Foot-loose and fancy-free By Angie Debo

McCabe's political concern clearly indicates the importance he placed on self-determination.

I expect to have a Negro population of over one hundred thousand within two years, and we will not only have made substantial advancement for my people, but we will by that time secure control of political affairs. At present we are Republicans, but the time will soon come when we will be able to dictate the policy of this territory or state, and when that time comes we will have a Negro state governed by Negroes. We do not wish to antagonize the whites. They are necessary in the development of a new country, but they owe my race homes, and my race owes to itself a governmental control of those homes.

McCabe and the Langston City promoters were attacked by some who said that they were "reaping a fortune by fleecing the unsuspecting members of their race, charging them 50¢ apiece for admission to the colony." Though McCabe was never directly accused, a white promoter, W.R. Hill, who founded Hill City, in Graham County, was arrested for alleged shady dealings. Nevertheless, the colonization movement had stirred a new sense of identity and destiny among black people. In a revealing incident, the pastor of a Kansas church asked his audience to join him in singing "America." The congregation refused and the pastor was forced to substitute "John Brown's Body."

McCabe's involvement with Langston City did not sit well with white Republican leaders. He was nicknamed "pushahead," referring to his desire to be appointed governor of the territory. The turning point for McCabe, and the black settlers as well, came on September 19, 1892, when he attempted to make a speech at the Republican county convention telling why he had urged blacks to bolt the party.

McCabe's bold confrontation brought the discontent of black people to a head, and nearly six months later it appeared that the break was complete. A call was issued to Oklahoma black settlers for a convention to organize an independent political party. The Republican Party had been using black voters to keep their majority, and had encouraged immigration for that purpose. But the black settlers in Oklahoma had come too far to allow a repetition of de facto disfranchisement, or second-class citizenship. The black Republican American Citizen observed this phenomenon and sadly concluded that unless this third party move could be headed off, the Republican Party in Oklahoma was doomed.

McCabe apparently moved to Washington, D.C., in 1894 and accepted an appointment as register of deeds for the District of Columbia. In 1897 he returned to Oklahoma to accept the position of deputy auditor of Oklahoma Territory, a post he held until 1907 when Oklahoma became a state. With the subsequent disfranchisement of black citizens, McCabe moved to Chicago, where he died in 1923.

For those who struggled on in Oklahoma, it became in fact, a Southern state. Perhaps it was only poetic justice that the 1910 "Grandfather Clause" which was used to disfranchise black people was declared unconstitutional in 1915. The Oklahoma experiment was a modest success, and Langston University, established in 1897, continues to attest to that success. For those who sought the promised land of that day, and for those who seek it on our own, political self-determination was the ultimate, crucial question.

The Twin Territories
By W. David Baird and Danney Goble³⁶
Before there was any state of Oklahoma, there were two territories—the Oklahoma and Indian territories—which commonly were called the Twin Territories. In some respects their eventual combination into one state was the product of accident. But in another since, it was no accident at all. The political reality, Oklahoma, grew from circumstances that were both predictable and political themselves.

However closely related, the Twin Territories were hardly identical. Roughly the western half of the modern state was known as Oklahoma Territory. On the east lay the estates of the Five Tribes. Although commonly referred to as Indian Territory, that particular term was much less political than it was geographical in meaning. After all, there was no single, unified government over those lands. Instead they were separated into five independent and quite distinct Indian republics.
Tribal Politics
As noted, political participation in each of those republics was tightly limited to the citizens of the separate tribe. Except for a handful of newcomers who had married into those tribes and thereby had acquired the status of tribal citizens, neither the whites nor the blacks who were flooding into the territory enjoyed any of the benefits of Indian citizenship.

For tribal citizens, however, those governments were quite important. Both the full-bloods and their mixed-blood cousins were proud of their Indian heritage, and intermarried citizens also recognized the significance of tribal traditions. Not the least element of that heritage and those traditions was the set of tribal governments that had begun right after the removals.

Although the forms of these tribal governments looked much like those common in most of the United States, the reality behind them was unique to Indian Territory. For example, although each tribe had at least two political parties, in no tribe were these at all related to the Democratic and Republican parties that existed throughout the rest of the nation. Instead the tribal parties continued to reflect distinctly Indian differences, many of which went back to pre-removal divisions. Thus the Creek Nation’s political parties in the late 1800s still reflected the ancient split between Upper and Lower Creeks. Similarly, the Cherokee parties continued the rivalries between the Ridge and Ross factions.

