuitous event theoretically meant that Rector was now unimaginably wealthy, the realities of Jim Crow laws and guardianship policies put her money squarely in the hands of white men. From guardians and probate court judges to lawyers and deceitful scammers, Rector’s newfound wealth represented highly contestable terrain on which questions of competence, deservedness, and responsibility were mapped. Rector’s identity as a Creek-descended young Black girl from a working-class agricultural family made her simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible, placing her in a precarious situation in which her immediate safety and long-term future were under scrutiny. Under the direction of her first guardian, Rector purchased property and issued personal loans to local Muskogee County residents while also being sent hundreds of miles away to Tuskegee Institute and Fisk University to complete her studies. Within a few years, after rumors of financial mismanagement, the county court appointed new guardians to oversee Rector’s fortune. As she neared legal adulthood, Rector’s life thus became a protracted battle between her insistence that she was fiscally savvy enough to manage her own estate and a multitude of stakeholders—both legitimate and illegitimate—who used racist, sexist, and ageist arguments to claim control of her wealth. Examining the exceptional case of Sarah Rector offers productive insights into an understudied phenomenon—Black children who ended up with profitable allotments in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century.