Installation view of Descendants of the Black 1000

Installation view of Descendants of the Black 1000: Flight from Oklahoma Black Towns to Canada, including facsimiles of two historical photographs.

Left, Facsimile of a photograph of the class Antoinette Snow (Mrs. D. C. Constant) taught at an African American missionary school, ca. 1890. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph
Collection.

Right, Facsimile of a photograph commemorating the signing of the Jim Crow law, the first bill signed
into law in Oklahoma, December 18, 1907. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph
Collection.

Prior to Oklahoma statehood, the area known then as Indian Territory offered the formerly enslaved something they had never had before. The photograph of Antoinette Snow’s class is what former slaves, now sharecroppers, envisioned and strove to achieve: the equity and freedom that served as the bedrock for more than fifty thriving Black towns starting in 1865.

But equity and freedom were swiftly denied by Oklahoma legislators upon statehood in 1907. They could not stomach seeing Black, White, and Indigenous children in the same schools, riding the same trains, and using the same bathrooms. This is what the Oklahoma lawmakers sought to destroy, involving their children and grandchildren in their racist legacy. It had only been 41 years since each Black American had been granted freedoms with a promise of “40 acres and a mule.” A dream otherwise deferred elsewhere that was already materializing in the Black towns dissolved upon statehood. Despite these roadblocks, many people still held out hope for an equitable future.