A Very OK Podcast
Episode 12: “Live Episode: Oklahoma’s All-Black Towns”
February 15, 2022
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson, and I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and we are here at our second live podcast event to talk about Oklahoma’s All-Black towns. We have a fantastic crowd tonight. Can you let everybody out there listening hear you!
(cheering and applause)
Thompson: That was great. We have a great crowd here, Larry.
Larry O’Dell: We do.
Thompson: We’re very excited that you are all here. We’ve got a fantastic topic to talk about. I do want to mention one thing before we get too far into this. And many of you know Dr. Bob Blackburn, and he was going to be on our panel tonight, but he did have some emergency surgery yesterday, and he was very, very sorry that he couldn’t be with us tonight. But I have drafted probably one of the people who knows almost as much about this topic as anybody, and that’s my colleague Larry O’Dell here, one of our resident historians here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. And so, Larry is going to do a great job, and we’re excited to have you here tonight, Larry.
(applause)
O’Dell: I’m sorry you guys get the “B” team up here.
Thompson: Dr. Blackburn wanted to be here, but we felt like that he should probably be off the painkillers before he talks about these important topics. So, we are, we have him in our thoughts and in our prayers, and he’s recovering very well, and he wishes you all the best. And so we’re going to go ahead and move on with our podcast. Now, the subject of the All-Black towns is a fascinating one. And in many ways, it’s a uniquely Oklahoma subject because while there are All-Black towns in other states, we had more than any other state, and it’s because of the unique historical circumstances that came together right after the Civil War and then into the land run. And we have a fantastic panel here tonight to talk about that, and I want to introduce our panel. First of all, sitting right to the left of Larry, we have Senator Kevin Matthews from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(applause)
Thompson: We have Shirley Nero from Clearview, Oklahoma.
(applause)
Thompson: And Ms. Henrietta Hicks from Boley, Oklahoma.
(applause)
Thompson: And folks, we couldn’t have put together a better lineup if we had tried, I assure you of that. And so, Larry, I think the best way to kick off this podcast event tonight is, can you talk a little bit? Let’s just set the stage. Let’s talk a little bit about the history, what’s happening after the Civil War. How do we get to this position where we have these All-Black enclaves that are forming up here in Oklahoma?
O’Dell: Well, Trait, you are right that Oklahoma was very unique in its African American history. What happened in the early 19th century is the Five Tribes, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, to present-day Oklahoma. And, one of my old colleagues, Bruce Fisher, used to always say, if you think the Trail of Tears were hard on the tribal people, think about their slaves that were having to make that also. So when they came to Indian Territory, they brought their enslaved people.
Civil War happened, the Confederacy lost, and many of the tribes, the Five Tribes sided— not everybody in their tribe— but they sided with the Confederacy. The United States used that as an opportunity to redo their treaties; took western Oklahoma away from these Five Tribes and allowed the Freedmen to have the possibility to be part of these tribes. Now, when I talk about these tribes, the Choctaw and Chickasaw were very southern. They had plantations. They were very southern tribes. The Cherokee, not as, and then the Seminole and the Creek were pretty lenient with their enslaved people. They would actually, there were several people that married within, married, mixed marriages in those tribes. So when the United States government wanted to force these tribes to have Freedmen have all the rights the tribe citizens had, the Choctaw and Chickasaw fought it. The Cherokee were the last to accept it, but the Seminole and Creeks did it very quickly.
So, of course, when these Freedmen had the right to live in this territory, they settled with each other. They created communities. And then, when western Oklahoma opened up to non-Indian settlement, African Americans made the land runs. Anybody who was an American citizen could make the land run. And of course, they founded more communities. They settled together. And one key person in this is E. P. McCabe, who is from New York. But he joined many exodusters who were freed slaves in the Deep South, who traveled to Kansas and settled there. They created the town of Nicodemus there, All-Black town. Well, when the land runs open, McCabe and his group of people wanted to get one at Oklahoma Territory, which would be an All-Black state.
Thompson: I want to go back just a little bit on that, because one interesting thing about McCabe is he actually ran for election in Kansas and was the state auditor in Kansas. He won two terms. Now, those were two-year terms in the 1880s in Kansas. So he was a very accomplished politician before he even thought about coming to Oklahoma.
O’Dell: And of course, he was one of the co-founders of the town of Langston, and it was instrumental in getting to college there in 1897. After the land run and these communities developed in western Oklahoma, the allotment process happened in eastern Oklahoma. And the Freedmen of these tribes were allotted land, just like the regular Creeks, Chickasaws, and the Five Tribes. And when they took their allotments, of course, they took them together, created their communities. So, when you have western and eastern Oklahoma creating these interesting All-Black communities, important for protection, to circulate the money within the community, we had more than 50 All-Black communities or towns here in Oklahoma. Of course, they all thrived in the early 20th century. The Great Depression killed a lot of these towns, like it did a lot of white towns, because the railroads left. But that’s really a quick synopsis of how these towns came about.
Thompson: Yeah, and, you know, one of the interesting things about E. P. McCabe is he was part of a movement that was really advocating for Oklahoma to be an All-Black state for a while there. And in fact, he was lobbying the president of the United States to make him a territorial governor of Oklahoma. And of course, that didn’t ever really come to fruition. You know, what happened with the land runs is more and more white settlement comes into the state. And that, you know, the voting block changes at that point. But there was a movement there for a while that would, that people had hoped that to make this an All-Black enclave.
And of course, one of the things that were, one of the things that happened as a result, that there were newspapers that were formed, and people would go out into the Deep South, and they would recruit people to come to Oklahoma and say, hey, we’ve got a chance to have an All-Black state here in Oklahoma. If you will come move to Oklahoma, we can start to turn the political advantage to our will. You know, but unfortunately, what happens is some people came, they didn’t, you know, they weren’t used to the climate. They weren’t used to the territory. I mean, we’ve all lived in Oklahoma. It’s a pretty harsh land sometimes, right?
(agreement)
Thompson: I mean, we have our tornadoes, and we have our droughts, and it’s not the easiest place to farm in or to make living in. And so a lot of people actually ended up going back to the South, where they were more comfortable or would migrate into the north from that particular point.
O’Dell: And one last thing about McCabe is, when we became a state, the very first law that we passed, our legislature passed was Senate Bill Number One, segregating the railroad stations and train cars. E. P. McCabe took that to the Supreme Court, eventually lost, but he was fighting even after statehood.
