copyright 2021
by Hershel Parker
13 April
2021
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 or Dovie Costner (although identified elsewhere as Dovie Costanar,
Davie Costun), a man who interested me very strongly. Who was this outspoken
Black Costner 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 counted eighty-eight lynchings for the year and ranked Texas
in the top three states, two lynchings 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 casually
repeated the official cleaned-up version of events, creating a false history,
nationwide. 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 excused
the White Men’s Union and claimed
that all controversy was over. 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. 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, including 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 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. Some
of the Blacks waved back. 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.”
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 gain after Jacob Costner died, but the Black Costners had endured hard
lives.
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