Thread by @ChoctawFreedmen

Tulsa didn’t become “Black Wall Street” because a bunch of Black capitalists worked through Jim Crow to make a large amount of profit and found ways to build wealth in family units. Tulsa’s wealth was built off land allotments Afro-Indigenous people received from the federal govt

In fact, most of the Black towns in Oklahoma were built on Freedmen’s land allotments and were developed by Freedmen from money they made from oil on their land or from building businesses on their land allotments.

We need to stop acting like Tulsa is some story about the success of Black capitalism or respectability politics. In fact, Oklahoma was so unique because Freedpeople of all genders and marital statuses from the Five Tribes received land allotments.

Tulsa is really more of a story of how the redistribution of land to former slaves can positively affect building Black towns and community centers. This isn’t a story about Black capitalists—at least not initially. It’s a story of how government distribution of land to

Black Natives can lead to positive affects for the whole Black community. Even though land allotments WERE NOT reparations, they give some idea of how the redistribution of land or other resources could affect Black communities.

#NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

Btw please follow @MCIFB1866Treaty! Most of the base of people in Tulsa Freedmen-wise were Creek Freedmen!

Freedmen of the Five Tribes are Afro-Indigenous. We descend from people of African descent who were owned by members of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations and some free Black people who also had ties to the Nation.

https://twitter.com/choctawfreedmen/status/1327656996166914049

We received land allotments as a part of the Curtis Act of 1898, which extended the Dawes Act of the Five Tribes and broke up our tribes’ communal lands into individual allotments. As tribal members with treaty rights to land and citizenship (per the Treaties of 1866)

We were included in these allotments. This meant that every Freedman, Freedwoman, and Freedchild received an allotment. You can definitely begin to see how this may have shifted gender and marriage norms in the Black community in Oklahoma, with women having their own land.

PLEASE SIGN THE CREEK FREEDMEN PETITION

https://twitter.com/choctawfreedmen/status/1327339468823654402

We are still actively being denied basic citizenship rights:

https://twitter.com/choctawfreedmen/status/1327692417424908288

Donate to the Descendants of the Freedmen of the Five Tribes GoFundMe @VannMarilyn: gofundme.com/f/federal-cour…