In practice the Indian governments exercised only the most limited powers. Although they continued to maintain fine schools for their own children and effective police forces for their own citizens, their authority over most of their residents were minimal. For example, tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-tribal members in the region which led to a large number of outlaws from the surrounding states taking refuge within Indian Territory. Also, the federal constitution’s “commerce clause” allowed Congress to have ultimate power over the Choctaw Nation’s coal industry rather than the Choctaw legislature.

The whites and blacks who settled within Indian Territory, despite political standing within the tribes, still held Republican and Democratic party conventions and acted like their counterparts in the surrounding states. Although they knew that their actions were not valid, they were hopeful of a future when the Indians no longer possessed control over Indian Territory and they would be able to implement their own political agendas.

These “outsiders” within Indian Territory selected their party allegiances based upon their attitudes regarding the Civil War and its aftermath. Blacks and those whites from the North favored the Republicans while those whites from the South favored the Democrats. In that Indian Territory was surrounded by former Confederate states, it attracted far more Democrats than Republicans. Should tribal government disappear, it was almost certain that Democrats would be in charge.

Another difference separated the political affairs of the Twin Territories. Unlike the tribal dominance in Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory did have a formal territorial government, established by the Organic Act of 1890 that officially created Oklahoma Territory.

Modeled on similar patterns for the transition from territory to state status since the ratification of the constitution, the Organic Act provided a simple structure of government. A governor and a territorial secretary exercised executive authority, both appointed by the President. Legislative authority rested with a bicameral legislature selected by the territory’s residents. Three judges appointed by the President oversaw the territorial courts.

Party control in Oklahoma Territory generally went to the Republicans in that they held a slight majority, a majority that could be overcome if the Democrats would side with a minor party of any reasonable size. In that the President appointed the governor, secretary, and judges, whichever party controlled the White House controlled executive and judicial control in Oklahoma Territory. For thirteen of the seventeen years as a territory, Republicans controlled the presidency. Only one of the territory’s nine governors was a Democrat.

In the Twin Territories progressives saw a magnificent opportunity to achieve all of those things and to achieve them all at once. Statehood would require Oklahomans to write a constitution. Progressives hoped to place every one of their ideas right in the heart of that constitution.

The progressive agenda found favor among many Democrats, especially in Indian Territory. Uniting with other of like mind, they met in Muskogee in 1905 and gave form and substance to their ideas. Proposing to create a state of Indian Territory alone, they gave it a name—Sequoyah—and wrote a constitution for it. Contained within the proposed constitution was nearly every item on the progressive’s wish list.

Of course, Sequoyah never became a state. Progressive or not, any state formed from Indian Territory alone was certain to be Democratic. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican controlled Congress had no interest in such a prospect. Instead, they insisted on a joint statehood of Democratic Indian Territory and Republican Oklahoma Territory that had some chance of sending Republicans to Washington. To prepare the way for its entry into the union, Congress approved the Oklahoma Enabling Act in 1906.

In preparation for those elections, the progressive Democrats from the Sequoyah convention reminded potential voters of the progressive ideals that they already supported. They also vowed to support an additional list of progressive reforms proposed by both the Indiahoma Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Labor, whose members were both Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans remained largely silent during much of the campaign for the upcoming election of convention delegates, believing that registered Republicans would select Republican delegates and Democrats would select Democratic delegates. However, Republicans were soon forced to voice a stance on an issue that arose during the campaigns.

Most southern states had laws requiring racial segregation. These Jim Crow laws were a major reason that many blacks had migrated to the Twin Territories. Now, the Democrats in those territories, due in party to their southern legacies, began to demand that Oklahoma’s new constitution must embrace Jim Crow laws too.

In that segregation was popular among most whites, even white republicans. This led the territory’s Republicans into an impossible dilemma. If they opposed Jim Crow, many of their white supporters might vote Democratic. If they supported segregation, their black followers might not vote at all. Calculating that black voters had nowhere else to turn, the Republicans made their decision and cast their support for Jim Crow laws as well.

