Abstract
Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War traces the experiences of three family members of historian Kendra Taira Field and centers the themes of land dispossession to African American and American Indian histories and the transnational dimensions of African American history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Field draws on oral histories to trace experiences of her own family alongside archival evidence to construct her argument and convincingly demonstrates that genealogies and family histories are useful and reliable tools at the historian’s disposal. One of Field’s main objectives is to “show that Indian Territory and early Oklahoma served as one of the first sites of African-American transnational movement in the postemancipation period, decentering the United States in North American history even at the turn of the ‘American century’” (p. 2). According to Field, many African Americans viewed Indian Territory “as a political and economic space on the margins” and therefore a desirable place to migrate to escape the oppressive purview of the United States (p. 5). When Indian Territory did not live up to these aspirations, African Americans continued their search for better opportunities outside of the United States, to places like Africa, Mexico, and Canada. By examining such migrations, she illuminates the diasporic aspects of African American activism and freedom struggles.
In the first three chapters, Field shares family histories, using them as a lens to understand the migrations of black southerners to Indian Territory: Field’s great-great-grandfathers, Thomas Jefferson Brown and Monroe Coleman, and Alexander (Elic) Davis, a first cousin of Coleman. Thomas Jefferson Brown, born in the 1850s to a free African American father and an Irish mother in Arkansas, is the subject of the first chapter. After making several trips to Indian Territory and learning the Muskogean language, Brown moved to the area in 1870. Eventually, he married twice to women who were Creek and Seminole freedpeople, which, according to the Dawes roll, entitled him and his children to land. Due in part to these strategic marriages, Brown eventually accumulated over a 1,000 acres of land and established the town of Brownsville in Indian Territory. Despite this financial success and his increased social standing, the era of Jim Crow and statehood brought growing economic pressures to Brown and his family, motivating them to leave Brownsville. By using Brown’s life as a lens, Field illustrates how conditions in the postemancipation South shaped African American migration to the American West while at the same time conflicted with the issues of native sovereignty and land dispossession in Indian Territory.
The second chapter examines the life of Monroe Coleman. He left Mississippi to go to Indian Territory in 1904, three years before Oklahoma statehood. Born in 1868, Coleman, like Brown, was of “mixed-race” parentage, the son of a freedwoman and possibly his mother’s former enslaver. Coleman decided to improve his fortunes after hearing that Oklahoma offered promise to African Americans as a respite from the South, likely from newspapers, friends, and neighbors like Thomas Jefferson Brown who had settled there previously. Coleman purchased land from Brown’s grandson and participated in the creation of a black town in what was formerly Creek territory, again highlighting how black uplift and economic prosperity often collided with native sovereignty and land rights.
The third chapter chronicles the life of Alexander (Elic) Davis, a sharecropper in Mississippi who made the exodus to Oklahoma with his wife in 1907. With Oklahoma being admitted as a state, and land quickly gobbled up by white speculators and settlers, Davis’s circumstances did not mirror those of Brown and Coleman. He did not have the resources to buy land so Davis became a minister, a profession that barely covered his family’s needs in a space that can aptly be termed the “Jim Crow West.”
These disappointments moved Davis and his wife, as well as Coleman and his family, to participate in the little-known “back to Africa” movement (1913−1915) led by an activist known as Chief Sam, the subject of the fourth and final chapter. When Indian Territory, and later Oklahoma, no longer represented a place of freedom and economic, political, and social autonomy, Field argues that African Americans turned their gaze outward to the international landscape, preceding even the Garveyite movement. African Americans from different socioeconomic classes and religious denominations raised thousands of dollars to buy the steamship Liberia to start anew in Africa. Nevertheless, like the earlier colonization movement of the early nineteenth century, many found life in Africa hard and unsatisfactory, including Monroe Coleman and his family, who decided to return to the United States. Field’s detailed exploration of this transnational social movement expands current understandings about the beginnings of black nationalism as well as the history of African American emigration.
One theme that Field could have expanded upon is the idea of Oklahoma—and the American Southwest in general—as a “long-standing middle ground” (p. 144). The term “middle ground” brings to mind images of cooperation, negotiation, and a balance of power. With the forced allotment of native land, the extinguishment of Indian sovereignty, land dispossession, “Jim Crow statehood,” and lynchings of both African Americans and Indigenous Americans, the use of the phrase “middle ground” for Oklahoma and other areas of the Southwest needs clarification. And although Field salutes the importance of women to the history of African American migration and postemancipation life and honors the women in her family as the main vessels of knowledge about these important histories, this book would be even richer if Field had delved into their lived experiences or speculated on their thoughts. Scholarship about this time period has demonstrated that black women played valuable roles in religious life and social and political activism in the South and the North. Field has laid the groundwork for more expansive scholarship on the public and private lives of African American women in the American West during the postemancipation and early twentieth century eras. Overall, Growing Up with the Country is a fine contribution to the study of family formation and construction, postemancipation studies, African American migration, history of the American West, and scholarship on racial identity and formation, especially black Indian racial identity.