Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and Black Wall Street. With special guest, Florence Price!

Oklahoma keeps coming up this year as a theme in a variety of unexpected ways both for me personally, and for the nation. I recently took my dad to see the new production of Oklahoma! for his first-ever trip to New York, which certainly provided a great deal of added resonance when millions watched the many references to same in the alt-Tulsa of Watchmen (further resonance with Hamilton there!). Meanwhile, and unrelated, I’ve found myself becoming interested in the music of Jerod Tate, and thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision, we are all now learning more about Oklahoma's history with regard to First Nations. Oklahoma almost begins to serve as a of mental totem for a lot of other important ideas in understanding our history in the US.

One place in which the twin threads of slavery and *Indian removal come up in particular is understanding the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. A fact most of us (including myself) probably didn't have on recall until this week is that Tulsa was founded by the Lochapoka and Muscogee nations in 1836 when they completed the dreaded Trail of Tears (which was illegal even by US standards).

To get there, we need one important fact highlighted by Rebecca Nagle's excellent podcast This Land. It is the uncomfortable truth that the Muscogee Nation (though not all American Indian tribes/nations) held slaves and allied itself with the confederacy. After the Civil War, it negotiated a new treaty with the US in which it agreed to free its slaves and in which it agreed to sell off another 3 million acres of its lands to give out to new freedmen. So, it's messy. Very, very messy! (By the way, Tate wrote the theme song for This Land.)

But then, something interesting happened. Muscogee Freedmen were added to the rolls of the tribe. They became citizens of Muscogee nation, and many of them settled in Tulsa. While most of the south began erecting massive structural barriers for black excellence (Jim Crow), the Muscogee Nation tried, for the most part, to actually do right by its former slaves. While they engaged in slavery as a practice, they lacked the racial animus to attempt to perpetually hold freed slaves back. Or, they at least lacked the strongest possible degree of animus, and did not mirror white governments in their policies toward former slaves.

Flash forward over 50 years, and thanks to efforts from folks like Booker T. Washington and O. W. Gurley, large chunks of land in Tulsa were purchased and sold exclusively to African Americans, many of whom were those original Muscogee freedman in an effort to create a Black majority area that could be impervious to the rise of Jim Crow. This for me was a bit of an "aha" moment: key to Black success was the mere absence of intentional white-erected barriers thereto. Tulsa eventually became more like the rest of white America, but its roots as a hub for First Nations folks allowed their ethos to permeate the land and create space free of the white gaze, if only for a vanishingly short period of time, for its Black citizens.

[Side note: For me, this ties very much into the history of Florence Price. As Rae Linda Brown documents thoroughly in her biography of FP, released posthumously just this past month, Price’s family history in Little Rock very closely mirrors some of the history exposed in Tulsa. It would be too much to get into all of that right now, but Florence's story represents a multi-generational project that was possible only in a brief window of time before the full devastation of Jim Crow and incessant lynchings made it impossible. Thus (with notable exceptions, also unique to their time and place), we mostly lack a succession of Black composers of the next two generations after Price that might otherwise have been expected. To be clear, there was no dearth of Black musical excellence during the period I just mentioned. I'm speaking very narrowly here. It nonetheless attests to yet another case where Black excellence is as much a staple of Black life as one would expect to see with any other conceivable group, absent the galling oppression of slavery and Jim Crow, to name just a couple of examples.]

And again, land and messiness comes in, because these were tribal lands that were taken from Musogee, Cherokee and Osage Indians. And tons more was being sold off to white folks, and a great deal of land (I'm summarizing) was parceled out to Native Americans themselves with the goal of getting them to sell off some of it, and then lose other portions through squatters' rights, until there was nothing left.

[Another side note: for anyone who thought this was ancient history, it's not. Take a look at the commercial chicken farms being setup spuriously to this very day in reservation residential areas. In the process they are powdering whole communities with literal chickens***. All in the name of white profit on land promised to the Five Tribes (again, listen to This Land!).]

