The land my family owns is in Boley, Oklahoma. Boley is one of the more than 50 towns in the state where Creek Native Americans and the descendants of formerly enslaved Black people, called “Creek Freedmen,” found unoccupied land after the Muskogee Cimeter, a Black newspaper, posted an advertisement: “Thousands of our native people are land holders, and have thousands of acres of rich lands to rent and lease. We prefer to rent and lease our lands to colored people. Our terms will be found reasonable.” Today only 13 of these towns still exist.
My dad is 80 years old. Elijah Moore III’s a hybrid of James Evans from Good Times and That ’70s Show‘s Red Forman. This is a man who found a prom date for my sister after her boyfriend contracted chicken pox, a man who kicked me out of his car to walk home after my grades slipped. These days, he likes to trick off his bread at the Indiana casinos and buy chocolate milk and popcorn for his granddaughter. He has been telling me about “the land we own in Oklahoma” for as long as I can remember. He never said much else about it, only that he remembered being there to visit family and that he hadn’t seen it since he was an eight-year-old. This land, he would tell me, was my land.
This Black History Month, back when it was normal to travel between states, before the pandemic ripped through the nation and interrupted everyone’s plans indefinitely, I decided to take a trip to Boley and see the land myself.
The catalyst for the massacre was an alleged sexual assault of a white woman, Sarah Page, by a Black man, Dick Rowland. Some townspeople say the two were in a relationship, others say he may have tripped in an elevator and grabbed onto her arm. An angry white mob stormed the courthouse to demand that the local police turn over Rowland.
We couldn’t have known it then, of course, but in a few months from that day in February, the president would kick off his reelection campaign in Tulsa on the weekend of Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved African descendants. Tulsa’s Black residents, utilizing scorched earth, would tell the vice president to stay away from Greenwood Avenue and would cover the monument with blue tarp. Standing next to my dad back in February, I thought about the money owed to the Black business owners.
Boley was founded in 1903. Once a self-sufficient town that reveled in cooperative economics, it had its own power plant, grocery stores, hotels, a jewelry store, department stores, a water system, an ice plant, two colleges (Creek-Seminole College and Methodist Episcopal College), two banks, and a newspaper, the Boley Progress. The town had the distinction of housing the first Black-owned bank to receive its own charter, along with the first Black-owned telephone and electric companies. Boley was dubbed a “social success” and its business district is designated as a National Historic Landmark.
