Looking for Rose: Muskogee, Oklahoma - Clare Kinberg, 10th installment in a series
This is a story about my aunt Rose and her husband Zebedee Arnwine. Before they met and before they moved together to a rural town in Southwest Michigan, they’d lived for more than 30 years in their separate communities — she in St Louis, Missouri, with immigrant Jewish parents, and he in a family of Black farmers in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Though I never met Aunt Rose, I knew five of her siblings quite well, among them my father. Writing my aunt’s life is an inward-facing process: though a generation distant, her background is my own. I can hear her sisters’ voices, my father’s inflections. I listen for echoes within to imagine Aunt Rose.
To write Mr. Arnwine’s life, I search directories, public legal documents and census records. These shards of his life have led me to buried scenes of Oklahoma history — American history. Though deep in the archives, this history that shaped the lives of my aunt and her husband also ,shapes my own 21st Century life.
My 19-year-old daughter came into my bedroom two nights ago to tell me about a TikTok she’d just viewed of a white supremacist angrily
ranting about an all-Black town somewhere in the South. “I want to go live there,” she said.
She didn’t know I was writing, just then, about ball-Black towns in Oklahoma three generations
ago.My aunt’s husband, Zebedee Arnwine, was born 100 years before my daughters, in 1902 in Cherokee County, East Texas. Soon after his
birth, Zebedee’s parents moved their family 300 miles straight north to Indian Territory, to what would become, in 1907, the state of Oklahoma.
The Arnwine family’s move to the area near Muskogee, Oklahoma was part of a large migration of Black farmers, a wave that came a generation after the Exodusters of 1877, yet two decades before the Great Migration to the North. This relocation included thousands of
families who organized all-Black towns in a part of the Indian Territory where some were advocating for an all-Black state. They were dreaming of a place where Black people could
live free from ever present degradations and violence.
At the same time that some were imagining an all-Black state in the Indian Territory, the United States Federal Government adopted bureaucratic, legal mechanisms to allot Native American tribal lands to individuals who could be proven to be members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, or
Seminole tribes. In 1887, the Dawes Act had authorized the United States President to subdivide communal tribal lands into individual
allotments. Nine years later, in 1898, the Curtis Amendment to the Dawes Act abolished tribal governments and assigned the Dawes Commission the responsibility of determining
each individual’s tribal membership. The racial and economic struggles in the Indian Territory during those years were unique, in part because the Black slaves of some of the tribes, freed by the Civil War, were also considered tribal members, and could be included in the allotments. Known as the “Creek Freedmen”
the people enslaved by members of the Creek tribe, and their descendants, had complicated
relationships with African Americans arriving from other parts of the South.
In Acres of Aspiration: The All-Black Towns of Oklahoma, Hannibal B. Johnson explains, “Beyond the natural yearning for freedom,
many Blacks held firm to a perceived economic truth: land ownership held the key to success. Moreover, they thought land ownership would lead inexorably to full citizenship. . . . In trickles, then in torrents, Blacks streamed first into Kansas, then increasingly into Oklahoma. This bold swim upstream by Black pioneers sparked controversy, then fear and resentment, among local whites. This decidedly mixed reception failed to stem the tide of migrants. The floodgates having parted, a cascade of newcomers spilled across the region. Oklahoma, some thought, would evolve into an all-Black state captained by a Black governor. All-Black towns and settlements in the windswept Oklahoma plains captured the collective imagination of an entire people.”
Zebedee Arnwine was perhaps five years old when the Indian and Oklahoma Territories became the state of Oklahoma and adopted a
Jim Crow constitution. The new state’s constitution defined “White race” as everyone except anyone who was of African descent and then
went on to establish segregated schools and empowered the legislature to limit the voting rights of Blacks. The first bill to come before the new Oklahoma senate established into law the segregation of Blacks in public transportation
and public facilities.
Zebedee was working as a farmer with his father when on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, declared the United States was sending troops to Europe to fight what would become World War I because “The world must be made safe for democracy.” About a year later, 16-year-old Zebedee, claiming he was 18, briefly married and registered for the draft. He was one of the several hundred thousand Black men who registered but were not called up. I
have found no record of the dissolution this first early marriage.
Tamah, the woman who became Zebedee’s second wife, was born in 1901 to Rebecca Walker, an enrolled Creek Freedman. Still, Rebecca
was required to go in person and with a witness before the Dawes Commission in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to enroll three-year-old Tamah into the tribe. A transcript of the Dawes commission’s interview before a panel of white men is
preserved in the Oklahoma archives. Enrolling her young daughter into the tribe meant Tamah would be entitled to an allotment of land in the Muskogee area, in Indian Territory.
