Attorney Wm. S. Peters of Boley--Martyr or Stormy Petrel?

Boley’s Masonic Temple

The unsolved death of the African American lawyer William S. Peters (1876-1936) shrouds the sixty years of his life with a darkness. Two attempts were made on his life. After the first one a large reward was offered for information leading to a conviction, but no one came forward to claim it. The names of the would-be assassins in the first ambush remained on a suspects list from the sheriff’s office, but the pair of them involved in the second attempt were tried and acquitted for lack of witnesses. Peter’s death was recorded by the State of Oklahoma, but no obituary or death notice has been found for him and his place of burial went unrecorded.

The online vital records for Attorney Peters provide the facts of his life that can be documented. He was born in Haynesville, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana in 1876, as attested to by six vital records at Ancestry.com and by his great nephew Prof. James Peters, who in 2005 wrote a book about him, which we will discuss at the end of this essay. The book, however, doesn’t mention his uncle’s father, who was King Peters, born about 1840 in Alabama; or his mother, Frona or Fanny Gipson, age uncertain. The name King Peters appears as “next-of-kin (father)” on William’s 1917 draft registration, a document that apparently escaped Professor Peters’ notice. Nor did he notice his uncle’s complete name, which also appears there, as William Samuel Peters.

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Still, the most detailed biographical paragraph comes from the nephew’s book, and it comes in the author’s publicity blurb. There James writes: “Over the course of sixty years, I researched in Bill’s birthplace of Haynesville, Louisiana, Magnolia and Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he attended high school and college, respectively, Nashville, Tennessee where he attended law school, and Boley and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where he practiced law.” It’s useful to know where Bill attended school, especially as this helps fill in the blank of years between his birth in 1876 and his legal career in Boley. The Professor dates the Boley period from 1903, but the first reference I find is from Boley’s The Weekly Progress (a.k.a. The Boley Progress) in January 1906, where we read:

Lawyer W. S. Peters of Muskogee has been in town for four or five days assisting Lawyer Jones on some very, important legal business.

This tells us that Attorney Peters was living in Muskogee in 1906, a much larger and more important town than Boley, lying about sixty miles to the northeast. The State of Sequoyah as proposed in 1905 was to have Muskogee serve as its capital. Its population in 1900 was 4,254, as compared to Boley’s 1910 population of 1,334. What Boley lacked in size, however, it made up for with an African American population of 60 to 80%. Whatever adversities his skin color caused Uncle Bill in Muskogee, they would disappear in Boley.

This indeed seems to have been what happened, judging from a substantial paragraph of praise that appeared in The Okfuskee County News for November 1909. It’s headline was “The Negro Lawyer”:

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During the term of the district court [in Okemah, the county seat] which was just closed we had the opportunity to witness the negro lawyers in the trial of cases, and William S. Peters, of Boley, especially attracted attention. His success was due to skill and efficiency as well as preparedness in a given case. From observation we can say that he is a credit to his race as well as to his town, and with him as an advisor we see no reason for the negroes of the county at large and his community in particular to [commit] errors and blunders.

This is pretty high praise for a lawyer just beginning his practice--it could also arouse professional jealousies--and it comes as no surprise to find that the 1910 census shows Peters living in Boley. He is still single, and he remains so, and his color is given as “Mulatto,” a designation he would also carry in 1920, though 1930 reverts to “black,” which is the color given him in the 1900 census in Tennessee. Little faith can be placed in these color designations. They depended on the subjective evaluation of the enumerator or the wishes of the subject enumerated.

Peters next appears in the Boley newspaper spotlight in a long open letter in The Weekly Progress for late December, 1909, celebrating the failure of a bill which would have restricted suffrage to a party line rather than allowing voters free choice from different parties. Democrats, the party in power, evidently felt that blacks were choosing Republicans rather than following the Jim Crow party line. Peters writes, the bill “is directed at the Negro of the State and to perpetuate the Democratic party in power.” This bill, known as the Taylor Election Law, was killed by the Supreme Court in late 1909, much to the approval of Attorney Peters, who affirmed his intention to

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always vote for the man rather than the party. He ends his essay by stating “I believe we have some fairly good democrats in Okfuskee County, and there may be some good other folks.” The whole matter of the Taylor Election law would not be worth mentioning, except that it is the first hint that Attorney Peters is going to start voting Democrat, a practice that will win him few friends among black voters in Boley. It could even be related to the assassination attempts he underwent, the last one fatal.

