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copyright 2021 by Hershel Parker
10 April 2021--this is now the Master
Dovey Costner--Being Black in the Carolinas, Texas, Indian
Territory, and Oklahoma
The
Smithsonian Magazine for April 2021
features Tim Madigan’s article on the Tulsa Massacre of June 1921, that
“murderous attack on the most prosperous black community in the nation.”
Preceding this in the Smithsonian is Victor
Luckerson’s “The Promise of Oklahoma” on the last-ditch attempt of “eleven
black leaders” in 1907 to prevent “Indian Territory” and “Oklahoma Territory”
from becoming the state of Oklahoma. They and other blacks had hoped for a
different result--perhaps (a wild hope) even a Negro Oklahoma. Their reasoning
was that once Oklahoma was a state the white majority would enforce segregation
and voter suppression just as in the Deep South. They were, of course, right. A
“Grandfather Clause” went into effect in 1910 to allow illiterate men to vote
if they could prove their grandfathers had voted before 1866. Illiterate blacks
would be excluded.
That
ugly year 1910 and especially 1911 were familiar to me from documents I had
been encountering on Dovey Costner and other Black Costners in Bryan County,
Oklahoma. The Tulsa World on 6
September 1911 ran two headlines: “OKLAHOMA DON’T LOOK GOOD. Will Lead Colony
of Blacks to the Negro Republics.” From a Denison, Texas article of the day
before, the World explained: “Because
he believes that under present conditions it is impossible for the negro to
prosper in Southern Oklahoma since the recent race troubles there Stover
Costner, a negro farmer has announced that he will head a band of fifty negroes
in an expedition to colonize in Liberia. Costner says he has found fifty
negroes in Bryan County who are willing to go with him.” The papers were
careless. There was no “Stover Costner” but the man was real, Dovey Costner
(although identified elsewhere as Dovie Costanar, Davie Costun), a man who
interested me very strongly. Who were these outspoken Black Costners in Indian
Territory and then Oklahoma at the same time my White Costners were in Oklahoma
Territory and Oklahoma?
I
was a Depression Okie who knew nothing at all about my ancestry beyond two tiny
anecdotes about two great grandfathers, Parker and Bell. Beginning in 1960 I
had done dogged, meticulous research on Herman Melville and other writers, but a
decade into the twenty-first century, well after the second volume of my
biography and other volumes on Melville were published, I turned to the
Internet now and then to see if I could find anything at all beyond the two anecdotes.
I saved 1911 articles on Dovey Costner when I saw them partly because of the
daring aspiration to colonize Liberia but more because my mother was a Costner,
born in Oklahoma Territory in 1906. I wanted to find out more, when I had time.
I had already learned that my Great Grandfather John Andrew Jackson Costner,
born in 1832 in South Carolina, had moved west to Mississippi, where he died in
1892. Two of his sons, Moses Amariah (1870) and Gene (1872), both born in
Mississippi, as young men homesteaded near Guymon in the Panhandle of Oklahoma
Territory. When my mother, Martha Costner, was a few years old, Gene (Edgar
Lugene) proved his homestead moved his family back to Mississippi for a time.
Moses (“Uncle Mode”) stayed. His grandchildren, now all dead, were my second
cousins. You can glimpse one of them, Bill Costner, toward the end of Ron
Shelton’s Tin Cup, which stars his
son, the actor Kevin Costner. All my folks except my Uncle Andrew Costner
(1913-2001) lost contact with Uncle Mode’s family after 1930. As you will see,
the name “Moses Costner” created some confusion in my research for this chapter,
for that was the name of Dovey’s father.
Well
before I began collecting documents on Dovey, I knew that the American Costners
had arrived from Germany in the mid 1700s and settled in south central
Pennsylvania. This was unnervingly close to where I had lived for two decades,
for I could have stood by their tombs in York. Some Costners soon took the
Great Wagon Road to south central North Carolina near Charlotte. Eventually I
learned that a Costner uncle, Jacob, and a startling array of other kinfolks and
their neighbors had signed a seditious pact there, an “association,” in 1775. On
the document were the names of Uncle John Dellinger, a brother of Jacob’s
brother Peter Costner’s wife, another Dellinger, George, along with Uncle
Jonathan Price, the husband of Aunt Betsy Ewart, a daughter of the Salisbury
Committee of Safety member Robert Ewart who was twice my five-great grandfather.