There was oil and gas under that land.
When Tamah was a teenager her land was leased to an oil and gas company that sent her a monthly check. However, as was common at
the time, a white “guardian” wasestablished by the court. The Muskogee Cimiter, a local Black newspaper, found more than 3,000 similar guardianship cases, showing that $100 million had been stolen from Native American and Black families. In Tamah’s case, her appointed guardian was evidently temporary, and he spent a good
deal of court time in an effort to become a permanent “guardian”
by proving Tamah’s incompetence to manage her estate. These court
proceedings, too, are preserved in the Oklahoma Historical Library. After three years of legal wrangling, Tamah, when she turned 18, won the right to manage her own affairs.
Not long after, she married Zeb Arnwine, and in 1924 Tamah and Ze-
bedee had a daughter they named Rebecca.
It was during this marriage that the Black community of Greenwood, not an hour away from Muskogee, was
attacked by a white mob, killing dozens if not hundreds, burning several square blocks, and leaving 10,000 Black people homeless.
Greenwood had been a prosperous Black city within the city of Tulsa with its own thriving economy, professionals, shops, and banks.
Tulsa was considered the oil capital of the world, and Greenwood the Black Wall Street.
One eyewitness account of the coordinated destruction of Greenwood was recorded by the attorney Buck Colbert Franklin in his autobiography, edited by his son and grandson, the historians John Hope and John Whittington Franklin. On the evening of May 31, 1921, Buck Franklin got wind of impending violence, and because he knew so many of the city’s leaders, white and Black, he thought he could do
something to prevent it:
I tried to reach [the sheriff’s office] but was unsuccessful, and I learned that the [phone] wires were cut. At daybreak [June 1, 1921] I went to my office still believing I could get to
the sheriff’s office. But I saw I was too late. Hundreds of men with drawn guns were approaching from every direction. . . . I stood at the steps to my office, and I was immediately arrested and taken to one of the many detention camps. Even then, airplanes were circling overhead, dropping explosives upon the buildings that had been looted, and big trucks were hauling all sorts of furniture and household goods away. In these camps I saw pregnant women, and one was so heavy that a doctor was called in to deliver her baby. Soon I was back upon the streets, but the building where I had my office was a smoldering ruin, and all my lawbooks and office fixtures had been consumed by flames. I went to where my rooming house
had stood a few short hours before, but it was in ashes, with all my clothes and the money to be used in moving my family. As far as one could see, not a Negro dwelling house or place of business stood.
Buck Franklin describes the trigger to the Tulsa massacre as an accusation against a teenage son of a well-known and respected Greenwood businessman. “The boy was on his job [as a shoe-shiner and janitor] and, boarding a very crowded elevator, he accidentally stepped on
the lady’s foot. She became angry and slapped him, and a fresh, cub newspaper reporter, without any experience and no doubt anxious for
a byline, gave out an erroneous report that a Negro had assaulted a white girl.”
This familiar yet false cross-racial accusation compounded generational trauma still felt in 2018 when Charles Blow, a New York Times opinion writer, interviewed 103-year-old Olivia J. Hooker, another eyewitness to the Tulsa
massacre. Hooker’s father owned an upscale department store in 1921, and the family lived in a comfortable five room home. “White men
broke into their house as Hooker and some of her siblings hid beneath an oak dining table, draped with a tablecloth. ‘They took a hatchet
to my sisters’ piano. They poured oil all over my grandmother’s bed. They stuffed the dresser with ammunition,’ Hooker told me. . . . They broke the phonograph and the Enrico Caruso
records her mother had received as a gift from a friend who had gone to study in Heidelberg,
Germany.”
I can only imagine the effects of this racist violence on young Zebedee Arnwine. I have been witness, though, to my daughters’ emerg-
ing identities as young Black women, their
self-love and their self-doubts, their righteous anger, their rising independence, their bold
confrontations with risk, all of these developing amid looping replays of white police beating, strangling, and shooting Black men and women. My daughters share with me their feelings of anger and vulnerability; because I am white, I know I don’t fully feel what they are experiencing. Yet, when there was a shooting in
a synagogue in Poway, California and when a rabbi’s houseguests were attacked with a machete in Monsey, New York, my daughters were the first to check in with me.
