Selfishness Is At the Bottom of Civilization
How black people gained--and lost--millions of acres of land out West
Chickasaw freedmen file for allotments in Tishomingo, Indian Territory. Photo Courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.
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"We bought land and got it any way we could without violating the law,” Cass Bradley told five U.S. senators on a November evening in Muskogee. “We did the country a service.”
It was the end of 1906 and Oklahoma was just months away from becoming the 46th state in the Union. The region still known as “Indian Territory” had 538,000 whites, 80,000 blacks, and barely 60,000 Native Americans. Bradley was one of the whites, a Muskogee real estate man who built his wealth on a pile of questionable land deeds secured from hundreds of Native Americans and blacks. Lust for land in the Territory was rampant, and the rules governing the sale of real estate had collapsed under the weight of widespread avarice. Washington D.C. sent a senate committee to conduct a series of hearings in Muskogee, Tulsa, and other frontier towns. No one on the east coast really knew how the laws passed in Congress were playing out at the edge of America.
Nearly a decade earlier, in 1897, the federal government began signing agreements with the Five Tribes--the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Seminoles--to divide their communally owned lands into individually owned allotments. The architect of the plan was Henry Dawes, a senator from Massachusetts. Dawes considered himself a “friend of the Indians,” as white humanitarians of the era were called. But his vision of “helping” Native Americans hinged on their assimilation into white America’s cultural and economic systems. On his early trips to Indian Territory, Dawes was mystified by Native Americans’ capacity to share resources without trying to exploit them for personal profit. It seemed downright un-American. “There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization,” he said to the Board of Indian Commissioners in Washington. “Until this people consent to give up their lands...they will not make much progress.” Ultimately, Congress threatened to pass an allotment law with or without tribal input, leading to a forced negotiation.
The Five Tribes aggressively resisted allotment, but by the time the U.S. senators were making their tour of Indian Territory in 1906, more than 15 million acres of land in the region had been redistributed to individual owners. Black tribal members, who were classified as “freedmen” during the allotment process, were granted approximately 2 million acres of land. In the Creek Nation about a third of the land was black-owned. While the U.S. had failed to keep its promise of offering 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves in the Deep South after the Civil War, allotment constituted the largest transfer of land wealth to black people in the history of the United States (hundreds of thousands of additional acres were likely owned by black settlers who participated in the land runs further west).
Blacks were among the fastest tribal members to register for allotments, so they received much of the prime farmland in Oklahoma, particularly southeast of Tulsa (many “full-blood” Native Americans, as they were called at the time, refused to accept their allotments as a form of protest). Allotments were divided between a 40-acre homestead and “surplus” lands of as much as 120 acres. Initially, restrictions were placed on tribal members’ ability to sell the land. In Dawes’ original vision, owned property was to be a “civilizing” force that would teach Native Americans and freedmen how to raise and sell crops under a capitalist system. But Congress lifted these restrictions one by one as white settlers clamored for more land. The restrictions on freedmen adults were lifted first. In 1904, thousands of black men and women were suddenly at the mercy of one of America’s most ruthless conquerors: the free market.
Bradley capitalized immediately. He believed that only white men were equipped to properly cultivate the lands of Oklahoma--farming, he said at the senate hearing, was “something the Indians and freedmen, niggers and half bloods, wouldn't have done.” Once word came that freedmen’s surplus lands would be up for grabs, he inked deals with dozens of black Chreokees to purchase their entire surplus allotments. No matter the size, the price was always the same: $25 for the entire plot of land.
A newspaper in Claremore outlined Bradley’s con in greater detail. In towns across Oklahoma, he would entice freedmen with the offer of $25 in immediate cash. This was the down payment on allotments that had not yet been assigned by the federal government. Bradley promised to pay each freedman more once they secured a land title. Sometimes he hired a local black person to recruit targets for his scheme, offering them a $5 commission. In a typical contract, signed by Aaron Ross, the 30-year-old freedman awarded Bradley “All of my allotment of land in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, to which I am or may be entitled.”
The additional payment promised by Bradley was sometimes as little as $50, amounting to $1 per acre or less. It’s unclear whether the extra money was even paid at all. The deeds did not stipulate a second payment, and most of the freedmen who signed these contracts, such as Ross, were illiterate. Bradley was arrested and charged with defrauding blacks of their land in 1905. The Claremore newspaper called him “king of the grafters.”
Despite his infamy, Bradley did not go to jail. In front of the U.S. senators, he played the role of the humble and hardworking American entrepreneur. He was the new iteration of the Boomer settler, seizing land with a pen and a notary rather than a rifle. This line of business wasn’t predatory, he argued--it was patriotic. Dawes’ virtue of selfishness had been taken to its logical conclusion. "If this business that I am in is a grafting game,” Bradley said, “then there is not a business in the world that is not a graft."
A land deed contract between Cherokee freedman Aaron Ross and the Bradley Realty Bank and Trust Company
Bradley would later become the director of a respected Muskogee bank and a member of its chamber of commerce. Aaron Ross would work odd jobs as a laborer in his hometown of Tahlequah for decades. Despite once owning 110 acres of land, by 1930 he was living with 6 other boarders in a home that the U.S. census valued at $8 (Ross didn’t own the place--he rented). The lives of the other people Bradley swindled are largely ignored in the historical record. But here are a few of their names: Jane Crossley of Braggs, Henry Anderson of Muskogee, Sylvia Grimette of Tulsa.
There’s no firm accounting of exactly how much freedmen land was lost in the years before statehood. The day before Bradley boasted of his exploits at the senate hearing, J. Coody Johnson, a black Creek tribal leader and legislator, estimated that two-thirds of Creek freedmen had already sold their property by 1906. The elimination of land sale restrictions had fast-tracked many blacks toward a life of poverty. “It will make a class of citizens here who, because of the fact that they do not understand the value of their lands, will part with them for a nominal sum,” he argued.
But of course, not every freedman sold their most valuable asset in those years. In 1910, “colored” farmers in Oklahoma still owned about 1.6 million acres of land (this figure includes Native Americans, so it’s not a perfect comparison to the 2 million figure cited earlier). Despite the legalized theft by men like Bradley, freedmen land ownership helped form the basis for a strong entrepreneurial class in Oklahoma and a streak of black independence unknown in other parts of the country. And sometimes, it wasn’t just corn or cows being harvested from this black-owned land. It was often oil, the substance that turned Tulsa into one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
Thank you for reading. To learn more about the origins of Greenwood, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and the community’s astonishing rebirth, check out my narrative nonfiction book Built From the Fire. The book was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and it has been named a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Buy Built From the Fire on Amazon, Bookshop, or at your local bookseller.
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Sources:
1907 Oklahoma Census
1910 U.S. Census
1930 U.S. Census
Chang, David. The Color of the Land
Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
Littlefield, Daniel. Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist and Humorist.
“Real Estate Man Arrested.” Woods County News. 27 October 1905.
Report of the Select committee to investigate matters connected with affairs in the Indian territory with Hearings, November 11, 1906-January 9, 1907
Tulsa County Courthouse land records
“Wholesale Buying of Allotments.” Claremore Messenger. 22 July 1904.