Others of the signers were kin or connected. The pact was misunderstood and
miscopied when the document was discovered in the nineteenth century. Now the
document was known, but wrongly spliced up in the photographs on the Internet,
labeled with a modern name, “Tryon Resolves,” and seldom read carefully. Even descendants
of the signers seemed oblivious to its importance. Tracing my kinfolks among
the signers led to my writing a dozen articles on Revolutionary history,
starting with one on the Tryon patriots and their pact.
The
neglected Tryon County patriots had been eloquent: “The unprecedented,
barbarous & bloody actions Committed by the British Troops on our American
Brethren near Boston, on the 19th of April & 20th of
May last together with the Hostile opperations & Traiterous Designs now
Carrying on by the Tools of Ministerial Vengeance & Despotism for the
Subjugating all British America, Sugest to us the painful Necessity of having
recourse to Arms, for the preservation of those Rights & Liberties which
the principles of our Constitution and the Laws of God Nature & nations
have made it our Duty to Defend.” These men knew they could have been hanged,
but in North Carolina their fervent sympathy for their fellow colonists embattled near
Boston overcame any fears. By contrast, New Englanders for two and a half
centuries have ignored or downplayed any role North Carolina may have had in
the Revolution. My cousin David Dellinger, portrayed in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) descended from a signer of this
Association, in his autobiography described visiting kindly, simple, unimportant
farmers in North Carolina even while he celebrated his descent from one or more
heroic ancestors in Boston, “the ‘Athens of America’ and the ‘Hub of the
Universe.’”
I
was a writer. I had done nineteenth century biographical research. In fact, I had
worked from primary documents more than many published historians had. I could
do history. On 14 August 2014 my 11-page
“The
Tryon County Patriots of 1775 and their ‘Association’” was published in the
webzine Journal of the American
Revolution. The editors, Todd Andrik, Don N. Hagist, and Hugh T.
Harrington, selected it among ones reprinted in June 2015 in the hardback Journal of the American Revolution: Annual
Volume 2015, (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2015), 63-72. The essay
was political history, but also family history, and a history of how that area
of North Carolina lost sight of the significance of the brave pact. The
descendants of Christian Mauney, into whose little house the signers had
crowded, had begun hosting annual reunions without knowing the historic
importance of what had happened there in 1775. Recognizing my article’s local
value for Gaston County, the historian Robert C. Carpenter gained permission to
reprint an expanded version in the Gaston-Lincoln Genealogical Society’s Footprints in Time (December 2014),
154-174. (Tryon, the name of a banished British governor, had been removed from
the county, and county (and state) lines had been changed.) Over the next years
many descendants of signers (including several cousins previously unknown to me)
came across the article in the Journal of
the American Revolution and posted grateful comments. Local people saw it
in Footprints in Time. What makes me
most happy is that my article has become a mainstay in annual meetings to
celebrate the bravery of local men in 1775. It’s part of every Mauney reunion
in Cherryville.
By 2014 Robert C. Carpenter was
already preparing a unique book, Gaston
County, North Carolina, in the Civil War (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 2016).
His concentration on one locality stand with the statewide survey in Barton A.
Myers’s Rebels Against the Confederacy:
North Carolina’s Unionists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2014). These books have opened the topic, and give context to a chapter of my
next book, Racial Encounters, in
which one chapter deals with cousins who during the War dared to chair open
Union Meetings in North Carolina. Meanwhile, I have gained access to Carpenter
as a resource person.
Once I looked, I found right away that Dovey Costner was, no surprise, born in Gastonia,
Gaston County, and he was born a decade and a half after slavery ended (which
was not in 1863 but for practical purposes in mid-1865, at the end of the war).
But who was he? In
his book on Gaston County, Carpenter does not name Dovey Costner, but he
describes the intimate relation between one family of black slaves and their
Costner owners. My cousin Jacob Costner (not the Revolutionary patriot) who
died in 1862 left a will so unclear that his slave Randal Costner was much
perplexed and downright panicked for fear he could be sold away from his wife
and family. Jacob’s sons, including Ambrose, who later was a prominent politician,
did not take charge of Randal, but Jacob’s son-in-law did, William G. Morris,
then serving in the Confederate army. In his absence Morris entrusted Randal
with running his farm. In letters to his wife he regularly sent greetings and
even his “love” to Randal and his family. This was in many ways a trusting
relationship: who else sent love to a slave family? Morris tried to reassure
Randal that if he had to be sold he (Morris) would buy him to keep him home--but
(Randal must have worried) what if Morris died in battle or from disease in
camp? Carpenter’s treatment of Costner slaves was fascinating to me although it
seemed to do nothing to help me identify Dovey.
