"Education Is the Watchword": Pursuing Schooling for Freedom’s Sake in the All-Black Towns of Oklahoma, 1865–1930

From 1865-1930, fifty-plus All-Black Towns emerged in what prior to Oklahoma statehood, was known as Indian and Oklahoma Territory. In at least eighteen of these towns, formal schooling emerged. Scholars and researchers have explored the nascence and evolution of all-Black Oklahoma, yet focused educational inquiry is wanting. This paper aims to illuminate how community members managed to construct school systems in the face of white settler colonialism and anti-blackness.

All-Black Oklahoma educational historiography is simultaneously poignant and troublesome. Like their deep south kindred, Black Oklahomans were not considered human and therefore had to contend with popular Jim Crow tropes prevailing in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, whereas respectability politics certainly played a role in all-Black Oklahoma educational strivings, the desire and action towards manifesting educative space was catalyzed by their belief in education as a foundational anchor to family, community, and nation building. Indeed, next to the church, no institution was deemed more central to realizing their spiritual strivings than education. Moreover, while white philanthropy contributed to school formation, it cannot monopolize credit. From Boley to Langston to Redbird and elsewhere, these Black communities consistently pooled their resources–financial and labor– to manifest schools.

This story also finds black teachers adopting a pedagogy of love and care while teaching a curriculum that, although exhibiting traits of 19th- and 20th-century traditional and industrial education, also centered black liberation philosophy in the face of consistent government surveillance.

Humbly useful, this paper offers a necessary contextualization of the socio-political economy birthing all-Black Oklahoma towns and school systems. Worthy of standing on its own, mining this rich history also inserts all-Black Oklahoma into broader conversations around 19th- and 20th-century American and Black education, which often do not recognize it as a useful site of educational historiography.