Discover Southwestern Oklahoma Historical Society's Cultural Heritage

                                              by Don Hawthorne

Unless you have traveled on Oklahoma SH 7 between Duncan and Davis, you may not have heard of this town. Or even if you have traveled that highway, you might not have paid any attention to this wide spot in the road. The little town of Tatums is four miles east of Radcliff City and its beginning is quite interesting.
 

                       Mary and Lee Tatum, the founders of their namesake town.       (right)

It was established as an all-black town in 1895 when a Post Office was granted to Lee and Mary Tatum.  At the time of its founding the town was located in the Pickens County of the Chickasaw Nation in the Indian Territory. 

Lee Tatum was the first postmaster. In addition, he ran a grocery store in the corner of their house. He was later appointed U. S. Marshall.  Early on a school and church were built.  By 1899, a hotel and blacksmith shop were built. In 1900, a cotton gin was added and a sawmill in 1910. The Julius Rosenwald Fund helped build a brick school in 1925–26, and the WPA built another in 1936.

In the 1920’s oil was discovered in the area bringing wealth to the community. In 1932, famous gangster Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd hid out in the town’s hotel for a short time.  n 1927, Norman Studios filmed a silent movie, Black Gold, in Tatums and enlisted Marshal Lee Tatum to play a role. Although a copy of the film cannot be found and probably no longer exists, the script and camera are preserved at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in California.

The Bethel Missionary Baptist Church is one of the original structures and Sunday services are still being held. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As with most small towns in Oklahoma, Tatums’ economy was affected by The Great Depression causing many of its residents to move into urban areas. At the time of the 2020 census, the population was 111. 

Tatums was one of more than fifty all-black towns that were founded in the Indian Territory. Of those towns there are 13 that are still in existence. The most renowned of these was Boley which is located 11 miles west of Okemah in Okfuskee County. Booker T. Washington, nationally prominent African American educator, visited Boley twice. The most populated is Langston where Langston University is located.

Locations of the original black towns in pre-statehood of Oklahoma (photo of map is in the hard-copy Prairie Lore).

Only in Oklahoma did the all-black towns represent a unique chapter in American history.  Between 1830 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act allowed the U.S. Government to forcibly remove the Native Americans from their homeland in the eastern U.S. and relocate them in Indian Territory. These Five Tribes were also known as the Five Civilized Tribes and included the Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw. 

This also included the African Americans enslaved by many of the tribal members. By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the tribes' members owned approximately ten thousand slaves.  At the time the Five Tribes were considered sovereign nations, and they were not subject to President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and the 13th Amendment. There had to be treaties made between the United States and each Native American nation to free the enslaved peoples they held and to formally end the Civil War with them.

In 1866 and 1867, a Bill was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives that would create a Territory of Lincoln which would establish an all-black territory but it never passed into law.

Even though the Bill did not become law, a mapmaker jumped the gun and published a map showing it.  (see hardcopy Prairie Lore)

After the Civil War, all-black towns grew in Indian Territory when the former slaves of the Five Tribes settled together for mutual protection and economic security.  Entrepreneurs and land speculators in these communities started every imaginable kind of business and advertised throughout the South for settlers. Many African Americans known as Freedmen migrated to the Indian Territory, considering it a kind of "promised land." But this turned out to be wishful thinking as the Legislature began enacting Jim Crow Laws.

The transition of these slaves to American citizenship is unique in the history of race relations in the United States. It was a journey filled with contentious negotiation among factions of the Indian nations, the federal government, capitalist developers, black and white agricultural colonizers, and the Freedmen themselves. Efforts to secure the rights of the Freedmen represented one aspect of the struggle that ultimately opened Indian lands to non-Indian settlement of what is now the State of Oklahoma.

Sources: Oklahoma Historical Society and Red River Historian