Back to Black Wall Street: The fatal flaw in the plan was the underestimation of the vile hatred and disdain that their white neighbors would feel and respond to at the sight of Black excellence. The brutal revenge for Black achievement was exacted in 1921 as millions of dollars of black wealth, and 35 city blocks were destroyed. At least 300 black citizens were dead, and an estimated 10,000 successful middle class Black Tulsans found themselves destitute overnight.

The messiness continue right up through to today (see the chicken farms!). I don't pretend there is some big insight here, but this week’s SCOTUS decision does at last give some room for dim hope that some positive steps may be possible going forward, perhaps more than previously realized. As US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (who is a Tulsa resident and Muscogee citizen) says, "Some changes take centuries to reveal themselves." Let us hope, though, that it does not take justice centuries to reveal itself.

To achieve those steps, I think the very simple balm for that is massively educating ourselves about it. I, for one, was shocked that there was any way that Oklahoma could be restored or that lost sovereignty might be able to be somehow reconstituted to the First Nations in Oklahoma or across the country, which only shows that we need to learn more as a society, and to broaden our imagination about how to make our society just for all its members.

As a reminder, this is not a partisan issue, which would go far beyond the scope of a blog that is primarily here to serve music. There is not a single page of our history on these matters that looks great for white liberals. The Dawes commission was believed by liberals to be a great way to "help" American Indians by "integrating" (assimilating) them into American (white) culture.

Look, I'm no historian, I'm a conductor. Performing musicians use a (hopefully) rigorous process to analyze a variety of sources to seek broader truths for use in a specific application. Namely, performance. It is definitely not a science, and it is not really a part of the humanities in the traditional academic sense. It is art. Further, I’m a white guy myself. These two facts should help to situate this essay in the space from which it comes and speak to what it can and cannot achieve.

Nonetheless, it’s incumbent on people from every background to speak up about injustice, and use their own platform, however large or small, to add to the chorus of individuals crying out for change, especially around historic inequities that still reach into the present day. As an individual who works for change especially around the music and legacy of Florence Price, I am regularly reminded of the historic difficulties that musicians who are Black, Indigenous, and persons of color have faced in a largely white institution like classical music.

Recreative performing artists (people who perform composed works such as a play or a symphony), rely on data sources such as textual analysis, performance history and practice, original sources, cultural context, and community perspectives to try develop a working concept of the spirit of a work (a piece of music, say) so that they bring a moral core to their own performance. This moral core centers performers in a way that allows them to exudes authenticity and humanity in their work. Somewhere in that moral core must be a commitment to basic principles of justice. This is not a political commitment. I accept that different people can come to different conclusions about how to address the problems we face today. Rather, this is a spiritual commitment to deeper principles; a commitment that transcends parties, ideologies, elections, affiliations, and nations. This is a larger topic for discussion that I will have to return to some other time.

Let’s all continue to think out loud and in print about how to develop a moral core to our society, one that is rooted in an accurate and complete understanding of our history, one that can be a source for just living, and one that can serve as a source for humane art. In light of all that has come to light in a recent look at Oklahoma history, we should apply the motto of another state, one that is popular across certain sectors of our society. It is the same logic of, "don't tread on me" to all of our people.

Santayana. It's cliche because it's a great quote. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Perhaps this is our opportunity to refresh a few critical details so that our future doesn’t resemble our past.

*I use the word Indian freely here because most American Indians use the term freely and show a firm preference for it. It sounds like it may be an anachronistic word to white ears and it is undoubtedly just as colonial as just about any other aspect of our society, but I am assured by a variety of sources across several modalities that, on most reservations, that is mostly not the case. YMMV but I think we should call folks whatever they want to call themselves - which above all is to refer to the SPECIFIC nation from which they hail. (For more, start here and here.)

Books

I will never pass on an opportunity to encourage folks to learn more about Florence Price! Read the first two chapters to dig deeper. Also take a look at this book of Poems by the US poet laureate.