It’s also the first hint of something else, possibly something more serious, for in this long article Peters stops to tell a personal anecdote, the only one I’ve found in all his many newspaper contributions:

When I was working and saving money to enter a law school I was employed by a rich white family in the state of Texas, in which family was an old blind gentleman. One day at noon while this old gentleman was eating, he remarked, “Peters, this is the best gumbo I ever saw. I don’t see how we can give you up.” Prior to that time a section foreman said I was a good tie tamper.

“Tie tamper,” an obscure phrase, refers to the work of laying railways, where the ties had to be tamped solidly into the earth to sustain the rails the trains would run on. It was brutal low-paying labor performed by ethnic-minority work gangs, black and Irish. The work was performed to a rhythm provided by a lead singer, and some of these songs and the labor they accompanied can be heard and watched on youtube. A kindred group of workers were called gandy dancers, named for the manufacturer of the long metal poles they used for leverage in “lining” (aligning) the track (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandy_dancer).

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Peters continues:

This shall not be construed to mean that I have fallen from grace and become a democrat, because my people say we can’t be if we would. I mean to remain under the old banner, and I also mean that if Messrs. Taylor and Bill Cross let me vote again, I first shall scrutinize my ticket with an eye of an eagle and if there are bad republicans opposing good democrats, I mean to scratch Hades out of it.

The reader is still left to wrestle with the meaning of the anecdote. Peters may have told it as a way of warning his enemies about his physical strength, for this kind of hard labor would have developed a young man’s physique. In his WWI draft registration in 1917, Peters describes himself as short and “stout.” It’s noteworthy that the attacks on him were never physical, which would have been normal procedure to serve as a warning. His assailants just shot him.

In February 1912 Peters was still doing alright, according to the Muskogee Times-Democrat. He was elected second vice president of the newly formed “colored state bar association” with W. H. Twine as president. Twine was known as “the black tiger” for his crusading journalism. Peters has a finger on the common pulse, for in September 1913 in The Okfuskee County News he reports on Chief Sam’s “Back to Africa” movement that is “wildly exciting” folks around Clearview”8 (Bittle 74). The year 1915 was a time for open letters in The Boley Progress exchanged with W. L. Jones (a former legal partner) and L.

8. Clearview was an all-black town eight miles SE of Okemah. Of the original fifty such towns in Oklahoma, it is one of the thirteen that still exist.

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L. Dolphin, with Peters firing the opening salvo in a full- pager called “Challenge to the Tricksters.” The other three came back with replies, rebuttals, and countercharges. The issue fought over was the use or misuse of school funds. It was unclear who won the exchange, unless it was the last man standing. One animosity emerges clearly enough: here were two prominent black men in Boley who would hold a grudge against the newly arrived lawyer. In October 1917 Attorney Peters would sue Attorney Jones (his former law partner) for libel, claiming $2000 actual damages and $3000 punitive, Peters asserting that his law practice had suffered because of Jones’s accusations.

In December 1918 The Okfuskee County News published a two-column plea “with Negroes for Red Cross Help.” Peters regrets that he can’t be with the soldiers to share “the victory with them upon the battlefield” and the thrill of “going over the top behind a barrage being laid down by American artillery.” He quotes from two letters received from “Okfuskee county boys who are over there” in which they joke with him about their promise not to return until they had “caught and bearded the Kaiser.” Sadly, they say, they cannot catch him because “he fly, he flew, he flown (fly-flew-flown),” leaving everything “even Mrs. Kaiser.” The jokey tone of the letters suggests that Peters had warm relations with the men who’d gone overseas to fight.