I found in a Reconstruction era newspaper
that a remarkably brave 4th of July celebration had been held by
Blacks in Gaston County in 1867, the Secretary being Moses Costner, presumably
a man who could read and write. When I approached
Carpenter
about this Moses he provided me with the 1885 administrator’s papers for Randal
Costner’s estate. They showed that most of the children were still nearby in
1885, but that Randal’s son Moses, the North Carolina family thought, lived “in
Texas.” I still don’t know whether or not the 1867 Secretary was Randal’s son;
censuses vary on whether or not Moses was illiterate, and a Secretary should be
able to read and write. At least in the course of my querying I met the part-black
Randy Thomason, whose wife and children are cousins of mine, descendants of one
of my White second cousin Simon Peter Costner’s “colored” children (acknowledged
in his will.) In 1885 Randal’s son Moses (or Mose) was living, in fact, in
Grimes County, Texas, near several of his children and grandchildren.
From censuses I then found that Dovey
was a son of this Moses, a grandson of Randal’s. Dovey’s tombstone in Okmulgee,
Oklahoma (not Liberia), gives his birth as 16 February 1879 and his death day
as 24 August 1963. The 1963 date is presumably accurate, but most of his life
Dovey assumed he was born earlier than he was, about 1877. 1879 was right, and
he may have been told and remembered 16 February. However, the census taker in
Bethel Township of York County, South Carolina, just across the state border,
on 11 June 1880 listed Dovey as 8/12ths of a year old, and specifies that he
was born in November 1879, in North Carolina--Gastonia. Census takers make
errors (1940 has me born in 1930), but 1879-1963 are right. Some time in the
previous several months before June 1880, Moses had moved over the border into
Bethel, where he was a “croper”--presumably pronounced not “crowper” but as in “sharecropper.”
His wife Ann (40), and his first two sons, 13 year old William and 11 year old
John, were all three listed as “laborers.” That was nothing unusual: in the
1920 census for Guymon, Oklahoma, my 14 year old mother is listed as “farm
laborer.” For that matter, my older sister and brothers were taken out of
school and put to work in war-time Portland, and at 9 I was being hauled out on
a flatbed truck in a gang to pick fruit all day. Moses’s boys were, of course,
not in school, Black education having not been a permanent post-Reconstruction
benefit. Prospects for Black sharecroppers were bleak, even with four people
laboring. White sharecroppers were lucky to pay the owner back for his
exorbitant supplies before they could keep any of their earnings for
themselves. For Blacks, sharecropping was slavery with a nicer name. (For
Whites it was not much better, and lien laws passed in the early 1900s made it worse
than ever.)
So Moses Costner, son of Randal, made
a big gamble sometime in the next years after 1880. Well before 1885, when
Randal died, Moses had taken his large family to Texas, to Grimes County,
surely by one or more wagons. (Gene Costner took his family from Mississippi to
Oklahoma as late as 1915 or so in wagons “covered” somehow--maybe not just what
we think of as “covered wagons,”--pausing for harvest work along the way in
Arkansas.) Moses must have had his reasons, but for a Black family this was
about the worst spot in Texas to have gone to.
In the online “Texas History Now”
Charles Christopher Jackson tells a somber story that Wikipedia picked up and
quotes. Americans brought slaves with them before Texas won its independence,
and Grimes county’s “slave population continued to increase at an astonishing
rate during the last decade of antebellum Texas, as a result not only of
purchases by current residents but also of continuing heavy migration of
slaveholders from the lower South.” By 1860 Grimes had more slaves than whites.
In the lawlessness that followed the war there was violence, Jackson says, “Whites
against Whites, Blacks against Blacks, Blacks against Whites,” but the most
violent crimes were by Whites against Blacks. In 1867, Jackson says, twenty
nine instances of White violence against Blacks were reported--and of course
many were not reported. He summarizes: “As the anarchy deepened, armed bands of
Whites meted out vigilante justice; the Ku Klux Klan emerged in the county at
Navasota in April 1868. In self-defense, local Blacks formed their own
‘militias.’ The secret activities of the county’s Loyal Leagues” (or Union
League) “organized among the freedmen by Republicans as an agency of political
indoctrination, inflamed White fears of Black conspiracies against White lives
and property.”