Racial segregation and racially based
injustice impact my integrated family’s life every day. Our ears are attuned to danger; violence imprinted in our cells, accompanying us, through the generations, on
This is a story about my aunt Rose and her husband Zebedee Arnwine. Before they met and before they moved together to a rural town in Southwest Michigan, they’d lived for more than 30 years in their separate communities — she in St Louis, Missouri, with immigrant Jewish parents, and he in a family of Black farmers in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Though I never met Aunt Rose, I knew five of her siblings quite well, among them my father. Writing my aunt’s life is an inward-facing process: though a generation distant, her background is my own. I can hear her sisters’ voices, my father’s inflections. I listen for echoes within to imagine Aunt Rose.
To write Mr. Arnwine’s life, I search directories, public legal documents and census records. These shards of his life have led me to buried scenes of Oklahoma history — American history. Though deep in the archives, this history that shaped the lives of my aunt and her husband also ,shapes my own 21st Century life.
My 19-year-old daughter came into my bedroom two nights ago to tell me about a TikTok she’d just viewed of a white supremacist angrily
ranting about an all-Black town somewhere in the South. “I want to go live there,” she said.
She didn’t know I was writing, just then, about ball-Black towns in Oklahoma three generations
ago.My aunt’s husband, Zebedee Arnwine, was born 100 years before my daughters, in 1902 in Cherokee County, East Texas. Soon after his
birth, Zebedee’s parents moved their family 300 miles straight north to Indian Territory, to what would become, in 1907, the state of Oklahoma.
The Arnwine family’s move to the area near Muskogee, Oklahoma was part of a large migration of Black farmers, a wave that came a generation after the Exodusters of 1877, yet two decades before the Great Migration to the North. This relocation included thousands of
families who organized all-Black towns in a part of the Indian Territory where some were advocating for an all-Black state. They were dreaming of a place where Black people could
live free from ever present degradations and violence.
At the same time that some were imagining an all-Black state in the Indian Territory, the United States Federal Government adopted bureaucratic, legal mechanisms to allot Native American tribal lands to individuals who could be proven to be members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, or
Seminole tribes. In 1887, the Dawes Act had authorized the United States President to subdivide communal tribal lands into individual
allotments. Nine years later, in 1898, the Curtis Amendment to the Dawes Act abolished tribal governments and assigned the Dawes Commission the responsibility of determining
each individual’s tribal membership. The racial and economic struggles in the Indian Territory during those years were unique, in part because the Black slaves of some of the tribes, freed by the Civil War, were also considered tribal members, and could be included in the allotments. Known as the “Creek Freedmen”
the people enslaved by members of the Creek tribe, and their descendants, had complicated
relationships with African Americans arriving from other parts of the South.
In Acres of Aspiration: The All-Black Towns of Oklahoma, Hannibal B. Johnson explains, “Beyond the natural yearning for freedom,
many Blacks held firm to a perceived economic truth: land ownership held the key to success. Moreover, they thought land ownership would lead inexorably to full citizenship. . . . In trickles, then in torrents, Blacks streamed first into Kansas, then increasingly into Oklahoma. This bold swim upstream by Black pioneers sparked controversy, then fear and resentment, among local whites. This decidedly mixed reception failed to stem the tide of migrants. The floodgates having parted, a cascade of newcomers spilled across the region. Oklahoma, some thought, would evolve into an all-Black state captained by a Black governor. All-Black towns and settlements in the windswept Oklahoma plains captured the collective imagination of an entire people.”
Zebedee Arnwine was perhaps five years old when the Indian and Oklahoma Territories became the state of Oklahoma and adopted a
Jim Crow constitution. The new state’s constitution defined “White race” as everyone except anyone who was of African descent and then
went on to establish segregated schools and empowered the legislature to limit the voting rights of Blacks. The first bill to come before the new Oklahoma senate established into law the segregation of Blacks in public transportation
and public facilities.
Zebedee was working as a farmer with his father when on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, declared the United States was sending troops to Europe to fight what would become World War I because “The world must be made safe for democracy.” About a year later, 16-year-old Zebedee, claiming he was 18, briefly married and registered for the draft. He was one of the several hundred thousand Black men who registered but were not called up. I
have found no record of the dissolution this first early marriage.
Tamah, the woman who became Zebedee’s second wife, was born in 1901 to Rebecca Walker, an enrolled Creek Freedman. Still, Rebecca
was required to go in person and with a witness before the Dawes Commission in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to enroll three-year-old Tamah into the tribe. A transcript of the Dawes commission’s interview before a panel of white men is
preserved in the Oklahoma archives. Enrolling her young daughter into the tribe meant Tamah would be entitled to an allotment of land in the Muskogee area, in Indian Territory.