On the day of the election for delegates to the constitutional convention, the majority of whites voted for the party that committed itself to the progressive reforms, the Democrats. Most black voters, refusing to support a party which endorsed segregation, did not vote at all. After years of Republican domination in Oklahoma Territory, 100 of the 112 convention delegate seats went to the Democrats.

Meeting at Guthrie through the last weeks of 1906 and early 1907, the Democratic victors proceeded to keep nearly all of their many pledges. One result was that they produced the longest written constitution produced up to that time. Another result was that Oklahoma’s constitution was regarded as the most progressive for its day. Strict corporate regulation, safeguards for farmers, protection for workers, rights for children, new instruments of popular rule—all of these and other provisions found their way into the 250,000-word document. There, too, was the mandate of segregation in the new state.

When the constitution was submitted to the people for final ratification they were to vote both on the constitution and for those individuals who would become the first state officials in the event that Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt approved of the finished constitution. In the debate over ratification, Republicans encouraged voters to vote no on the constitution and while Democrats reminded voters that it was they who were chiefly responsible for its progressive provisions. This led the vast majority of the people, who supported the progressive agenda, to fear that Republicans, who were against the final constitution, might attempt to destroy its provisions if elected. When the results were counted, the constitution was overwhelmingly approved and Democrats were elected to every statewide office in the new government.

Although Congress approved of the document, President Theodore Roosevelt wavered on signing the constitution. Roosevelt was opposed to segregation elements within the document. However, due to the Supreme Courts’ ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, his advisors reminded him that segregation was considered to be legal. Reluctantly Roosevelt signed Oklahoma’s constitution on November 16, 1907. With the stroke of the President’s pen, Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in the union and Charles N. Haskell, a key leader at both the Sequoyah and Guthrie constitutional conventions, was sworn in as and the first governor.

The Good Angel of Oklahoma:

Kate Barnard
By Margaret Truman³⁷
For a few brief years at the beginning of this century, Kate Barnard was a power to be reckoned with in Oklahoma politics.

A small, pretty woman with olive skin, black hair, and deep blue eyes, Kate appeared on the political scene in 1907 just as the “Twin Territories”—Oklahoma and Indian—were about to merge and become our forty-sixth state. It was a rare opportunity to mold the future and Kate Barnard played a major role in the drama. A new commonwealth was about to be formed, a new constitution written. Kate Barnard was determined that this constitution would aid Oklahoma’s poor and dispossessed—especially the children.

An intense sympathy for the losers, the dropouts, the failures of our competitive society burned deep in Kate Barnard’s spirit. Her mother died when she was only 18 months old and her father’s job as a land surveyor kept him away from home for long periods of time. In her long days alone, she sometimes dreamt of doing something bold and heroic which would win his admiration. It is easy to see why she was instinctively sympathetic to anyone—especially children—who lacked a caring parent or friend. She knew only too well the hollow ache of that pain.

Kate thought that happiness had finally arrived when she and her father moved to Oklahoma City in 1892. But Mr. Barnard chose to settle on land he owned in one of the city’s slums—where Kate got her first glimpse of mass misery. Not everyone who followed the frontier was a self-reliant Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett type. A dismaying number were failures who thought geography was the answer to their woes. But they only repeated their dismal performance in a new area and their wives and children remained victims of poverty’s grinding humiliation and deprivation.

Kate wrote a series of letters to the Daily Oklahoman describing the grim life of the city’s poor and asking the blunt question: What was Oklahoma City going to do about it? The well to do responded by practically burying Kate in no fewer than ten thousand garments and a mountain of furniture. She and a small group of women associates found four hundred destitute children, many of them living in tents, gave them the clothing, bought books for them, and sent them to school.

While she continued to give away food and clothing, Kate organized Oklahoma City’s unemployed into a labor union. She gave frequent public speeches encouraging the Constitutional Convention delegates to address compulsory education, abolition of child labor, and the creation of a Department of Charities and Corrections to supervise the state’s social welfare programs. All three proposals became major issues in the state Constitutional Convention and all were adopted by the delegates. Thus it came as no surprise when the delegates nominated Kate for the job as the first Commissioner of the Department of Charities and Corrections.

Kate’s popularity combined with her gifts as a public speaker made her virtually unbeatable. She looked sweet and innocent, but there was an inner toughness beneath her charm. On one occasion, she was scheduled to speak in a town where fifteen coal miners had recently been burned to death because of inadequate safety conditions at the mine. The town fathers warned he not to come, but Kate went anyway. When she arrived, all the public halls suddenly became “unavailable.” Unintimidated, Kate staged her rally on a street corner.

