On November 16, 1907, the president signed the proclamation turning Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the 46th U.S. state, Oklahoma. Despite Roosevelt’s professed misgivings about admitting a state that discriminated against a portion of its citizens, the constitution itself enshrined the segregation of schools. With the president’s signature secured, state leaders moved aggressively to enact the rest of their Jim Crow agenda. The very first law passed by the state legislature segregated train cars. Next, the legislature passed the so-called “grandfather clause,” which circumvented federal voter rights protections by instituting a literacy test on any person whose ancestors had not been allowed to vote before 1866. Naturally, that included all descendants of slaves. Ultimately, the legislature would segregate nearly every aspect of public life—hospitals, cemeteries, even phone booths. Oklahoma’s formal and fully legalized racism was actually more rigid than that in much of the Deep South, where Jim Crow was sometimes upheld by custom and violence rather than legal mandate. In the South, segregation emerged from the vestiges of slavery and failed Reconstruction; in Oklahoma, it was erected statute by statute.
Ironically, at the time, Oklahoma’s state constitution was hailed as a victory for the progressive movement. William Murray, the constitutional convention president and future Oklahoma governor, earned the folksy nickname “Alfalfa Bill,” and was seen as an anti-corporate crusader in an age of oppressive monopolies. The constitution allowed for municipal ownership of utilities, increased taxes on corporations, made many more public offices subject to democratic elections, and set train fares at the affordable rate of 2 cents per mile. The progressive magazine the Nation declared that Oklahoma’s constitution had come “nearer than any other document in existence to expressing the ideas and aspirations of the day.”
But this view of “progress” measured success only by how much it benefited white people. And it led to broader disenfranchisement when those in charge perceived threats to their power. An early push at the convention to expand suffrage to women, for example, failed when delegates realized that black women were likely to vote in larger numbers than white ones.
And the constitution had another profound consequence that would alter the demographic landscape of the new state. It erased the line between “freedmen” and “state Negroes” once and for all. The document stipulated that laws governing “colored” people would apply only to those of African descent. “The term ‘white race,’ shall include all other persons,” it stated. In other words, segregation measures would apply to black migrants and black tribal members, but not to Native Americans.
With all black people in Oklahoma now grouped together, a new and more unified black identity began to emerge. It was represented most vividly in a neighborhood on the northern edge of Tulsa, in what had been Indian Territory, where black people learned to be collaborative, prosperous and defiant. The place was called Greenwood.