There was oil and gas under that land.
When Tamah was a teenager her land was leased to an oil and gas company that sent her a monthly check. However, as was common at
the time, a white “guardian” wasestablished by the court. The Muskogee Cimiter, a local Black newspaper, found more than 3,000 similar guardianship cases, showing that $100 million had been stolen from Native American and Black families. In Tamah’s case, her appointed guardian was evidently temporary, and he spent a good
deal of court time in an effort to become a permanent “guardian”
by proving Tamah’s incompetence to manage her estate. These court
proceedings, too, are preserved in the Oklahoma Historical Library. After three years of legal wrangling, Tamah, when she turned 18, won the right to manage her own affairs.
Not long after, she married Zeb Arnwine, and in 1924 Tamah and Ze-
bedee had a daughter they named Rebecca.
It was during this marriage that the Black community of Greenwood, not an hour away from Muskogee, was
attacked by a white mob, killing dozens if not hundreds, burning several square blocks, and leaving 10,000 Black people homeless.
Greenwood had been a prosperous Black city within the city of Tulsa with its own thriving economy, professionals, shops, and banks.
Tulsa was considered the oil capital of the world, and Greenwood the Black Wall Street.
One eyewitness account of the coordinated destruction of Greenwood was recorded by the attorney Buck Colbert Franklin in his autobiography, edited by his son and grandson, the historians John Hope and John Whittington Franklin. On the evening of May 31, 1921, Buck Franklin got wind of impending violence, and because he knew so many of the city’s leaders, white and Black, he thought he could do
something to prevent it:
I tried to reach [the sheriff’s office] but was unsuccessful, and I learned that the [phone] wires were cut. At daybreak [June 1, 1921] I went to my office still believing I could get to
the sheriff’s office. But I saw I was too late. Hundreds of men with drawn guns were approaching from every direction. . . . I stood at the steps to my office, and I was immediately arrested and taken to one of the many detention camps. Even then, airplanes were circling overhead, dropping explosives upon the buildings that had been looted, and big trucks were hauling all sorts of furniture and household goods away. In these camps I saw pregnant women, and one was so heavy that a doctor was called in to deliver her baby. Soon I was back upon the streets, but the building where I had my office was a smoldering ruin, and all my lawbooks and office fixtures had been consumed by flames. I went to where my rooming house
had stood a few short hours before, but it was in ashes, with all my clothes and the money to be used in moving my family. As far as one could see, not a Negro dwelling house or place of business stood.
Buck Franklin describes the trigger to the Tulsa massacre as an accusation against a teenage son of a well-known and respected Greenwood businessman. “The boy was on his job [as a shoe-shiner and janitor] and, boarding a very crowded elevator, he accidentally stepped on
the lady’s foot. She became angry and slapped him, and a fresh, cub newspaper reporter, without any experience and no doubt anxious for
a byline, gave out an erroneous report that a Negro had assaulted a white girl.”
This familiar yet false cross-racial accusation compounded generational trauma still felt in 2018 when Charles Blow, a New York Times opinion writer, interviewed 103-year-old Olivia J. Hooker, another eyewitness to the Tulsa
massacre. Hooker’s father owned an upscale department store in 1921, and the family lived in a comfortable five room home. “White men
broke into their house as Hooker and some of her siblings hid beneath an oak dining table, draped with a tablecloth. ‘They took a hatchet
to my sisters’ piano. They poured oil all over my grandmother’s bed. They stuffed the dresser with ammunition,’ Hooker told me. . . . They broke the phonograph and the Enrico Caruso
records her mother had received as a gift from a friend who had gone to study in Heidelberg,
Germany.”
I can only imagine the effects of this racist violence on young Zebedee Arnwine. I have been witness, though, to my daughters’ emerg-
ing identities as young Black women, their
self-love and their self-doubts, their righteous anger, their rising independence, their bold
confrontations with risk, all of these developing amid looping replays of white police beating, strangling, and shooting Black men and women. My daughters share with me their feelings of anger and vulnerability; because I am white, I know I don’t fully feel what they are experiencing. Yet, when there was a shooting in
a synagogue in Poway, California and when a rabbi’s houseguests were attacked with a machete in Monsey, New York, my daughters were the first to check in with me.
