Oklalusa

Book excerpt: Oklalusa, which means home of the black people, is about the true story of a U.S. Territory becoming a state run by men and women with fleecy locks and dark complexions. The black state movement begins in Indian Territory as the black Indians battle fears that allotment will displace them and the loss of land to farm would leave them bereft. J. Milton Turner, a black diplomat from Missouri has President Rutherford B. Hayes's ear. Turner and his able team of attorneys and accountants raise significant funds to support a home for the black Indians in the neighboring two million acres referred to as the unassigned lands. APRIL 22, 1889 is the most important day in Oklahoma history. That celebrated day the Federal Government surrendered legal possession of the unassigned lands. The lush lands of the "fair gods" fell into human hands, white human hands. But the romance dimmed when the weather turned rough and the ground proved hard. Absent black hands, plows stood idle, mules went unfed and cotton remained unchopped -causing half of the fifty thousand ne'er do wells who made the famed '89 run to abandon dreams of ease and wealth and move on. The Langston Herald newspaper, owned and edited by two mullato men kept a tally of abandoned claims. They hired agents in southern cities to distribute the Herald and exhort the industrious class among the five million former slaves to come to Oklahoma Territory, get a free farm, and live in a place where colored Sheriffs and colored government officials rule. When the number of blacks in Oklahoma Territory equals the whites, there is pressure on President Benjamin Harrison to appoint Edwin McCabe, a man called the Bright Jewel of the colored race, the first governor of Oklahoma Territory. The black state movement crescents in the second Oklahoma run of 1891. Blacks fight to put half the nearly one million acres available into skilled dark hands. What really happened in the run of 1891 and its aftermath is largely unknown until now.