When Moses and his family arrived in Grimes
County in the early 1880s, “an interracial Republican-Greenback coalition” had “succeeded
in electing candidates to a number of county offices.” This meant that for a
time there was support for Black schools, but what followed was a vicious
resurrection of the KKK. This was no place for a son and grandchildren of
Randal Costner to be trying to make an adequate living. Jackson says: “After
smashing victories by the People’s party in the county elections of 1896 and
1898, Grimes County Democrats retaliated by forming the White Man’s Union . . .
an initially secret, oath-bound society designed to end electoral ‘corruption’
by excluding Blacks from participation in county politics.” (In 2021 a new
Georgia law used precisely the same strategy about voting.) Then came “a
campaign of night-riding and intimidation” of Black voters and any White
sympathizers, and murders. Jackson is blunt: with terrorized Blacks avoiding
the polls, “the White Man’s Union swept the elections of 1900, and Blacks began
a mass migration from the county.”
“Negro Firebug Lynched . . . .“Some
two weeks ago a negro was lynched in Grimes county.” 26 July 1899 Baltimore Sun.-----“Four Killed in Fierce Race
Riot” . . . . “As soon as the whites got possession of the negro they lynched
him by hanging him to a scrub oak tree” 26 July 1899 Philadelphia Inquirer.-----“Judge Lynch Has Been Very
Active This Year.” 22 December 1908, the Bisbee, Arizona Review. The Review ranked
Texas in the top three states for number of lynchings, two in Grimes County. There
were nine officially recorded lynchings in Grimes in the decade, regular
affairs.
Back a bit: That “local White Populist sheriff,” Jackson
says, “wounded by an armed mob on the streets of Anderson, was evacuated to
Houston by an escort of state militia.” He does not explain the circumstances,
and the newspapers made filler by reprinting the official cleaned-up version of
events. On 14 November 1900 the Reynoldsville, PA, Star printed this: “Too Hot for the Sheriff.” “Sheriff Scott, of
Grimes county, Texas, has consented to abdicate his office and seek a new
career elsewhere. He failed to please an organization known as the White Man’s
Union in his administration of the office and a controversy ensued which
culminated last week in a shooting affray. In this the sheriff was wounded, his
brother and William McDonald were killed, as was also John Bradley, Jr.” Dozens
of newspapers--such as the Kansas City, Missouri Times, the Guthrie Oklahoma State
Capitol, the Louisville Courier-Journal,
the San Francisco Examiner, reprinted a version of the story that glossed
over the White Men’s Union and
claimed that all controversy was now over. Quite properly, the Union had held Sheriff Scott responsible
“for alleged misconduct of affairs.” As the Los Angeles Times said on November 11, “Texas Troops Settle Feud. Trouble Over
Election at Anderson Ended. Sheriff to Leave the Country.” “Alleged misconduct
of affairs” was whitewash. Scott had tried to protect rights of Negroes and
therefore committed “misconduct of affairs.” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat on 23 February 1902 reported: “Scott has a suit for
$100,000 against the citizens of Grimes county for forcing him to leave the
county.”
By the 1890s or 1900 Whites in Grimes
county, the prouder ones, descendants of settlers in Mexican Texas, had decided
that they no longer wanted to be outnumbered by Blacks, now that Blacks had
been free so long. One solution was to drive them out of the county. Simon
Curtis tried to fight back. The Lenoir, North Carolina News on 6 February 1903 reported: “Negro Sues for Banishment.
During the past year a large number of negroes have been driven out of Grimes
county in eastern Texas by an organization calling themselves the White Men’s
Union. All negroes free to emigrate have done so. Among them was Simon Curtis,
who moved to Houston Centre, and who has filed in the United States Court at
Houston suit for $40,000 damages against the white men who compelled him to
leave his home in Grimes. It is the first suit of the kind ever brought in
Texas, and is likely to affect the movement prevailing in many of the eastern
Texas counties to get rid of the negroes.” The dust settled fast, and on 3
August 1904 the Lincoln, Nebraska State
Journal reported that at the Democratic state convention in Houston the
“white men’s union delegation from Grimes county was seated.”
At some point in all this ugliness
Moses Costner, his children, and his grandchildren had been “driven out of
Grimes county,” even if no Whites had threatened them personally. They sought
refuge in Bryan County in Indian Territory, if the Bennington, Oklahoma Tribune
of 8 September 1911 is accurate. Dovey had
told a reporter for the Denison, Texas Herald that week that he had
rented part of "the old Colvert [CHECK--MAP HAS COLBERT] farm at Riverside
for the past several years and has lived on or near that place for ten
years." That would put the move to Indian Territory at 1900 or 1901,
during the great flight from Grimes County.