Racial segregation and racially based
injustice impact my integrated family’s life every day. Our ears are attuned to danger; violence imprinted in our cells, accompanying us, through the generations, on
Looking for Rose: Muskogee, Oklahoma - Clare Kinberg, 10th installment in a series
This is a story about my aunt Rose and her husband Zebedee Arnwine. Before they met and before they moved together to a rural town in Southwest Michigan, they’d lived for more than 30 years in their separate communities — she in St Louis, Missouri, with immigrant Jewish parents, and he in a family of Black farmers in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Though I never met Aunt Rose, I knew five of her siblings quite well, among them my father. Writing my aunt’s life is an inward-facing process: though a generation distant, her background is my own. I can hear her sisters’ voices, my father’s inflections. I listen for echoes within to imagine Aunt Rose.
To write Mr. Arnwine’s life, I search directories, public legal documents and census records. These shards of his life have led me to buried scenes of Oklahoma history — American history. Though deep in the archives, this history that shaped the lives of my aunt and her husband also ,shapes my own 21st Century life.
My 19-year-old daughter came into my bedroom two nights ago to tell me about a TikTok she’d just viewed of a white supremacist angrily
ranting about an all-Black town somewhere in the South. “I want to go live there,” she said.
She didn’t know I was writing, just then, about ball-Black towns in Oklahoma three generations
ago.My aunt’s husband, Zebedee Arnwine, was born 100 years before my daughters, in 1902 in Cherokee County, East Texas. Soon after his
birth, Zebedee’s parents moved their family 300 miles straight north to Indian Territory, to what would become, in 1907, the state of Oklahoma.
The Arnwine family’s move to the area near Muskogee, Oklahoma was part of a large migration of Black farmers, a wave that came a generation after the Exodusters of 1877, yet two decades before the Great Migration to the North. This relocation included thousands of
families who organized all-Black towns in a part of the Indian Territory where some were advocating for an all-Black state. They were dreaming of a place where Black people could
live free from ever present degradations and violence.
At the same time that some were imagining an all-Black state in the Indian Territory, the United States Federal Government adopted bureaucratic, legal mechanisms to allot Native American tribal lands to individuals who could be proven to be members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, or
Seminole tribes. In 1887, the Dawes Act had authorized the United States President to subdivide communal tribal lands into individual
allotments. Nine years later, in 1898, the Curtis Amendment to the Dawes Act abolished tribal governments and assigned the Dawes Commission the responsibility of determining
each individual’s tribal membership. The racial and economic struggles in the Indian Territory during those years were unique, in part because the Black slaves of some of the tribes, freed by the Civil War, were also considered tribal members, and could be included in the allotments. Known as the “Creek Freedmen”
the people enslaved by members of the Creek tribe, and their descendants, had complicated
relationships with African Americans arriving from other parts of the South.
In Acres of Aspiration: The All-Black Towns of Oklahoma, Hannibal B. Johnson explains, “Beyond the natural yearning for freedom,
many Blacks held firm to a perceived economic truth: land ownership held the key to success. Moreover, they thought land ownership would lead inexorably to full citizenship. . . . In trickles, then in torrents, Blacks streamed first into Kansas, then increasingly into Oklahoma. This bold swim upstream by Black pioneers sparked controversy, then fear and resentment, among local whites. This decidedly mixed reception failed to stem the tide of migrants. The floodgates having parted, a cascade of newcomers spilled across the region. Oklahoma, some thought, would evolve into an all-Black state captained by a Black governor. All-Black towns and settlements in the windswept Oklahoma plains captured the collective imagination of an entire people.”
Zebedee Arnwine was perhaps five years old when the Indian and Oklahoma Territories became the state of Oklahoma and adopted a
Jim Crow constitution. The new state’s constitution defined “White race” as everyone except anyone who was of African descent and then
went on to establish segregated schools and empowered the legislature to limit the voting rights of Blacks. The first bill to come before the new Oklahoma senate established into law the segregation of Blacks in public transportation
and public facilities.
Zebedee was working as a farmer with his father when on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, declared the United States was sending troops to Europe to fight what would become World War I because “The world must be made safe for democracy.” About a year later, 16-year-old Zebedee, claiming he was 18, briefly married and registered for the draft. He was one of the several hundred thousand Black men who registered but were not called up. I
have found no record of the dissolution this first early marriage.
Tamah, the woman who became Zebedee’s second wife, was born in 1901 to Rebecca Walker, an enrolled Creek Freedman. Still, Rebecca
was required to go in person and with a witness before the Dawes Commission in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to enroll three-year-old Tamah into the tribe. A transcript of the Dawes commission’s interview before a panel of white men is
preserved in the Oklahoma archives. Enrolling her young daughter into the tribe meant Tamah would be entitled to an allotment of land in the Muskogee area, in Indian Territory.
