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For generations, white and Native historians claimed that Native slave-owners from the Five Tribes were less violent than white slave owners. The story of Lucy, a Black enslaved woman owned by a Choctaw master who was BURNED ALIVE by her female Choctaw owner disproves this myth. 
In 1858 an enslaved man named Prince confessed to the murder of his master Richard Harkins. He claimed he had killed him with an axe to his head—transforming a tool of his forced labor to a weapon to end the life of his abusive enslaver. After Prince murdered Harkins,
he used a rope to a tie a rock to Harkins’s body and drowned him in a river. When he confessed under probable torture he “named” his accomplices, including his Aunt Lucy who he claimed urged him to kill Harkins for some time and even taught him how to tie the rope around his dead
Oklahoma is the perfect example of race being a myth crafted to shift control of land and wealth into white communities. Because each individual Native person in the Five Tribes received a land allotment (including women), white lawmakers made all non-Black people legally white.
This allowed for white men to marry non-Black Native women and shift control of Native lands into white communities and hands. Even though most white men couldn’t get a Native land allotment themself, by re-classifying non-Black Natives as white and setting up Jim Crow marriage
laws on racial lines, they were able to control Native women’s lands thru marriage and accumulate wealth. These Jim Crow Laws were the first laws every established after Oklahoma became a state and came into effect on December 18, 1907.
#FreedmenHistorySpotlightSaturday: Today, we spotlight a #MMIW of Afro-Indigenous descent from the Seminole Nation named Che-Cho-Ter, or Morning Dew. She was one of Chief Osceola’s two wives and bore him four children and was of mixed Black and Seminole descent.
According to accounts at the time in the Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine, Chief Osceola and Morning Dew traveled to Fort King (in present-day Ocala) to purchase supplies when Morning Dew was seized as a slave. “Evidently having Negro blood in her veins the law pronounced her a
slave.” This all happened while Seminoles still in Florida were struggling against forced removal on the Trail of Tears, objecting to being moved from their Indigenous lands in Florida. The Indians didn’t want to leave their lands and many free Black people in the Seminole Nation
#FreedmenHistorySpotlightSaturday: Sarah Rector
Did you know that the richest Black person in the world in 1915 was a 10-11 year old Creek Freedgirl? By 1915, Sarah Rector was worth over $25.5 million dollars in today’s dollars.
Did you know that the richest Black person in the world in 1915 was a 10-11 year old Creek Freedgirl? By 1915, Sarah Rector was worth over $25.5 million dollars in today’s dollars.
She made an income twice as high as President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Her income and wealth got to be so high that the state of Oklahoma’s white-dominated legislature attempted to pass a law reclassifying Sarah Rector as white.
Further, following her acquisition of wealth, she received marriage proposals from white men in the United States and around the world, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal, and at a pre-pubescent age.
Where did her wealth come from?
Where did her wealth come from?
