Thirteen All-Black Towns of Oklahoma Exhibit

After the 1889 Land Run, E. P. McCabe and others who were trying to "get away from the associations that clustered about them about in the Southern states...[and] the disgraceful surroundings that so degraded their people," established all-black towns in the new territory of Oklahoma. They wished "to show the people of the United States and of the world that they were not only loyal citizens but were capable of advancement." 

Nowhere else, neither in the Deep South nor the Far West, did so many African American men and women come together to create, occupy, and govern their own communities. This traveling exhibit, loaned to us for the month of June by the Oklahoma History Center, highlights the thirteen towns that are still incorporated today: Boley, Brooksville, Clearview, Grayson, Langston, Lima, Red Bird, Rentiesville, Taft, Tatums, Tullahassee, Summit, and Vernon.