There was oil and gas under that land.
When Tamah was a teenager her land was leased to an oil and gas company that sent her a monthly check. However, as was common at
the time, a white “guardian” wasestablished by the court. The Muskogee Cimiter, a local Black newspaper, found more than 3,000 similar guardianship cases, showing that $100 million had been stolen from Native American and Black families. In Tamah’s case, her appointed guardian was evidently temporary, and he spent a good
deal of court time in an effort to become a permanent “guardian”
by proving Tamah’s incompetence to manage her estate. These court
proceedings, too, are preserved in the Oklahoma Historical Library. After three years of legal wrangling, Tamah, when she turned 18, won the right to manage her own affairs.
Not long after, she married Zeb Arnwine, and in 1924 Tamah and Ze-
bedee had a daughter they named Rebecca.
It was during this marriage that the Black community of Greenwood, not an hour away from Muskogee, was
attacked by a white mob, killing dozens if not hundreds, burning several square blocks, and leaving 10,000 Black people homeless.
Greenwood had been a prosperous Black city within the city of Tulsa with its own thriving economy, professionals, shops, and banks.
Tulsa was considered the oil capital of the world, and Greenwood the Black Wall Street.
One eyewitness account of the coordinated destruction of Greenwood was recorded by the attorney Buck Colbert Franklin in his autobiography, edited by his son and grandson, the historians John Hope and John Whittington Franklin. On the evening of May 31, 1921, Buck Franklin got wind of impending violence, and because he knew so many of the city’s leaders, white and Black, he thought he could do
something to prevent it:
I tried to reach [the sheriff’s office] but was unsuccessful, and I learned that the [phone] wires were cut. At daybreak [June 1, 1921] I went to my office still believing I could get to
the sheriff’s office. But I saw I was too late. Hundreds of men with drawn guns were approaching from every direction. . . . I stood at the steps to my office, and I was immediately arrested and taken to one of the many detention camps. Even then, airplanes were circling overhead, dropping explosives upon the buildings that had been looted, and big trucks were hauling all sorts of furniture and household goods away. In these camps I saw pregnant women, and one was so heavy that a doctor was called in to deliver her baby. Soon I was back upon the streets, but the building where I had my office was a smoldering ruin, and all my lawbooks and office fixtures had been consumed by flames. I went to where my rooming house
had stood a few short hours before, but it was in ashes, with all my clothes and the money to be used in moving my family. As far as one could see, not a Negro dwelling house or place of business stood.
Buck Franklin describes the trigger to the Tulsa massacre as an accusation against a teenage son of a well-known and respected Greenwood businessman. “The boy was on his job [as a shoe-shiner and janitor] and, boarding a very crowded elevator, he accidentally stepped on
the lady’s foot. She became angry and slapped him, and a fresh, cub newspaper reporter, without any experience and no doubt anxious for
a byline, gave out an erroneous report that a Negro had assaulted a white girl.”
This familiar yet false cross-racial accusation compounded generational trauma still felt in 2018 when Charles Blow, a New York Times opinion writer, interviewed 103-year-old Olivia J. Hooker, another eyewitness to the Tulsa
massacre. Hooker’s father owned an upscale department store in 1921, and the family lived in a comfortable five room home. “White men
broke into their house as Hooker and some of her siblings hid beneath an oak dining table, draped with a tablecloth. ‘They took a hatchet
to my sisters’ piano. They poured oil all over my grandmother’s bed. They stuffed the dresser with ammunition,’ Hooker told me. . . . They broke the phonograph and the Enrico Caruso
records her mother had received as a gift from a friend who had gone to study in Heidelberg,
Germany.”
I can only imagine the effects of this racist violence on young Zebedee Arnwine. I have been witness, though, to my daughters’ emerg-
ing identities as young Black women, their
self-love and their self-doubts, their righteous anger, their rising independence, their bold
confrontations with risk, all of these developing amid looping replays of white police beating, strangling, and shooting Black men and women. My daughters share with me their feelings of anger and vulnerability; because I am white, I know I don’t fully feel what they are experiencing. Yet, when there was a shooting in
a synagogue in Poway, California and when a rabbi’s houseguests were attacked with a machete in Monsey, New York, my daughters were the first to check in with me.