Thompson: Yeah, very sad story. He ended up dying almost penniless up in Chicago, I believe. He’s buried in Topeka, Kansas today, but he is really one of the founders and one of the visionaries when it comes to especially the All-Black towns after the land run here in Oklahoma. And you’ll be, you can see, his portrait is actually in the State Capitol. It’s not there right now because all the art was removed for the restoration project. But my friend Amber Sharples is here, who’s the director of the Oklahoma Arts Council. And all of that wonderful art will be coming back into the Capitol over the next few months. So you can go see his portrait, and also they’re commissioning new pieces of art that are going to talk about things like Black Wall Street and the Katz Drugstore sit-ins. There’s going to be a bust of Hannah Atkins and also of Clara Luper in there. So, that first-floor rotunda is really going to tell some stories that haven’t been told in the Capitol before. So we’re excited about that.
I think now we should go in and bring our panelists into this discussion, which is why we’re here. Shirley Nero has lived in Clearview all your life?
Shirley Nero: Yes, all my life.
Thompson: And can you tell us about the town of Clearview and a little bit about its history?
Nero: Okay. I was born in Clearview. My parents lived on a little 40-acre farm and grew cotton and corn, my dad did. And I was born at home, and my two sisters were. And I attended a Rosenwald School from first to eighth grade before they closed the school. Clearview was established in 1903 by three gentlemen. Two of those gentlemen were Freedmen. So the property that Clearview was established on was property owned by a lady by the name of Holmes. And actually, there were three parts to Clearview when it was established. It was established first as Lincoln, and then they added Clearview, and then they added Greater Clearview. But the town itself, when it was established, there was a railroad that came through, and actually, it was the same railroad that came through Boley. It was a Fort Smith and Western Rail, and it actually started, I think, as I look back, it was in Guthrie, and it went all the way to McAlester. And so, there were several Black towns that were established along that railroad. And many of my relatives that I talked to, that actually rode that railroad, they would actually ride the railroad all the way to McAlester to Muskogee. If you had to go to a doctor’s office or a hospital or somewhere, you had to either go to Muskogee or Okmulgee. And I think back, as how long was that trip when you had to go? If you didn’t have a car, you get on the railroad, and then you would go to McAlester, and then on another train to go to Muskogee. So that was a two- or three-day trip just to get there.
But going back, and just me at my age, I used to tell my students—I’m an educator, I taught history—and I would tell my students that I grew up in Clearview in the ’50s, in the ’60s, and I won’t say fortunate, but I had the life of two worlds. I lived in the segregated world, and I lived in an integrated world. So when they closed the school down in ’64, I went to Weleetka, because I had to transfer to another school that would take me, even though I live closer to two other schools. But that’s the only other school that would take us.
But going back to talking about Clearview, established in 1903, and we had a thing change. It was established as Lincoln, but they had to do a name change because it was another city in Oklahoma Territory named Lincoln. And they said, you need to change your name. We went to Abe Lincoln, and then finally we changed the Clearview. And when they were thinking about it, how did you get your name of your town? Three gentlemen went up on the top of the hill. If you ever come to our town, it kind of sits in a little bowl. And they went up on top of a hill trying to think about what should we name this. And then looked down, and all the trees and everything was gone. And they said, oh, somebody said, you know, this is a clear view and someone said clear view?
(laughter)
Nero: All right, that's good, that’s good, we’ll name it Clearview.
(laughter)
Nero: But as you were talking about the people that advertised for a town, the advertisement always was upbeat. What would bring you to a town? And they talked about the walnut trees that were there, the rivers that flow through the town, and all the vast land that was there. So, one of the promoters of the town that actually came up a few years later, they talked; he was from Anadarko, and he had a lot of money. He had made his money in coal mining, and he would send the preachers from the churches, and he would send them to the south on the railroads with all kinds of flyers talking about how good it was to live in Clearview. So that’s how he got the people to come back and to move there.
My parents, my great-grandparents that came, they came because they knew this was a place to come. So some of my folks were there in 1902 and 1903. My dad was born in 1899, and he came out of Arkansas into Clearview. So Clearview was a bustling town. We had up to a thousand people in Clearview. We had everything that everyone else needed right there in town, from dry good stores to a movie theater to manufacturing pop, pop bottles to sewing factories, to dry goods stores, to two cotton gins. We had a railroad that you could ship any cattle, sheep, as far away as to Kansas City. There was money turned around five times. We actually even had a bank. I found information and found the— what’s the—title to the bank. I don’t know how long the bank lasted, but I do know that it was started there, in there. So, we actually had everything that was needed. Well, what happened was that the cotton economy dropped out. We had the Great Depression, and then we had the wars that took our people away. And when we lost our school, that was just about it for our town. So, is that quick enough for you?
(laughter)
Nero: All right.
(applause)
Thompson: What was Clearview like when you were growing up?
Nero: Well, when I was growing up, we still had, back in the ’50s and the ’60s, when I was growing up, there was still probably about 200 people that were still in Clearview. I lived in the country, so I had to ride a school bus. And I have some old photos of some of the old school buses. And to this day, I can’t remember what that school bus looked like. But I know it was hot, and it was rough to ride that bus. We had secondary buses. The school itself, and I can remember walking into a library. And I want to tell you the story that when I was in the second grade, my folks finally got a TV, and I was watching TV so much I wouldn’t study. So I got put back in the second grade. Well, we didn’t have telephones. We didn’t have indoor bath or anything. But somehow, my mother found out that I had gotten put back into the first grade. And how she found that out, I think my sister, who is sitting over there, told on me.
(laughter)
Nero: And so she turned the TV off, and my Dad said, well, why do we all have to suffer? She’s the one that can’t read? Not us.
(laughter)
Nero: But I got a little whipping with a red belt, and I learned to read. And from there on, I read everything that I could find. And I walked into the library, and there seemed to be, there were no books on the shelves for us to read. They didn’t stock our libraries. Everything that we had was second-hand. So, we, in that community, everybody was taught by teachers who were very educated. That’s because in Oklahoma, you were only allowed to go to Langston. And from Langston, you were, you graduated, but you had to go, if you wanted a master’s degree, a doctor’s degree, you had to go out of state to get that. So they came back. They were very educated, and they taught us a whole lot. So we had, even though we were, had less materials, we were taught very well. And we seen, we may have been poor, but we didn’t know we were poor. And we thrived. Most of the people in that town, we didn’t have cars. We walked. A lot of them walked wherever they needed to go. But we managed to survive. And, we had stores when I was growing up, you asked me what I was like when I was growing up, and we were happy. We were very happy.