As soon as she began to speak, the negligent mine owner pushed his way to the front of the crowd and stood there, arms folded, glaring at her. He was a thick-necked barrel of a man with a violent temper. He had obviously used this tactic in the past to silence other visiting speakers. But it did not work with Kate Barnard. She glared right back at him, and tossed aside her prepared speech.

Pointing her finger at the mine owner she said:

The diamonds you are wearing in your shirt front were bought with the blood of fifteen men who were burned to death in a mine which you own, because you would not spend the money to provide two entrances. You made their wives widows; you made their children orphans; you are responsible to Almighty God for the long, weary lives of poverty and ignorance which they face; and if the people of this state of Oklahoma will elect me to the office which I am seeking I will change such conditions, not only in your mine, but in all others.

In the very election when territorial settlers voted for Oklahoma’s Constitution, they also cast they votes for the first elected officials for what they hoped would be a new state. In that election in 1907, Kate made political history. She polled six thousand more votes than any other Democrat on the ticket and at the age of 32 became the first woman in the United States to be elected to statewide office. An accomplishment amplified even more by the fact that women could not vote in that election.

The early years of the twentieth century—the “Progressive Era”—were a period of tremendous social awareness. There were demands for reform in practically every area of American life. Kate was in favor of most of the reforms, with one surprising exception. She had no interest in women’s suffrage. “The boys always do what I ask them,” she said, “so I don’t see any need to go to the polls myself.” Like a good politician, she was willing to compromise on some issues, to win on more important ones. But Oklahoma would soon discover that there were some issues on which Kate Barnard would never compromise.

The work of the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections covered every aspect of social welfare. Kate rounded up homeless children and saw that they were housed and fed and sent to school; she battled for safety laws in mines and factories and explored new ways of educating the deaf, the dumb, and the blind. One of her major interests was prison reform. In the summer of 1909, she barged into the Kansas State Prison, where Oklahoma convicts were being kept under a contract system, and demanded to be taken on an inspection tour. She discovered that the prisoners were being grossly overworked and horrendously mistreated. The guards had devised a number of inhuman punishments. On was binding and gagging a man, smearing his face with molasses, and then leaving him beside an open window where flies and other insects could get at him. Another was tying a man’s hands and feet behind his back until they met, and then sealing him face down in a heavy coffin.



Kate Barnard—Oklahoma Historical Society archives

Kate issued a devastating report of her finding. In the wake of the scandal it caused, Oklahoma was inspired to build its own model penitentiary (at McAlester) and Kansas convicts won some badly needed prison reforms.

Kate was reelected by a large majority in 1910. But her courage and her conscience forced her to fight some of the most powerful men in both her own Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The trouble started when a report came into the Department of Charities and Corrections that three “elf” children were living in a field just outside of town. They slept in the hollow of an old tree and got their food by begging at nearby farmhouses. Kate sent one of her assistants to find the trio and bring them back to her office.

The three “elves” turned out to be Indian children. They were a sorry sight. Their clothes were filthy rags, their arms and legs were scrawny and covered with scabs, their black hair was so tangled and matted that it resisted comb and brush and had to be cut away from their scalps.

The youngsters were sent to a children’s shelter while Kate set about finding out who they were. After six weeks of investigation, she turned up the fact that their parents had died a few years before and they had been placed under the protection of a guardian. The man had also been appointed guardian for some 51 other Indian minors. When Kate asked him where the other children were, he shrugged indifferently. “I don’t know,” he murmured, “I’ve lost all track of them.”

What made the situation even more appalling was another discovery by Kate’s investigators. The three Indian children owned valuable lands in the Glenn Pool oilfields. The guardian had been collecting their rents and keeping them for himself.

Kate was horrified to discover that defrauding Indians had become a popular and profitable pastime in Oklahoma. Originally, the federal government was supposed to hold the land in trust for each Indian for twenty-five years. But federal officials transferred the responsibility for Indian minors to Oklahoma courts after statehood. Many of these children were immensely wealthy. Coal had been discovered on the Choctaw and Chickasaw lands, oil and gas on the Creek and Cherokee territories. Since the children were completely ignorant about their holding, the opportunities for graft and corruption were enormous.