Racial segregation and racially based
injustice impact my integrated family’s life every day. Our ears are attuned to danger; violence imprinted in our cells, accompanying us, through the generations, on
This is a story about my aunt Rose and her husband Zebedee Arnwine. Before they met and before they moved together to a rural town in Southwest Michigan, they’d lived for more than 30 years in their separate communities — she in St Louis, Missouri, with immigrant Jewish parents, and he in a family of Black farmers in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Though I never met Aunt Rose, I knew five of her siblings quite well, among them my father. Writing my aunt’s life is an inward-facing process: though a generation distant, her background is my own. I can hear her sisters’ voices, my father’s inflections. I listen for echoes within to imagine Aunt Rose.
To write Mr. Arnwine’s life, I search directories, public legal documents and census records. These shards of his life have led me to buried scenes of Oklahoma history — American history. Though deep in the archives, this history that shaped the lives of my aunt and her husband also ,shapes my own 21st Century life.
My 19-year-old daughter came into my bedroom two nights ago to tell me about a TikTok she’d just viewed of a white supremacist angrily
ranting about an all-Black town somewhere in the South. “I want to go live there,” she said.
She didn’t know I was writing, just then, about ball-Black towns in Oklahoma three generations
ago.My aunt’s husband, Zebedee Arnwine, was born 100 years before my daughters, in 1902 in Cherokee County, East Texas. Soon after his
birth, Zebedee’s parents moved their family 300 miles straight north to Indian Territory, to what would become, in 1907, the state of Oklahoma.
The Arnwine family’s move to the area near Muskogee, Oklahoma was part of a large migration of Black farmers, a wave that came a generation after the Exodusters of 1877, yet two decades before the Great Migration to the North. This relocation included thousands of
families who organized all-Black towns in a part of the Indian Territory where some were advocating for an all-Black state. They were dreaming of a place where Black people could
live free from ever present degradations and violence.
At the same time that some were imagining an all-Black state in the Indian Territory, the United States Federal Government adopted bureaucratic, legal mechanisms to allot Native American tribal lands to individuals who could be proven to be members of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, or
Seminole tribes. In 1887, the Dawes Act had authorized the United States President to subdivide communal tribal lands into individual
allotments. Nine years later, in 1898, the Curtis Amendment to the Dawes Act abolished tribal governments and assigned the Dawes Commission the responsibility of determining
each individual’s tribal membership. The racial and economic struggles in the Indian Territory during those years were unique, in part because the Black slaves of some of the tribes, freed by the Civil War, were also considered tribal members, and could be included in the allotments. Known as the “Creek Freedmen”
the people enslaved by members of the Creek tribe, and their descendants, had complicated
relationships with African Americans arriving from other parts of the South.
In Acres of Aspiration: The All-Black Towns of Oklahoma, Hannibal B. Johnson explains, “Beyond the natural yearning for freedom,
many Blacks held firm to a perceived economic truth: land ownership held the key to success. Moreover, they thought land ownership would lead inexorably to full citizenship. . . . In trickles, then in torrents, Blacks streamed first into Kansas, then increasingly into Oklahoma. This bold swim upstream by Black pioneers sparked controversy, then fear and resentment, among local whites. This decidedly mixed reception failed to stem the tide of migrants. The floodgates having parted, a cascade of newcomers spilled across the region. Oklahoma, some thought, would evolve into an all-Black state captained by a Black governor. All-Black towns and settlements in the windswept Oklahoma plains captured the collective imagination of an entire people.”
Zebedee Arnwine was perhaps five years old when the Indian and Oklahoma Territories became the state of Oklahoma and adopted a
Jim Crow constitution. The new state’s constitution defined “White race” as everyone except anyone who was of African descent and then
went on to establish segregated schools and empowered the legislature to limit the voting rights of Blacks. The first bill to come before the new Oklahoma senate established into law the segregation of Blacks in public transportation
and public facilities.
Zebedee was working as a farmer with his father when on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, declared the United States was sending troops to Europe to fight what would become World War I because “The world must be made safe for democracy.” About a year later, 16-year-old Zebedee, claiming he was 18, briefly married and registered for the draft. He was one of the several hundred thousand Black men who registered but were not called up. I
have found no record of the dissolution this first early marriage.
Tamah, the woman who became Zebedee’s second wife, was born in 1901 to Rebecca Walker, an enrolled Creek Freedman. Still, Rebecca
was required to go in person and with a witness before the Dawes Commission in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to enroll three-year-old Tamah into the tribe. A transcript of the Dawes commission’s interview before a panel of white men is
preserved in the Oklahoma archives. Enrolling her young daughter into the tribe meant Tamah would be entitled to an allotment of land in the Muskogee area, in Indian Territory.