Thompson: That’s great. That’s fantastic. I want to go to Ms. Henrietta Hicks, and she is from Boley. So not only is she the municipal judge in Boley, but she’s the Boley historian. And I’d like to know a little bit, because I’d say Boley was probably one of the most prosperous of the All-Black towns, at least in terms of population. I think it got up to around 4,000 people at one time. Can you tell us about Boley?
Henrietta Hicks: You got that right. Boley was popular.
(laughter)
Hicks: Yes, I’m Henrietta Hicks. I was born and reared in Boley. After college, I left Boley, and when I finished college, my uncle was the superintendent of schools, and he wanted me to fill out the term for the English teacher that was there. My major was English. Don’t hold it to me if I make an error here.
(laughter)
Hicks: So I finished that term, and I wanted to go to California because they had taken me there on vacation immediately after I had finished school. I went to California. I stayed there for 19 years, married, had one child, and my husband was from Boley, too. And he decided, well, why don’t we go back to Boley? I thought that’s a good idea. Let’s move back to Boley. Our son had asthma, and they said a change of climate would be good for him.
So here we go, after 19 years, we pack up and move back to Boley. Move back to Boley, and I declare, we had a house built. He sent me back and had a place built for us to stay. I sat in what we call our library for two weeks and cried. I said, now this is the wrong thing. I don’t know why you brought me back here. It takes us two weeks to get to a grocery store. There are no lights, no sidewalks. It’s mud everywhere you go. If you go to church, the mud is on your heels, and you can’t get in church for all that mud. Oh, I carried on and carried on. Finally, he said, you might as well stop because this is where we are. Now let me tell you about Boley. Boley is a sister city to Clearview, and I tell them in, I told them the other day at Clearview, I make a drink. This is sans liquor. It doesn’t have liquor in it. I make a drink, and I call it Boley branch water. But I have a drink I will make for Clearview, and I will tell them, drink this and have a clear view.
(laughter)
Hicks: I don’t, I don’t know how well that went over with Clearview, but they are my friends. (laughter) They are my friends.
Nero: Very well. We have a drink now in Clearview called creek.
Hicks: The Clearview creek...
Nero: The Clearview Creek Water.
Hicks: And as I was saying, Boley was established, was founded in 1903, 119 years ago, as you can count. And it was established by three entities: the railroad, two white men, and the people that had migrated, as he mentioned, from the southwest, that were living in dugouts, living in tents, living wherever they could, just on the land because they were Creek Freedmen. You already know about that. And what happened was the soil was rich there. The people were growing gardens, and they had plants. One of them had an old cow, an old mule, or whatever, and it was thriving. So they decided this would be a good place for a town.
Plus, the fact the railroad track ran through right through the town, and they had to stop there every six miles, as was told to us, because it was an engine, steam engine, and it had to have water. She’s shaking her head. She knows about that. So it stopped there, and therefore, Boley came to life. It took a little doing for Boley to come to life. And there was a gentleman out of Texas, T. M. Haynes, that had migrated up there. And he became the site manager, and he platted the town. Now, let me tell you, the town was established on the land that was owned by a Creek Freedman, a Mr. James Barnett. It was really owned by his daughter, and I believe she was 12 years old at the time. She could not give consent for us to have the land. I say us—I wasn’t there— but for them,
(laughter)
Hicks: for them to have the land. But he told her if he bought her a little white horse, would she give him, would she consent for this? And she thought, well, I’ll do that. So she consented for the land, and that town was established on her land. And that little lady was Abigail Barnett McCormick. She has a great-granddaughter here, and I want her to stand. Sheila McCormick.
(applause)
Hicks: She’s the great-granddaughter of the of the lady that we found, that Boley is founded on. I think it’s about six miles, at that time six miles. But it’s larger than that now. And of course, from there we were, we became a town, and then we were incorporated in 1905. So we were really Oklahomans before Oklahoma was Oklahoma. And from there, we’ve had schools; our schools were established. And of course, let me let you know a little more about the town. The people came to Boley in droves. They came all kinds of ways, riding a horse, riding a donkey, on the back of cars, and boxcars that the railroads used to bring in. They had boxcars, and people would come in those boxcars. They did a massive advertisement asking people to come to Boley. It is the land of the free, the land of the just, the land of the fair. Come here, get your education, learn how to talk, learn how to reason, and learn how to think. Learn some businesses. So they came. At that time, we had craftsmen of all kinds. They built homes. Some of them were shacks, some of them shotgun. But they built them.
Later on, as time went on and money was more available, better homes were built. People came, and they had a good time. They had the rodeo. They had a circus. Anything to draw the people into Boley. And in 19, in the 1900s, we had about 4,000 people. Velma Ashley wrote her thesis on Boley up to 1942 or ’45. And I believe she said there were about 4,000 people there. We had three banks at one time. We had a bank and trust company at one time, that I found out about later. We had a brick factory. We had five cotton gins. We had our own electric system, our own gas system, our own ice-making system. We made pop. We had a pop factory. They call it sodas now, but we had a pop factory that they made pop. We had a necktie factory for men because we wanted the men to come around, and we wanted to put a necktie on them because we wanted them to look like gentlemen. So we had a necktie factory, anything that was held, almost. We even had a—they call it the show— but we had a theater, we had restaurants, and we had a very popular hotel. There were several hotels there, but we had one real popular. We had one that the people were really careful about. And perhaps I shouldn’t tell this one, but you had to be the color of a paper brown bag before you could get into that hotel.
(laughter)
Hicks: And that, they ran those people out of town. But Boley was a thriving place. We had everything that everybody else had in the cities. We had our ups and downs. We had our defeats. We had our turmoils, but we turned those defeats into opportunities. And we’re still trying to be the kind of place that we would want anybody and everybody to come.
We had a school system second to none. I come from a family of educators. My mother just happened to marry a poor Black farmer, and that’s why I’m really from the country. Boley was a country town, but my, as I said, my family are a family of educators, and they pushed education. Our teachers were the best in the country, we thought. Sometimes we thought they were the worst, but the most times we thought they were the best. The superintendent that I came under was Velma Ashley. Velma Ashley was my aunt, but she did not treat me as a niece. She treated me as a student at the school, and I thought she was about the worst thing in the world. But she was, she believed in the children being prepared.
