All Black Towns
By
John C Abercrombie
In many areas of Black life, we have a tendency to only think about the subject presented without question of logic. Why? Does this make sense?
Because few people have written about it, one of these topics is all-Black towns. We see generations of people who have lived in captivity for hundreds of years, working under incredibly harsh conditions. Not being paid for their labor, owning nothing because they were not paid. Had remarkably untrue myths spread about them, including that slavery was the best thing for them, ever.
Just looking at the time of the American Revolutionary there were over two million persons of African ancestry living in America. Slightly over two percent were free even at that time. While this is a small number of free Blacks it is not insignificant.
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We even see promoters establishing an all-Black town on the Kansas frontier, offering the opportunity for five dollars. This was a ton of money for people who had been forced to work for free for generations, but they flocked there for the peace, quiet and opportunity this proposed. This was the beginning of a town known as Nicodemus.
In 1878, 300 people set out for Nicodemus. A measles epidemic spread during the trip killing several children.
Life for Black settlers was hard in Nicodemus, which, according to the Nicodemus National Historic Site, is one of the oldest Black settlements west of the Mississippi River.
Six black men and one white man created the Nicodemus Town Company in 1877, according to the site. They were:
- Smith, H W President
- Carr, Ben Vice President
- Hill, W R Treasurer
- Roundtree, S P Secretary
- Allsap, Jerry
- Edmonds, William
- Lenze, Jeff
Hill, the only white member, was a land speculator who had traveled to the South to promote Nicodemus and recruit Black people for the new colony.
Although life was hard on the Kansas plains — they fought hunger, snakes, and prairie fires — the population of Nicodemus reached as many as 700 people by 1880.
“The Black-town idea reached its peak in the fifty years after the Civil War,”
“The dearth of extant records prohibits an exact enumeration of them, but at least sixty Black communities were settled between 1865 and 1915. With more than twenty, Oklahoma led all other states. Unfortunately, little is known about many of the Black towns.”
There are several reasons for this including that.
not much was documented about the daily lives, aspirations and fears of people living in such towns as “Blackdom, New Mexico; Hobson City, Alabama; Allensworth, California; and Rentiesville, Oklahoma because residents failed to record their experiences and Whites were not interested in preserving and collecting material on the Black towns.”
Oklahoma’s all-Black towns included Clearview, Boley and Langston, which was founded around 1890, according to the Black Towns Project.
Mound Bayou, Miss., was founded in 1887 by freemen led by Isaiah Montgomery. The town, according to blackpast.org, was designed for the residents to have very little contact with Whites, had a post office, churches, banks, schools, and stores and was often cited by Booker T. Washington as a model of self-sufficiency.
Eatonville, Fla., where Zora Neale Hurston grew up, was incorporated in 1887. That’s where she went to collect Black folklore. Hurston wrote in “Of Mules and Men” that she could think of no better place to do so.
“First place I aimed to stop collecting material was Eatonville, Florida,” Hurston wrote in the introduction. “And now, I’m going to tell you why I decided to go to my native village first. I didn’t go back there so that the home folks could make admiration over me because I had been up North to college and come back with a diploma and a Chevrolet. I knew they were not going to pay either one of these items too much mind. I was just Lucy Hurston’s daughter, Zora.”
“I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt harm or danger. As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories.”
So, Hurston wrote, she sped “down the straight stretch into Eatonville, the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jail house.”
Greenwood, a division near North Tulsa, was founded in 1906. According to records, it was created by O.W. Gurley, a wealthy Black man who owned land in Arkansas. According to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. In 1889, Gurley traveled to Oklahoma to participate in the “Oklahoma Land Run.” Gurley purchased 40 acres, which were designated “only to be sold to colored,” according to records. The town, which gained fame as “Black Wall Street, “was destroyed in 1921, after it was burned by angry White mobs.
Blackdom, a town in New Mexico, was founded in 1911 by Black settlers, later forced out by a drought, according to New Mexico Genealogy archives.
Boley, Creek Nation, Indian Territory, was incorporated in 1905, becoming one of the wealthiest Black towns in the country, according to the African American Registry.