I have emphasized Jackson’s honest
depiction of Grimes County in my attempt to understand why Dovey in 1911 so
earnestly thought Liberia would be safer than Oklahoma. What went on in Grimes
County through the first decade of the nineteenth century was horrific: “The
violence unleashed against Populists during the election of 1900 proved
difficult to contain. Years of prolonged vigilantism and lawlessness in the
early 1900s earned Grimes County a ‘rough’ reputation which was only enhanced
by the local reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In 1908 Navasota
hired noted Texas Ranger Frank Hamer as its sheriff in an effort to ‘clean up’
the town.” The Black Costners were already gone before Frank Hamer got there.
In the splendid 2019 film The Highwaymen
Hamer is portrayed by a White Costner (aside from a little Indian), my second
cousin Bill’s son, Kevin.
By 1910 the Black Moses at 78 was in
Bryan County, Oklahoma, renting a house alone. Ann was alive at 76 years old,
living nearby with James (listed as 38), and two Lipscomb nephews. John was
there at 41 with wife and eight children. William at 42 was there at 42 along
with his wife and four children, the son at 12 named significantly, Sherman.
Dovey was there at 33 with his wife, daughter, and a middle-aged Daniel nephew
and niece. They were all living close together. They were renting. What had
drawn them there? Almost any place would have seemed safer than Grimes Count,
but they may have heard cheering news from north of the Red River. For the
first years they where there, as late as the middle of 1907, some had
irrational hopes that Oklahoma could be a Negro state, and there were already a
few “negro towns” in Indian Territory to celebrate.
Despite a few encouraging notices, many
events had been ominous since the 1880s and 1890s. Lynching was common in parts
of what became Oklahoma, the victims being mainly Whites, especially cattle
rustlers, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. After statehood, “lynching entered a more racist phase. The numbers
actually declined, but the victims were almost exclusively black. In this
period lynching reinforced an existing social order that deprived blacks of
political and economic rights and segregated them. The state constitution
enshrined Jim Crow, and forty-one persons were lynched by 1930. Most of these
incidents occurred from 1908 to 1916. Murder, complicity in murder, rape, and
attempted rape became the main offenses, attributed primarily to black males
accused of assaulting whites.”
When the Black Costners arrived from
Grimes County, the Choctaw and Cherokee lands were no longer safe for Indians
or blacks, and education for Blacks was threatened. “White Citizens Protest,”
said the 6 March 1903 Guthrie Oklahoma
State Capital: “The white children of Indian Territory, except in the
towns, are practically without schools, a prey to ignorance and its vices. . .
. Unless there is a change these white children will become the laborers for
the Indian and negro land owners; the superior Anglo-Saxon will be dominated by
an inferior race, and a condition of servitude imposed that will be repugnant
to every white man in the country. The Indian and negro citizens of Indian
Territory are not entitled to our exclusive sympathy. Are the interests of
80,000 Indians and negro freedmen to be placed above the welfare of 300,00
white men, women and children?”
Statehood loosed White vultures to
prey especially on those less than full-blooded Indians. Suddenly, after the
new law in 1908, part-Whites were allowed to sell their land. Now negro land
owners could sell their farms to white “grafters.” The Ada OK News, 30 July 1908 said, “Negroes Begun
to Sell. Will not be Long Untill Their Homesteads are Gone.” In Muskogee Times: “At the office of the register of
deeds 140 instruments had been recorded up to 4 o’clock and it is expected that
by the time the office closes yesterday’s record of 180 will be reached. All
the land grafters were busy today and as the negroes were sadly in need of
funds they are getting the land at their at their own price. Some of the
negroes who claim to have been victimized were in an ugly humor today and were
threatening to start trouble. It is expected that before the week not les than
1,500 negroes will have disposed of their homesteads and have moved to Muskogee
or left the state. The negro farmer will soon be a thing of the past in this
part of the country.” On 28 July 1908 the Salina, Kansas Journal announced: “They Are Prisoners. Indian and Negro Land
Owners Held by Whites.” On 31 July 1908 the Vinita Chieftain announced “Negroes unloading farms”--land grafters were ripping
them off.