And at the time before, long before I was around, we had two colleges. We had a Methodist College, and we had a Creek Nation College, and we had a college just for business to teach you how to run a business. That college that ran a business stayed around for about four or five years. But it lost its “umph,” and they moved to Weleetka, I believe. That gentleman became the superintendent of schools in Weleetka, and he was later killed by one of the one of the patrons there. But then, that was kind of a blow to us. But anyway, he had left Boley. Now, Boley is still a city to be reckoned with. I can talk a long time because I’m old and loquacious. And I feel that I can just say what I want to say and talk about Boley just as much as I want. But I’m not going to bore you with Boley. I want you to come and see. Now, I’m here tonight. Sheila lives here in Oklahoma City, and I know you're wondering, is anybody else left in Boley? We have a prison there. We had a school for incorrigible boys, and that school for incorrigible boys, I believe it went out around 1970-something, 1970-something, I believe. And now we have a state prison. The population of Boley is around 1,500; 800 of them are prisoners.
(laughter)
Hicks: They’re incorporated into our population. That was not our doing. That was somebody else’s. But they incorporated into our population, and our prison is a very good prison. We have a warden there, and he runs a very good prison. The staff is great, and we don’t have escapees. It’s a minimum security. And we don’t, oh, goodness, I said we don’t have escapees, I may go home, and one is escaped.
(laughter)
Hicks: Wouldn’t that be something? But at any rate, our school was equal to that. And I got to tell you about this when I was a child going in school, and there were little communities outside of Boley that we call the greater Boley area. These were little hamlets where Black folk lived out in the country, and there were 17 of them out there. And all of those kids were in segregated schools because they couldn’t go to school anyplace else. They were all schools in those communities. When they finished the eighth grade, they came into Boley because that was the high school, and they were under the Independent District of Boley. So they came into Boley to the high school.
So we had five buses, five yellow buses, that brought kids from all of those areas into our school. And we used to have an interscholastic meeting. The interscholastic meeting would test the children from the various schools on their academics. If you were good in history, your teacher would send you for the test in history or English, or et cetera. Whatever it was at the scene. Well, little Boley was just little Boley. They sent us for the big meet. Boley went. We competed with every school that was there, including the big school at Tulsa, Douglass in Oklahoma City, and all of the schools around. Guess who won the trophy? (laughter)
Now, I know you know. Boley High School’s kids were deemed the smartest kids—at that time. (applause)
Thompson: Now, Ms. Hicks, I want to know, before we bring Senator Matthews into the conversation.
Hicks: Oh, I’ve talked too long.
Thompson: No, we could listen to this all night. There’s a famous bank robbery that happened. Can you tell us? Can you tell us a little bit about that famous bank robbery?
Hicks: I’ve told you about the town had a collection of doctors, dentists, everything we need. We had a hospital. We had everything there. We also had a bank. “Pretty Boy” Floyd’s gang was known. Some of you have heard. It’s like the Jesse James gang. He was a bad actor, but he wasn’t really bad. He was a kind of, he was a Robin Hood–kind of person. Times were hard. Times were poor, and robbing the bank was easy money. He would take care of his family and would also help other families. But anyway, he had robbed several towns throughout Oklahoma, several banks throughout Oklahoma. I think about somewhere between 18 and 24 banks he had robbed. Some of them he robbed twice. That’s why the number went up. (laughter)
Hicks: Now, Pretty Boy Floyd used to come through Boley because he liked the pretty girls. Plus the fact— have you heard of bootleggers? He would come through there sometimes to check with the bootleggers, and there was an orchard outside of town. He would stop there to get the fruit. He’d give the little boy 50 cents to give him a glass of water. So, some of the townspeople knew him, and he told his contingency—his bank robbers—don’t go to Boley. Now, don’t bother that bank in Boley. Don’t go there. Don’t mess with those Negroes. But they would not listen. George Birdwell got the big head and came to Boley.
Hicks: Now, they had successfully robbed all these other banks. But can you imagine a town of all-Black people outsmarting that gang? And that is exactly what happened. When they came in to rob the bank, it was Birdwell, Patterson, and the driver of the automobile was Charles Glass, a Black man. Now, the reason they outsmarted them was because he had been robbing the banks, so the banks were all fixed. When you pull out the last dollar out of the cash register, they had it so rigged to every business in town, a bell would go off in their businesses. When that bell went off, that mean you come running with every gun, hoe, hammer, whatever you have.
(laughter)
Hicks: And when they came in to rob the bank, this was at bird season time. So you know what happens at bird season time. Everybody has a gun. Well, he came in, and D. J. Turner was there. He was a bank robber. He was one of the most prosperous men in Boley and really was one of the great leaders, David Johnson Turner. He owned the bank, and he was the cashier at that moment. And they came in, and Patterson asked him, Birdwell asked him, told him he came in for, it’s a holdup. And he said he wanted the money. So D. J. Turner pulled the money out of the drawer, and when he pulled the money out of the drawer and pulled the last dollar out, that bell went off. And when the bell went off, people just ran into the bank. These people were trying to make an unauthorized withdrawal.
(laughter)
Hicks: And he said, not today. You can’t do that today. And Birdwell shot D. J. Turner, mortally wounding him. In the meantime, this young girl’s great-grandfather was hidden in the vault, and in the vault was a steady steed. Now, the steady steed wasn’t a bicycle. It was a gun. And when he came out, he shot and killed Birdwell. In the meantime, Patterson came running in to see what the ruckus was. When he came running in, there was a patron in the office, in there too, in the bank. He came running in and going to take over, and they riddled him with bullets. The person that was in there that was there to make the honest withdrawal, he was moving so fast the bullet went through the tail of his coat, didn’t touch him.
(laughter)
Hicks: Did not touch him. And now listen, here comes Glass in. He is the driver of the car. He comes in to see about them, too. All of these guns and things carrying on. What in the world is going on? He runs in, and when he ran in, he tried to grab the money, and he had to run out. And he when he ran out, he went back to what they called the roadster. This automobile, they call it the roadster. I think it was a Buick or some kind. Excuse me, Buick drivers, but they said it was a Buick. He ran back to this Buick, and when he ran back to the Buick, this man, John Owens, who was not afraid of bear nor man, stepped in front of the, in front of this car and shot and killed him. And the roadster went into the side of the street, so that he was dead.
Birdwell was dead, and the other man who was there, that was riddled with bullets, was not dead. They thought that he had, they wanted to accuse him of a murder. But the people in Boley said, no, he did not kill D. J. Turner. He did go to prison for that. Now, what they, what Boley did was phenomenal. Those people in Boley were the greatest folk. They were smart, smart people—back then.