Researchers say it is almost impossible to find a complete list of all-Black towns and communities. Many less famous Black towns and communities survived until the Depression, when Black families left out of the necessity to find jobs.
In the Washington area, several communities still exist. Their populations have declined—but many descendants still live.
The town of North Brentwood was the first incorporated Black municipality in the Washington area, according to the Maryland Heritage Area Authority.
North Brentwood was established in the 1890s after Wallace A. Bartlett, a White Civil War veteran who had commanded Black troops, sold property to a local realty company, according to North Brentwood Historical Society.
The northern tract was designated for Blacks to develop. “North Brentwood’s first residents were former slaves of local planters and Civil War veterans,” according to documents by the Maryland Heritage Area Authority. “The first lot was sold to an African American by the name of Henry Randall in 1891.” Randall’s house stood on Holladay Avenue, which became Rhode Island Avenue.
Other Black towns and communities in Prince George’s include Glen Arden, Lincoln, Chapel Hill, Rossville and Ridgely.
“Fairmount Heights was founded at the turn of the Century and Glenarden in the 1920s,” said Susan Pearl, a historian at the Prince George’s Historical Society. “Of the communities listed, North Brentwood, Fairmount Heights and Gleneden were incorporated.”
Many were not incorporated. They include Ridgely, which was established on what is now Central Avenue in about 1870 by a Black farmer. “It was a very vibrant community,” said Pearl, who wrote “African American Heritage Survey, 1996.”
“There is little left of it. The church and school are still there.”
Rossville was named after Augustus Ross, who was born a slave in 1855. He was freed in 1864 and went on to work for the Muirkirk Iron Furnace. Twenty years later he and 10 other freedmen, many of whom worked at the furnace, bought land in a new subdivision that would eventually be named after Ross, according to the Prince George’s County African American Heritage Survey in 1996.
Lincoln was established in 1908 as a retreat community for successful Blacks who lived in the district and could afford to spend time out of the city. “They were movers and shakers in Washington,” Pearl said. “The biggest mover and shaker in Lincoln was the brother of the man who handed out the Rosenwald awards.”
But the community did not prosper. “It was never incorporated,” Pearl said. “It didn’t grow even as a Black community. There is hardly anything left of Lincoln.”
Other Black communities were established within towns, Pearl said. “What we know as Old Bowie had a large Black population after 1870 because of the people who worked on the railroad.”
Heritage Montgomery, an initiative created to promote the county’s heritage, collected the stories of some African American communities in its publication “Community Cornerstones,” which lists dozens of African American settlements created by freed people after the Civil War.
“A symbol of hope and faith, the church was typically the first institution established in a new Black community, usually followed by a school and a charity hall,” according to the brochure. “Fortunately, many of Montgomery County’s historic landmark churches still proudly stand as cornerstones of their communities.”
Those sites include Scotland A.M.E. Zion Church, built in Scotland, which, according to the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission in Potomac, was created in 1880 by William Dove — a freedman who bought 36 acres for $210. The community was originally called Snakes Den.
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All Black Towns p2
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Rare 1920s Footage: All-Black Towns Living the American Dream | National Geographic
By the 1920s, Oklahoma was home to some 50 African American towns, in addition to a large and prosperous black community living in the city of Tulsa. These towns and their self-reliant middle class and affluent residents are documented by the home movies of Reverend S. S. Jones, an itinerant minister and businessman. Known and respected by the citizens of the towns whose lives he captured on film, Rev. Jones’s work offers revealing glimpses of these communities as a haven for African Americans who very often faced discrimination elsewhere in America. The subjects are everyday life: a family on the front porch of their bungalow, shop workers at a storefront, farmers plowing their fields, children playing on seesaws in a schoolyard. Much of the material documents the economic life of the towns, from business districts filled with prosperous merchants to the homes of successful professionals, with an abundant countryside beyond. As Rhea Combs, curator of film and photography for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, points out in her commentary, here we even find a married couple who were oil barons, proof of the extraordinary progress made in the relatively short time since the end of slavery. The fashions and hairstyles, automobiles and horses, and even such details as a man manually pumping gasoline at a filling station make the films a fascinating record of the lives of Americans, and African Americans in particular, in the early 20th century.