There was oil and gas under that land.
When Tamah was a teenager her land was leased to an oil and gas company that sent her a monthly check. However, as was common at
the time, a white “guardian” wasestablished by the court. The Muskogee Cimiter, a local Black newspaper, found more than 3,000 similar guardianship cases, showing that $100 million had been stolen from Native American and Black families. In Tamah’s case, her appointed guardian was evidently temporary, and he spent a good
deal of court time in an effort to become a permanent “guardian”
by proving Tamah’s incompetence to manage her estate. These court
proceedings, too, are preserved in the Oklahoma Historical Library. After three years of legal wrangling, Tamah, when she turned 18, won the right to manage her own affairs.
Not long after, she married Zeb Arnwine, and in 1924 Tamah and Ze-
bedee had a daughter they named Rebecca.
It was during this marriage that the Black community of Greenwood, not an hour away from Muskogee, was
attacked by a white mob, killing dozens if not hundreds, burning several square blocks, and leaving 10,000 Black people homeless.
Greenwood had been a prosperous Black city within the city of Tulsa with its own thriving economy, professionals, shops, and banks.
Tulsa was considered the oil capital of the world, and Greenwood the Black Wall Street.
One eyewitness account of the coordinated destruction of Greenwood was recorded by the attorney Buck Colbert Franklin in his autobiography, edited by his son and grandson, the historians John Hope and John Whittington Franklin. On the evening of May 31, 1921, Buck Franklin got wind of impending violence, and because he knew so many of the city’s leaders, white and Black, he thought he could do
something to prevent it:
I tried to reach [the sheriff’s office] but was unsuccessful, and I learned that the [phone] wires were cut. At daybreak [June 1, 1921] I went to my office still believing I could get to
the sheriff’s office. But I saw I was too late. Hundreds of men with drawn guns were approaching from every direction. . . . I stood at the steps to my office, and I was immediately arrested and taken to one of the many detention camps. Even then, airplanes were circling overhead, dropping explosives upon the buildings that had been looted, and big trucks were hauling all sorts of furniture and household goods away. In these camps I saw pregnant women, and one was so heavy that a doctor was called in to deliver her baby. Soon I was back upon the streets, but the building where I had my office was a smoldering ruin, and all my lawbooks and office fixtures had been consumed by flames. I went to where my rooming house
had stood a few short hours before, but it was in ashes, with all my clothes and the money to be used in moving my family. As far as one could see, not a Negro dwelling house or place of business stood.
Buck Franklin describes the trigger to the Tulsa massacre as an accusation against a teenage son of a well-known and respected Greenwood businessman. “The boy was on his job [as a shoe-shiner and janitor] and, boarding a very crowded elevator, he accidentally stepped on
the lady’s foot. She became angry and slapped him, and a fresh, cub newspaper reporter, without any experience and no doubt anxious for
a byline, gave out an erroneous report that a Negro had assaulted a white girl.”
This familiar yet false cross-racial accusation compounded generational trauma still felt in 2018 when Charles Blow, a New York Times opinion writer, interviewed 103-year-old Olivia J. Hooker, another eyewitness to the Tulsa
massacre. Hooker’s father owned an upscale department store in 1921, and the family lived in a comfortable five room home. “White men
broke into their house as Hooker and some of her siblings hid beneath an oak dining table, draped with a tablecloth. ‘They took a hatchet
to my sisters’ piano. They poured oil all over my grandmother’s bed. They stuffed the dresser with ammunition,’ Hooker told me. . . . They broke the phonograph and the Enrico Caruso
records her mother had received as a gift from a friend who had gone to study in Heidelberg,
Germany.”
I can only imagine the effects of this racist violence on young Zebedee Arnwine. I have been witness, though, to my daughters’ emerg-
ing identities as young Black women, their
self-love and their self-doubts, their righteous anger, their rising independence, their bold
confrontations with risk, all of these developing amid looping replays of white police beating, strangling, and shooting Black men and women. My daughters share with me their feelings of anger and vulnerability; because I am white, I know I don’t fully feel what they are experiencing. Yet, when there was a shooting in
a synagogue in Poway, California and when a rabbi’s houseguests were attacked with a machete in Monsey, New York, my daughters were the first to check in with me.
Racial segregation and racially based
injustice impact my integrated family’s life every day. Our ears are attuned to danger; violence imprinted in our cells, accompanying us, through the generations, on
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