(laughter)
Hicks: What they did, and what they stopped, was a riot because it could have been a riot of a multitude and a magnitude that you couldn’t even think about. Because these people were there. This is their town. This is their money. And when that person came out, that had been riddled with bullets, was not dead, and the town, some of the townspeople said, kill him. But one of our uncles and the townspeople, some of the townspeople said, no, no, we will not do that. We will not cause a riot. We will not kill this man. We will send him to the hospital and hopefully to jail. And that’s kind of the short version of the story about the bank.
(laughter)
Thompson: Why, thank you. Yes.
(applause)
Thompson: Deserving of applause, certainly. I want to bring in my friend, Senator Kevin Matthews. And I’ve had an opportunity over the last year, since I became director here at OHS to get to know him better, and we’ve had a chance to work together on legislation that he has been working on so that we can bring more notice and notoriety to the All-Black towns, to bring awareness and bring more people there. And he has really put his heart and soul into this. And I’d like to talk to you first of all about what got you interested in this first, and then of course, let’s get into talking about the things that you’re doing to bring tourism and to revive some of these All-Black towns across the state.
Kevin Matthews: Well, thank you, Trait, and thank you, Larry, for having this. The other part of history that they did not say is that we have, here, Shirley Nero has created the Black Educators Museum and Hall of Fame in Clearview. And while our historian is talking about what would happen, she’s also a judge. So that’s a little Black history fact about them. So why did I, what caused me to be interested in the All-Black towns? Well, when I came into the Senate in 2015, we had taken a vote on the Native American Cultural Center that they’re now enhancing right now, getting ready to do a resort. We had taken a vote on the POP center, just blocks over from Greenwood. And everybody kept saying to me, you taking a votes on cultural center, POP center. And we’ve had a cultural center and things on Greenwood that used to get state funding, and you haven’t done anything for us. And I said, you know, that’s a good point. You know, what can I do? And this was back in about in 2015 when I came into the Senate, and I started to look at what was happening in the area and realized that my predecessor, Representative Don Ross, and former late Senator Maxine Horner, they had built the Greenwood Cultural Center. A beautiful place there, but it was mostly an event center, and it had black-and-white pictures of history, et cetera, and I saw that it was being told.
Right about, right after that, I was invited to the National African American Museum of History and Culture. It was brand new, and I went there and saw the stories there about Clara Luper there, about Greenwood there, and five million visitors went there in the first two years. And it was told in a tremendous way and an impactful way. And I say, you know, we ought to do this in Tulsa. And so I started a commission, and now we’ve completed Greenwood Rising, a $30 million project.
(applause)
Matthews: And then, at the same time, right after that, there was a bond issue to build the Clara Luper Civil Rights Center here in Oklahoma City, and those were two bookends of Black history. And as you were told, that this was slated to be a Black state, and it’s wonderful to know the history that happened here, and it’s wonderful to know the history that happened in Tulsa.
But the real untold story was these Black towns. These places I grew up and went to, I went to segregated schools when I was younger. Then I was bused, but I had never seen or been to a place where they had a Black mayor, Black police chief, Black fire chief. I had never seen it. And there’s a lot of people that haven’t seen it, and it’s the untold stories, it’s the gem of Oklahoma. And I said, you know, I’m not going to, they’re not going to tell me, ask me any more, what are you doing? When Greenwood Rising was one of the top tourist, new tourist destinations in America this past year. But what’s going to be next is these Black towns. And so, as we were building that, some three years ago or so, I started to convene the Black mayors here because people were so excited about that story. And I said, people would really be excited if they knew these people, just listening to that, you listening to history that many people never get exposed to. And I thought to myself, you know, when we have a living historian here, and when we have someone that brings people to this room every year and memorializes it and creates a way to know the African American educators that have done a great job.
Unfortunately for me, at 62 years old, I was an adult before I found out that Historically Black Colleges and Universities and places where you have African Americans that care about you, they look like you, that teach you, they care, and they are the most successful people, Black people, in America. And so my son had the opportunity to go to an HBCU. He went to Hampton. But many Langston graduates are some of the top-performing individuals in this state. And so, where did they come from? They came from Clearview. They came from Boley. They came from Langston. They came from Taft. They came from these places.
And so I took it upon myself to, because I was on the fire department where I say we organize chaos. You know, I had 652 employees that I had to manage. And so, I feel like I’m an organizer. And I thought if we could bring these people together, these mayors that are doing these things individually, and we could create a thread of organization and structure through the state, it would be phenomenal for me as an individual, for my children, and many people across America. And so that’s how this started, and I’ve gotten great support. When I passed Senate Bill 17 to help with the work that we were doing in Tulsa, I was the only Black man in the Senate. Anastasia Pittman was the only Black woman. But 100% of everybody in the Senate and 100% of everybody in the House of Representatives voted for it, and then-Governor Fallin signed it. And this governor and this legislature has funded us organizing, these towns, so that we can have an opportunity to bring the US Civil Rights Trail here.
(applause)
Thompson: Yeah. Senator Matthews was able to work last year and got $150,000 put into the OHS budget, and we were able to hire two grant writers who are now working with the mayors of the All-Black towns to look at starting strategic plans, so that we can start to build that infrastructure for getting more tourism and more infrastructure in those towns. And we got that program off the ground just a few months ago, and we’re excited to see what that is going to lead to as we lean forward. And of course, he’s right. You know, he was instrumental in Greenwood Rising. And I had a chance just this past weekend to go visit for the first time, and I took my kids with me. And it is powerful. And if you have not had a chance to go visit that museum yet in Tulsa, I encourage you, please make it make a point to do it. You cannot walk out of that place and not be affected and impacted by what you experience there.
And we’re so fortunate, and Senator mentioned the OKPOP Museum, and we’re going to tell the story of people at that museum, like the Gap Band and folks who have really impacted Tulsa, or Oklahoma: Charlie Christian, and, you know, these folks who have really had an impact, because of what they’ve contributed into our cultural society. And so we’re going to be this is going to be a very hand-in-hand relationship as we look at what we’re going to have in Tulsa to tell stories there.
Matthews: I want to say that we also had the opportunity and got put in the budget this past year, that’s being developed now. Something called like the Yellow Bus Brigade, where we have funding. I got funding so that young children on this side of the state can go to these towns, through these towns to Greenwood Rising in Tulsa, and young children there can get grants through the History Center to come and learn this history. We got funding for that as well. And, Trait and Larry are organizing that program right now.
Hicks: Excuse me. You know, we were talking about the past, but we have a great, great future, and we’re doing something now, and let me, before I talk about Boley anymore, I think we ought to hear from Shirley Nero. They’re having a big affair down there on the 19th of February.