Coincidentally, or perhaps reflecting
the changing climate, the first lynching in the state of Oklahoma came in
January 1908. [CHECK or Dec 1907?] The Bryant County Bennington Tribune recorded it. On 10 May1907 the
Oklahoma City Times-Journal
proclaimed: “Charged with Murder,” “Six Men Alleged to Have Helped Lynch James
Williams at Terrett” (that is, “Sterrett”). These men were arrested at Durant
and Sterrett, I. T., and brought to South McAlester for grand jury. All were
“prominent business men.” “The negro, James Williams, who was lynched at
Sterrett, had been arrested on a charge of assaulting Rosa Misner, a fourteen
year old girl, near Colbert. The mob took possession of a train at Colbert,
went to Sterrett, where deputy marshals were waiting to transfer their
prisoners to Durant, overpowered the officers and hanged the negro to an oil
derrick.” The prominent White businessmen were not punished: “In the case of
Jim Hudson, growing out of the lynching of a negro in Sterrett, the jury
returned with a verdict of not guilty. The county attorney will probably
dismiss the remaining cases connected with this lynching.”
On 25 June 1908 the Bennington Tribune announced that the lynching of
James Garden “was participated in by all the townspeople” of Henryetta. The mob
battered down the jail door and “secured the negro and hung him to a telegraph
pole nearby. Then they riddled the body with bullets.” In Purcell, some hundred
miles from Durant over in the Chickasaw Nation, a White crowd cheered as a
negro was made “a human torch” (Independence, KS Reporter, 25 August 1911). The negro was “burned to death on a
brush pile on the Main street of Purcell at 5 o’clock . . . a crowd pf 3,000
persons witnessing the death.” The mob soaked the brush with coal oil then
poured oil on the negro. “The pile of wood and brush on which the negro’s body
was reduced, to little more than bones and ashes, is still smoldering” (a day
later). “The cheers of the crowd when the first flames shot up, mingled with
the cries of the negro, and after the body had been burned to a crisp, the
crowd cheered again and dispersed.” The majority of cheering witnesses were
men, some were women.
What
was going on elsewhere in Oklahoma was going on locally, where the Black
Costners were becoming progressively anxious. The 17 August 1911 Blackwell Sun printed 4 headlines about a Caddo
crime: “A Negro Lynched. Black Assailant of White Woman Killed by Mob. Body
Afterwards Burned. Other Negroes Warned and General Exodus Begun.” A thousand
armed citizens followed the assailant (of Mrs. Campbell) south toward the Red
River, the Texas line. In “brilliant moonlight” they poured such a rain of
bullets that his body was “torn to shreds.” Later the mob saturated a bile of
wood with oil and burned the body until it was consumed.
There were repercussions after the
attack on Mrs. Campbell: “a number of negroes have been informed Durant is not
the healthiest spot on the globe for them, and as a result there has been a
general exodus of those who received warning.” White men in Caddo--allegedly to
prevent revenge--“formed a posse and posted signs warning all colored persons
in town to leave the place before Saturday night. The negroes started at once,
but there was some talk of their expecting aid from negroes of other towns.
Since then all negroes have left Durant.” This report came: “The negroes who
have been leaving Durant and Caddo are reported to be collected in Caney, north
of both towns” (eight miles north of Caney).
Rumors spread: “It is said blacks from
other towns are preparing to open up a fight upon the white people of this
section. Many small towns throughout this district of Oklahoma are populated
nearly entirely by negroes and in a larger number of towns the population of
white and black people are equal.” Some Whites used the telephone to incite “A
RACE CONFLICT,” reporting racial conflict as “a ruse to start war.”
Side by side on pages with this local
article was a report on the Coatesville, Pennsylvania, capture of “a negro
desperado” who in despair had shot himself in the mouth and fallen out of the
cherry tree he was hiding in. A thousand people raided the hospital and
strapped him to the bed and carried it out of town. They lighted dry grass and
weeds under it and set the screaming man on fire then fed the fire with fence
rails. Almost as many women as men were in the mob. So much for the higher
civilization in Pennsylvania where some of the mob were surely Quakers or
descendants of Quakers. Some Oklahomans learned about Coatesville even as they
learned about Durant.