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Before the Land Run:: The Historic All-Black Towns of Oklahoma
The Historic All-Black Towns of Oklahoma are a part of U.S. history that is missing from most history books. At one time, Edward P. McCabe, the founder of the town of Langston, OK sought to make Oklahoma an All-Black State. Is that a surprising fact? While Oklahoma did not become an all black state, it did create close to 50 black towns- more than any other state in the Union. Thirteen of these towns still exist. The author Cheryl Coleman has visited all of the surviving towns and interviewed residents and leaders. Travel back in time, and learn the fascinating stories of these Oklahomans whose ancestors lived “Before the Land Run”.
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Rare Footage Shows All-Black Towns in 1920s America | NowThis
This rare footage shows what life was like in all-Black towns during the 1920s.
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Located just outside of St. Louis, Kinloch was once a community locked off from the rest of the area by natural and man-made barriers. In spite of a lack of financial resources, it once provided its residents with a school district, city hall, post office, business district, and recreational facilities. Residents will recognize Dunbar Elementary, the oldest school for blacks in St. Louis County, Holy Angels, the oldest continuing black parish in the St. Louis Archdiocese, as well as former residents Congresswoman Maxine Waters and political activist Dick Gregory. Eventually, due to insufficient revenue, this once thriving community fell into decline, and is now struggling to keep its small town values and ideals alive.
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Not Just Tulsa: 5 Destroyed Black Towns
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No Place Like Home: A Story About An All-Black, All-American Town
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Charlie’s window on the world offers us an up-close and personal view of this historic town during its heyday. In an era of great flux-the immediate wake of World War I; the dawn of women’s suffrage; the rapid industrialization of America; the introduc-tion of the doomed social experiment known as “Prohibition”; the continuation of unstable race rela-tions and racial hostility, intimidation, and violence against African- Americans . . . Boley became a kind of cocoon enshrouding African-Americans (“coloreds” or “Negroes” at the time). They thrived, emboldened and empowered by the sense of openness and oppor-tunity the town provided.
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The EVIL History Of Flooding Black Towns
Imagine living in a thriving Black community where you could find refuge from discrimination in the days when racism was at its peak. Such communities existed in the United States during segregation, and at least 200 of them were established by 1888. But as time passed, many of these communities disappeared from the map, completely erased from black history.
Why were these towns deliberately hidden and erased, and what can we learn from this dark and troubling part of black history?
In this video, we will reveal some of th
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Black Wealthy: The All Black Town of Boley Oklahoma
PREVIEW: • Are you curious about to learn about black history of Oklahoma? • Do you want to know what happened in Attempted Bank Robbery in Boley, Oklahoma? If so, then keep reading! Oklahoma history includes a complex tapestry of themes, tales, and points of view, including those of the state’s varied community of black people, who were the land’s first human inhabitants thousands of years ago. An appendix includes recommendations for visits to historic sites in Oklahoma as well as further reading material. The history of black Oklahomans is intricately intertwined with the westward expansion of the United States and the quest for land in the nineteenth century. When European farmers began clamoring for cotton fields in what is now the American southeast, they put pressure on the government to expel Indian tribes from the area. Oklahomans, even those who differed about how to accomplish that objective, recognized the constitutional concept of equality as early as the twenty-first century, according to the state’s most recent census. It was their conviction, however, that the state and the nation had already gone too far to turn around. A renewed sense of pride in their history and optimism for the future, black Oklahomans celebrated the finest of their ancestors and paid tribute to a storied past that was a story of struggles and success. HERE’S WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SPECIAL: • When Did Oklahoma Became A State • Black History is Oklahoma History • Special Proclamation Of Benjamin Harrison • Establishment of Oklahoma Statehood • Rejuvenation & Reconstruction • Historic Oklahoma Bank Tied To Pretty Boy Floyd To Be Restored • Much, much more! Interested?
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One of the many reasons that these towns no longer exist includes the change of small town to an industrial town which is difficult. Other reasons include the invasion by American terrorist groups and legal measures such as imminent domain.