Thompson: I’m glad you brought that up.
(laughter)
Thompson: I was going to make sure we talk about that.
Nero: Well, I was just waiting my turn.
Hicks: I’m always doing that.
Nero: Larry gave me a little list over here of what I’m supposed to talk about and when. But then, we can just go for that.
Thompson: Let’s just wing it. We’re having fun now.
Nero: We’re winging it. We’re winging it. But for Black History Month, we are having an affair on February the 19th, and my husband has put together a panel of sports athletes. One of them is Dewey McClain, and he’s out of Okmulgee, played for the Atlanta Falcons. And then we have Felix Jones, who was an outstanding athlete for the Cowboys in Dallas. And then we have also a young lady who’s coming, there’s Darlean Calip. She’s a basketball coach, a winning, she’s won several state championships. And she will be there, and the whole idea is for them to come and talk to the young people from the Black towns or anywhere else that would like to come down and visit with them to talk about what it was like to be a pro and where you go from there, and visit with the parents and the students.
Thompson: So what day, what time, and where?
Nero: It’s February the 19th in Clearview. And the mayor is here. Marilyn Jackson is here. And she could, raise up, raise your hand up, so they can see who you are.
(applause)
Nero: She’s here. So that would be from 11:00 to 2:00, and it’s actually a fundraiser for our school gym, and just talking a little bit about Clearview and visiting all of the Black towns that we do have our remaining gym that was established or constructed in 1939 as a WPA building. So we do have one of the only remaining facilities that’s left on our school grounds. So we’re very proud of that fact, and we’re going to keep that. So we have two centers in Clearview.
O’Dell: If we’re winging it,
Nero: If we’re winging it...
O’Dell: I want you and Ms. Hicks to talk about rodeos and how important they are to the to the Black towns.
Matthews: I’d like to first give an advertisement for Boley. They are, in May, we will have the Smithsonian there in Boley from the middle of May, right through the rodeo for six weeks. And we were also raising the money to have Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! done by an all-Black cast viewed in Boley for a week.
(applause)
Hicks: Oh, that’s a big thing. That’s a big thing. And listen, you might as well get your boots and shoes on and come on down, because we are working on it. And Shirley is a part of the committee too, as I told you, she’s our sister city. She’s my friend. And sometimes I kind of think maybe my sister, but we just, you know, sisters with another mother, I guess. I guess.
(laughter)
Hicks: And the rodeo in Boley is always the Memorial Day weekend. It’s the weekend before Memorial Day. The Boley rodeo has been going on consecutively since 1961. If you have not been to the Boley rodeo, you have missed three-fourths of your life.
(laughter)
Hicks: It used to be, it was billed years ago as the Black-only rodeo, a Black Rodeo, but that’s not the case anymore. We have cowboys from everywhere, and these are not just playing cowboys. They are cowboys that really know how to ride, rope, and hoop. And we would be delighted for any of you to come. That’s in regard to the rodeo. And I was sitting here thinking that we have all kinds of entertainment. Boley now has some cabins if you want to come down, and you don’t have a place to stay. We have cabins for you. Of course, they cost you a little money, but when you come to Boley, you will have money. When you enter Boley, we have a new park. So you can see that when in the springtime, it’s a beautiful little park. For us, it is. So come on down to Boley. Take out a little time and enjoy the view in Clearview, and come on over to Boley.
(laughter)
Hicks: And come on over to Boley. You know, Boley is known as the crown jewel of the Black towns. Now, I didn’t name it that, but Boley is known as the crown jewel of the Black towns. And we still have a lot of people there in population.
Nero: Yeah, and Mrs. Hicks and I always have a good time messing with each other about, you know, when the train came, there’s the same train that came to Boley as it did Clearview. And I said, tell her all the time which way the train was traveling, whether they came to Clearview first or whether they came to Boley first. And so when Booker T. Washington came to Oklahoma, and it was Oklahoma when he came, I said he came up from the south, from Tuskegee. He was coming, going to the north. He came to Clearview first.
(laughter)
Nero: And so, we greeted Booker T. Washington first.
Hicks: What year did you say that?
(laughs)
Hicks: She always said he came in 1910. And I told her, I always tell her. I said, well, that’s probably why he came on to Boley, and said Boley was the best town he had seen. But he came to Boley in 1906.
Nero: I think he was there, too. Yeah, I have go back and check the newspapers about that.
Hicks: Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the people that came. Oh, we’ve had all kinds of visitors that came to Boley. I think she came around 1940, ’35 or ’40. And I was going to say there have been a lot of people from Clearview that are well-known that you would know them if we called them by name. There have been people that have come from Boley that you would know if we called them by name that have reached the pinnacles of their success. Some of them have gone on as great educators and whatever field they were in. I think probably none of you have ever, well, I don’t know if had any baseball players or baseball misters in here, but the baseball, was a big thing back in the years when Jackie Robinson went in with the Dodgers. But there was a little boy from Boley that was the first Black player for the Chicago Red Sox. We called him “Pumpsie,” “Pumpsie” Green. Came out of the hills and the country of Boley. That’s just one person. We have a whole lot of folk we can talk about, but time will not allow it.
(laughter)
Nero: That’s right, Ms. Hicks. We could just go on and on and on, and we all have great people that came out of our towns.
Hicks: Well, one thing I guess I need to say, excuse me. You’re not going to say it. I’m going to say it.
(laughter) We have a Black Educators Hall of Fame where we honor Black teachers that we could not have had that without the astuteness and the brainstorm and the brilliant mind of Dr. Nero, who is Mrs. Nero’s husband. Stand up, Dr. Nero.
(applause and laughter)
Matthews: Okay, and while Dr. Nero is standing up, I want to tell you that he’s the treasurer for the Black Mayors Association. And so what we’re doing in Boley, our plan is to do that across all the towns, create visitor centers and housing, new housing in each of them. So if you’re an investor, and you want to help with this, you’re going to see Dr. Nero, who is over those finances, because we’re creating public- private partnerships to do this. And so, see Dr. Nero if you want to help in any way.
Thompson: All right. Fantastic. That’s a great way. Now, we want to take your questions, and Elizabeth back there is going to bring a microphone around. So if you have a question for anybody or for everybody on the panel, just get your hand up there, and we would love to answer your questions.
Audience member #1: Thank you. My name is Charles E. Woods, I am with the Clara Luper Legacy Committee. I always had this question. I had many answers. I wanted to know what started the Race Riot in Tulsa. The actual thing that really started it, if you know.