Whites were panicked. When a little
girl of Mrs. Ferrell’s on a farm near the White town of Pirtle “espied a negro
approaching,” she “screamed and started to run.” Allegedly the man ran toward
her and her sisters until a neighbor fired a shot. In Ada the Pontotoc County Enterprise on 1
September 1911 was certain that the man had “been foiled in his attempt to
assault Mrs. Ferrell.” The same paper reported attempts of the “Congress of
White Farmers” to “rid” Okfuskee County of negroes. Blacks in Southern Oklahoma
were to blame: “The recent lynchings and burning of negroes at Durant and
Purcell have actuated the movement in Okfuskee county.” On 31 August 1911 the
Tahlequah Arrow added a new story
from Durant: “Negro Kidnapped White Child. Attempts to Lure the Mother Into
Nearby Woods But Failed--Lynching in Prospect”: “All Bryant county was in a
fever of excitement yesterday as a result of a negro kidnapping a two-year-old
child Saturday morning with the evident intent of luring the mother after the
child, getting her into the woods and assaulting her.” Now it was “probable
that a determined effort will be made to drive every negro out of Bryan county.
As there are lots of them and some of them are in a defiant mood, such a
movement will doubtless cause bloodshed.”
What at last precipitated the flight
of negroes from Caddo was the shooting of a masked white man, Horace Gribble,
by blacks on the night of 2 September. Gribble and a few white companions were
on a quiet Saturday night jaunt, going down a road shooting at black houses.
When they threw a stick of dynamite toward one house, Negroes fired back,
hitting Gribble. The surviving whites told Caddo authorities that they had been
fired upon while innocently riding by. The next morning, Sunday the 3rd,
and for the next days, White locals saw Gribble as a martyr to Black
fiendishness.
Within hours of the news spreading on
the 3rd the Katy (MK&T) station was thronged. The Knoxville Journal and Tribune on the 4th
had the news by telegraph: “All outgoing trains were crowded, while extra
facilities were required for the handling of their baggage and express. More
than 1,500 purchased tickets for McAlester, Muskogee, Atoka, Okla., and Bonhan,
White Right, and Denison, Texas and smaller towns. The ticket sales amounted to
nearly a thousand dollars.” This was Sunday, and negroes were going to the
depot rather than church. The Knoxville paper continued: “Cattle, hogs and
crops were sacrificed at ridiculous prices in order to raise money while much
other personal property was left behind. Farmers were in an angry mood
following the report of the killing, but the community is quiet tonight since
the negroes have fled. A large Sunday crowd at the depot cheered each departing
train which carried the blacks from the town. The three negroes arrested for
the killing were taken in an automobile to Tishomingo. Officers there at first
hesitated to keep the prisoners, fearing a mob would pursue them and attempt a
lynching. There was no agitation here” [in Caddo] “in favor of such a
demonstration.” put in the paper that
said Blacks waved back
On Tuesday, 5 September, the Muskogee Phoenix reported on Sunday: “In a few
hours, and for the first time in its history, Caddo was a ‘white’ town. The day
following [the shooting of Gribben], Sunday, was a busy one at the M., K., Y T.
station. But many of the blacks had left on the northbound train earlier in the
day. The revenue at the station exceeded the $1000 mark. In addition three
car-loads of effects belonging to local negroes were routed out. Armed crowds
watched them leave, horde after horde, on train after train. It was a sight
long to be remembered.” “A Farewell Cheer,” the Phoenix said: “And as the afternoon train slowly pulled out of
Caddo, loaded to the guards with colored freight, a mighty cheer went up from
the crowd, as in ironic salute. This was practically the last of Caddo’s negro
population.”
The Caddo Herald showed how the town was adapting (on September 8): “The negro has gone and we have the ‘Steel King’ washing
machine to take her place. We guarantee them to do the work. Brigance Hardware
Co.” With such labor-saving devices to be had at a local White business with a
humorously thuggish name, who needed Negroes? The paper immediately began
inviting Whites: “ The cotton must be picked, the gins must run, there is
plenty of hauling and the like to do, besides cement workers, carpenters, and
other lines are here to furnish employment. There is plenty to do and Caddo
people will welcome those who desire to come here for the purpose of working
and making a living, besides something for a rainy day. We have good free
schools, city water, light taxes, and good government; what more can an immigrant
desire? Come to Caddo.”
On
the 15th the Herald faced
“The Race Question”: “The Herald has always believed the negro should be made
to keep in his place, and his place necessarily is on the back seat. But
because a man is a negro is not full proof that he has no rights at all. . . .
The Herald believes now that they are gone our race troubles are at an end and
hopes it may thus continue. . . . White
people are fast coming to Caddo to take the places left by the blacks. They are
laborers, cotton pickers, and all other lines which formerly were done by the
negroes. It may work a hardship for a time, but The Herald believes that in a
short while things will run along as smoothly as ever.”