Matthews: Well, the story goes that was a young Black man, there was a Black man and a Black woman on the elevator, Sarah Page and Dick Rowland. Dick Rowland, they said that the elevator shook, and he bumped into her. She yelled out, someone else said that he raped her. He never got convicted of that, but that was the spark. But as we know, the prosperity on Greenwood, that was the envy of others. That was an excuse to say that they wanted to go and get this Black man. And they took him to jail and they they wanted, to hang him, et cetera. And we had Black men that had been trained that came back with the war and knew how to use guns. They went to protect him and then a gunshot went off, May 31st. And that started, what would otherwise be called a civil war. And they burned down, that was the excuse, for burning down Black Wall Street in Greenwood.
Thompson: All right, all right, now we got some hands. All right.
Audience member #2: Hello there. My name is C. J. Harris, and I have a question with our panelists here. Kind of remember and reflect on the legacy of Mrs. Octavia Douglas and how she helped our minority teachers of color get their pension pay, and just some things of Ms. Octavia Douglas.
Hicks: Yes, Mrs. Octavia Douglas, that was a time of the segregated schools. There was a superintendent who was Mrs. Griffin, that was the overall superintendent of all the schools in Okfuskee County, and that’s where we’re from. And at that time, there had to be a supervisor for the Black teachers. They were segregated. Absolutely. And Octavia Douglas was the was the supervisor for all of these Black teachers. She did an outstanding job. Of course, before Octavia Douglas, there was a Mrs. Hallie Jones. But Octavia is who you asked about. So let’s talk about her.
Mrs. Douglas, her name was Octavia Douglas. She instituted many things for the ongoing of all of the segregated schools and Okfuskee County. She had spelling bees. She had special programs designed to help kids learn as much as they could. She did little things to encourage them. She worked with the teachers. She saw to it that the teachers had books, because in many places there were hand-me-downs. You get those old, torn-up books that the white folks had used. They sent them over there to us, and we could use. We didn’t want them. We’d throw them away, because we had people that were helping us, and they wrote books. And that’s how we learned. She saw to it that we had books.
She saw to it that the teachers got as much pay as possible. When my aunt was a principal, one of my aunts was the principal that I lived with. And I think her salary, her first salary was $75 a month, and she thought she was rich then. And Mrs. Douglas, she worked to be sure that those teachers would be the best that they could be. Now, Mrs. Douglas finally moved to Oklahoma City. She owned some property not too far from here, and one of her favorite people was Dr. Ernest Holloway. And when he was the president of Langston University, she donated her house, as I understand, to him. And he lived there when he retired. He lived on one floor, and on the other floor was a floor for guests to come in, and then there was an entertainment floor. She wore lots of pins in late years that the various governors had given her, and she was, you know, she was the ambassador. She called herself the ambassador. She had a home built in Boley. That home is no longer there, but Mrs. Douglas’s memory lives on.
Nero: Okay. One thing about the history of Okfuskee County, since we both from there, that there were only two high schools for Blacks in Okfuskee County. And as she said earlier about the schools, there were 14 schools that came to Boley High School. Well, on the other side of Okemah, where Clearview was, on the east side of Okemah, we had the same situation. We had several schools that only went to the eighth grade that came into Clearview that went to high school. There was one school, Weleetka, who actually had a town that had five, four different areas of Black areas within what Weleetka. There was Frogsville, Frog Hollow, Spiro, Sandtown, and new addition. And they had a school within Weleetka that only went to the eighth grade, and those kids were bused out of Weleetka to come to Clearview because they did not have a high school in Weleetka for the Black kids to go to school. So there were only two until the 1920s, with the Rosenwald Fund, were able to, in 1923, for Clearview to get a high school. If you did not, there was no other place for you to attend high school other than, if you wanted to finish high school, you had to go to Langston to finish high school. And I know of one person that their family was able to send that person to high school at Langston to graduate from high school. Now, I think, when did you get a high school in Boley?
Hicks: We had high school in 1919.
Nero: 1919.
Hicks: When the high school burned, we had another one built with Rosenwald.
Nero: With the Rosenwald money in 1919.
Audience member #3: And going back, as you were mentioning, the centers that are going to be established for the Black towns across Oklahoma to make sure that Black towns are acknowledged. And I was just wondering about how many active Black townships are there now, and how many kinds of centers, and what are the plans, long range, for keeping Black towns alive and keeping that part of our heritage alive?
Matthews: Thanks for the question. My focus is on the 13 original Black towns, those 13. And those 13 towns are the ones that are participating in this organizational structure we’re building. And my goal is to have visitor centers for them to highlight their history, and so we’re fleshing out that history now. And we feel that once people start to come through and spend money with these people and learn, and buy souvenirs, et cetera, and we put housing there. Because these towns, they have this great museum. They have this rodeo, and they’re not the only ones that have a rodeo. They have a gumbo fest in one of the towns, et cetera, but it would be great if they could stay and spend money with even the restaurant the McCormicks have there in Boley.
So the goal is to create the structure so that they have something for people. And once you flesh the history, then when the history is fleshed out, that’s when you can have t-shirts. That’s when you can have books. That’s when you can have things that you can sell to people and make your economy grow. And then when you have people stay in the towns, then we’re hoping that people come back to Boley, come back to Clearview, and come back and build houses and build the towns. And we’re hoping that that’s a sustainable model, but we have to start.
Hicks: Ms. Goss, we have a coffee house in Boley with lots of museums. We have a new coffeehouse there, and we also have a museum. The museum is in regard to the history of Boley.
Audience member #4: Hello. My name is Floyd Washington. I recognize some of you guys are educators up here, and I’d like you guys to speak to the barriers that are being put in place by politicians about giving accurate history as far as African American history. What is your thoughts on that?
Matthews: Well, I want to say, as a legislator, it’s very disappointing that on the one hand, we got $1.5 million to build Greenwood Rising, and then the same legislature said, let’s not talk about things that are difficult. I believe that that was political. I think it was popular at the time. But at the same time, even the governor specifically said that we would teach the 1921 Race Massacre and Black Wall Street in all schools. And so I think that people used that as a political stunt because they’re running for office. We’re not paying attention to it. We’re moving on.
(applause)
Audience member #5: I am 59 years old. and I never knew about race riots and Wall Street until maybe last year.
Matthews: I’m 62 years old. I’m 62 years old. I grew up in Tulsa, and I didn’t learn about it until my uncle came from California and told me when I was 18 or 19. We called it “Tulsa’s Dirty Secret.” That’s why we want to tell that history openly.
Audience member #6: So, my question kind of follows that line of thinking. I grew up in the Tulsa area in Broken Arrow, and in the ’80s our Oklahoma history book, I think, had one paragraph about the Race Massacre, and I don’t even know that it was raised by the teacher. I remember just reading it thinking, this happened here? You know, what? And I don’t think I even knew about the existence of the All-Black towns until my mid-20s when I happened to read Toni Morrison’s Paradise.
And I started, you know, hearing about these towns. So I’m wondering, is there anything that’s being done? I know with Greenwood, that has become part of the national conversation, right? You have Hollywood coming in and telling that story. But as far as the All-Black towns, what is being done to educate Oklahoma students about their existence and just the history of that?
Nero: Well, I, you know, I’m an Oklahoma history teacher, retired. And I think that a lot of it, as me, as a teacher, I think that the teachers, they teach what was in the standards and what you were supposed to teach. And if you go beyond the standards, and if that’s your interest, my interest was Black history. And I would go outside of my box of what I had to teach. I had one semester of Oklahoma history to teach, and that history book would start you at the beginning, the prehistoric time, and you had to try to cover that to the present. And how can you cover...there’s a lot in that history book that you’re going to miss in one semester and not teach. And if you are an educator, and you’re starting out young as a teacher, and you’re trying to see what do I need to cover these standards, and then what do I do? When are you going to do a research paper in your class? Are you going to have kids do a topical paper or something like that? What do you teach? When I started out in the ’70s in teaching, there was a book that Oklahoma City put out. Larry, tell me the name of the book. Oklahoma City Public Schools put out the book.
O’Dell: I’ve got it in my office right now.
Nero: Oh, we’re trying to think, but it has resources.
O’Dell: Resources.
Nero: Oklahoma City Public Schools, a resource book that they put out, and it had the Tulsa Race Riot in it. I knew it was there. And when I saw it, and I happened to be teaching with another teacher, her mother hid under her bed during the Tulsa Race Riot. And I brought this up to her and was telling her about it. She said, oh, my mother was in the Race Riot. Okay. I could relay that to my students because I knew it. She knew it. She told me the story, and I could tell them, and I could go and tell them to do a little bit more research on that. The history book, it was there in 1921, but if you didn’t go, and you’re filing, this is what I need to teach in my standard books, and you teach from pre-history and you got to get all the way to 1921, you just didn’t get there to tell that in your events.
So, as I tell my kids and my students that sometimes we have to go a little bit farther. You have to be a parent, and you had to teach this. If you have that Black history, go out and find it. Go to take your kids to the museums, and there are things that we’re going to miss. I’m not excusing anybody for it or anything like that. Sometimes we have to teach our kids ourselves because they are limited on time sometimes on doing these things, and that’s something that was overlooked. But now we’re making a wave and getting that stuff done. But now we’re getting pushed back a little bit.
Matthews: We also have, to answer your question, we created teacher’s institute. Dr. Karlos Hill, for the last three to four years, has created teacher’s institute that we had a trial with Tulsa Public Schools first, and a curriculum for elementary schools that’s a one-day or two-day course, and then a three to five-day course that they teach during Black History Month. And they went last year, they made it online. So we had over 500 people from across the United States learning it. And so we want to expand that to the Black towns.
O’Dell: And I can tell you what the Historical Society has done. We had, in the ’70s. Rubye Hall was the chair of our Black Heritage Committee, which Shirley is the chair now. But Rubye Hall was instrumental in putting together the book that Shirley’s talking about. And when Shirley took over, she started moving the Black Heritage meetings, which were every quarter, all around the state to get to different communities. We also, in the ’90s, Dr. Blackburn knew that we were negligent in telling all of Oklahoma’s history. So he hired Bruce Fisher to come in, and he created our exhibits here. He expanded our collections 100 times, and now we have resources on our website. We have a “Black History is Oklahoma History” that shares all of OHS’s history. You know, it’s got documentaries, it’s got the encyclopedia articles, books, resources. So I encourage everybody to look at that website.
Thompson: Yeah. And I want to add to, you know, one of the things that we’re trying to do here at the Historical Society is make sure that we’re telling all of Oklahoma history, and we’ve just brought on a wonderful young lady to be our new director of the multicultural office here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. Her name is Saidy Orellana, and she is going to help us reach out into these communities because we want to learn these stories. We want to get artifacts that are associated with that, so that we can have them here at the Historical Society for researchers; photographs, and all of those things. So we’re making a concerted effort to tell stories that haven’t been told or have been under-told throughout our time as the Oklahoma Historical Society. And we’re excited about what’s ahead on that.
Nero: Can I add one more thing?
Thompson: Yes, ma’am.
Nero: Not just the Tulsa Race Riot. As they mentioned, the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame, back in 2011, my husband and I were talking about our educators. Who do we look up to? Who are heroes in this state? And we realized that their story hasn’t been told. So we created this Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame, not only for recognition, but for education, for our own selves. What did our educators go through when they were teaching back in 1915, or 1921, or in Boley? They educated us to become what we are right now. We want their stories to be told. There’s a lot of history in our own educators who taught us. When we started doing this in 2011 and looking at their stories, we have had over 100 educators that we have inducted into this hall of fame. And when we get those inductees, we not only just induct them, we get their histories. They have to do a oral presentation, a one-hour interview that’s recorded. What am I saying?
O’Dell: Oral history.
Nero: Oral history interview. They have to write out oral history on paper, and actually, they give us photos from their schools or anything else like that. And this is something that the History Center also has a copy of their information that we’re keeping on record, and anybody can go back and look at this from teachers that taught in 1921 or 1915, from the beginning that we are collecting now, and we have over 100 of those, plus those people who actually have put in a nomination that are not inducted into the Hall of Fame. We have that information. So that is part of our history through that Hall of Fame, which is something that we are very proud that we actually have now in this state.
Hicks: And those presentations of those teachers that were honored at that time, we have a banquet, and that banquet is held here, and it’s done once a year, and it usually occurs in September. So, be on the watch out for that. We would want you to come to see what our Black teachers have done. Yeah. The nominations are open. They’re open now to nominate those Black teachers that have done a phenomenal job in your life or in your community.
Thompson: Well, with that, I want to, first of all, let you know if you want to learn more about what we’re doing here and some of the things we’ve talked about tonight. You can go to our website. okhistory.org. And let’s give a big hand to all of our panelists tonight.
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Thompson: Thank you all for coming out to our live event for A Very OK Podcast, and we hope to see you all very soon.
You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
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