That
was Caddo, only a little over 20 miles from where the Costners lived in
Colbert. Some of those fleeing Caddo went south, to Denison and onward. On 5 September 1911 many
negroes had arrived in Denison, Texas, just eight miles over the Red River from
Colbert, some planning never to return to Oklahoma, “others seeking advice and
protection” (said the Chelsea Oklahoma Reporter
on 7 September). Dovey was one of the second group:
Dovey Costner, a negro renter on the
Colbert farm, near the Colbert Ferry, four miles north of Denison on Red river,
was in Denison Tuesday” (the 5th) “and sought financial assistance
in organizing a movement to send a number of negro families to Liberia. He
stated that there were nearly fifty families along Red river north of Denison
who were ready and anxious to leave for that country. They are willing to
dispose of all their cattle, horses, crops and even their land. The Chelsea
paper continued:
Costner says that there are about fifty families who either
own their farms or rent lands, obey the laws and live respectably in the
neighborhood. Some have resided there for more than ten years and have the
confidence and respect of all their white neighbors. Recently these negroes
have been subjected to many embarrassing assertions by white men, their homes
have been entered during the night and searched for the alleged assaulters of
the wives of white men, that there [they] are now afraid to venture on the
public roads and into the small towns nearly, least they be accused of some
fiendish crime and lynched. Costner, who has more than the average education
for a negro farmer, said he and his two brothers were cultivating about one
hundred and fifty acres of corn and cotton and expected to realize considerable
money off their crops this year, but are ready to load up their household goods
and leave their crops, it not being considered safe for them to remain if the
present condition continues to prevail.
Costner is of the belief that the lawless negro element
which has created the present strained relation between whites and blacks is
due largely to the invasion of Bryan county by negroes from north Texas and
southern Oklahoma towns. He says that to
his knowledge many are of the low vagrant element which infests low negro
restaurants, pool halls and joints in prohibition districts.
A
flippant reporter re-wrote the article for the Pontotoc County Enterprise in Ada, Oklahoma on 8 September:
“Negroes in the riot-ridden land of Bryan county, Oklahoma, just north of
Denison, are turning their faces toward the dark continent of their
forefathers, where the tomtom sounds the call of battle, where only the
breech-clout bedecks the body and, above all, where race riots are unknown.”
The negroes causing trouble were not residents but “floaters of the type that
infest the red light districts of every city.” The “better class of negroes”
were “living in daily fear of their lives at the hands of the lower element of
whites,” who have repeatedly searched their houses and subjected them “to
humiliating treatment.” Now, said Costner, “Negroes Want to Emigrate.”
All over the country newspapers
printed stock stories about Dovey's plan. On 6 September: COSTNER HEADS PARTY
(Fort Worth Star-Telegram)----- NEGRO
EXPEDITION TO LIBERIA (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)-----
NEGROES GOING TO LIBERIA (Wilmington, NC Dispatch)----- WOULD EMIGRATE TO LIBERIA (Washington DC Star). On 7 September NEGROES PLAN TO
ABANDON HOMES IN OKLAHOMA FOR NEW ONES IN AFRICA (New Orleans Times-Democrat)----- On October 7
NEGROES TO LIBERIA. RACE TROUBLES IN OKLAHOMA START EXDUS FROM THAT STATE
(Pittsburgh Courier).
The Costners did not go to Liberia. In
1920 Dovey was still on the Colbert farm, still not able to write, and caring
for his mother, 90. In 1940 he was in the Tiger section of Okmulgee, but he reported
being on a farm as late as 1935. In his last years in Okmulgee lynchings had
all but ceased and a 4 April 1948 Okmulgee Times
cartoon could mark a great change: fat White man in bathrobe looks down the
street and from the door his wife calls, “Stop mumbling about crime waves,
Edgar--the paper has only been missing for two mornings!” Dovey had known crime
waves. Yet through Reconstruction and the KKK and White Man’s Union and the
lynchings in Texas and Oklahoma, through the Depression, Moses’s family had
stayed together. At a dangerous moment Dovey had been its public face. They lived out their lives. They were allowed to live out
their lives. In Okmulgee in 1940 Dovey was "working on his own
account" and had worked 21 weeks in 1939 and made $340. Maybe at the end
Dovey achieved a measure of security such as his grandfather Randal was anxious
to have after Jacob Costner died, but the Black Costners had endured hard
lives.
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