An October 1920 article published in the The Black Dispatch is important because it refers to a meeting of the NAACP at the Masonic Temple (pictured below), an edifice of which the town of Boley was justifiably proud. Both Attorney Peters and “Judge Sawner” of Chandler (the subject of an earlier essay in the present collection) are referred to in the article. The more important presence one feels, however, is that of the brilliant Dispatch editor

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Roscoe Dunjee from Oklahoma City who already is working hand-in-hand with the NAACP. As will be seen shortly, Peters also writes for Dunjee’s Dispatch.

Boley’s Masonic Temple

Which brings us to the first assassination attempt in May of 1922 (following, it should be noted, the Klan- instigated Tulsa Massacre of a year earlier). Though initial accounts insisted on the seriousness of the wounds, with the shot passing “entirely through his body in the region of the lower part of his lungs,” a later report in the Okfuskee County News on May 18th, two weeks after the shooting, gave hope:

Reports from the hospital at Guthrie where W. S. Peters, the colored lawyer who was shot from ambush at Boley several days ago, is being treated, are to the effect that the wounded man is improving and it is now believed he will recover.

Peters was shot down in the streets of Boley while going from his office to his home. It was in

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the night time and the assailant fired from cover. The officers as yet have no clue to the identity of the would-be assassin.

An account from a passing witness is published, the Methodist preacher who heard and answered Peters’ call for help when he fell: “Help! I’m Peters. Come here.” The County News continues:

The closest friends of the wounded man think that the shooting was the result of personal prejudice which the lawyer had incurred in the course of his professional duties. Citizens of Boley have subscribed the sum of $500 which they guarantee as a reward for the conviction of the party who shot Peters from ambush.

As an armchair detective writing a hundred years after this event, I agree with the assessment of prejudice on the part of Peters’ legal colleagues. After his announcement that he would vote Democratic when he felt like it, Peters was not making friends for himself. Every county in Oklahoma had political machines, Democratic and Republican, and these machines wielded enormous local influence. Around Boley the Republican machine would have been the stronger, and Peters had already opposed it by stating in print his intention to vote Democratic when the spirit moved him. One acrimonious situation had already flared up with his former law partner William L. Jones, the mutual hatred indicated by the large sums named in their libel suits. Also, it should be kept in mind that $500 was a large sum of money in 1922. If no one came forward to claim it, and there was no arrest or trial, that would suggest that the killers were being well paid and that

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probably they had powerful friends in Boley’s Republican political machine.

In fact, however, three men were arrested on a charge of “being implicated in the shooting.” As reported in the Okfuskee County News for September 14th, the three were: John Owens, for several years deputy sheriff and city marshal of Boley; L. C. Taylor, a “colored lawyer”; and Sam M. Mathonican, a barber. None of them were brought to trial, however, and nothing more is heard about the arrests. The barber may be a person of special interest, since in 1916 he was charged with resisting arrest. “The local officers at Boley allege that they attempted to arrest Sam and Sam went on the war path.” L. C. Taylor too had a poor track record. A lawyer specializing in farm loans, in November 1913 he was released from the state penitentiary and then charged with forgery. As for John Owens, deputy sheriffs commonly owed their jobs to the political machine and were open to corruption. All in all, a motley and unsavory threesome, but trial convictions were yet another matter. Before the advent of forensic science, a charge of murder or attempted murder required witnesses, Old Testament style, and for killers it was a simple matter to intimidate or eliminate witnesses.

By June, Peters was well enough to send an angry letter to Roscoe Dundee protesting against an article that had recently emanated from Boley and been published in the Black Dispatch. The article in question, dated May 25th, was entitled “To Investigate Boley Shooting.” It states that the recent shooting of Attorney Peters

is the result of an unrest and violent agitation of mind in this community, growing out of the election outrages in this county and city. It is alleged that a few Negroes have banded themselves together for

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the purpose of serving the purpose of the Democratic party in Okfuskee county and have systematically assisted in the virtual disfranchisement of all but a handful of the Negroes of the county [who conspired to do otherwise. Peters] is charged with being the chief of the conspirators.

Peters wrote Dunjee at the Dispatch denying the allegations:

There is not a word of truth in the article . . . . True, I am registered as a Democrat; but without fee, putting up all my personal expense, and one fourth of that incidental to the lawsuit, I carried a case through all the state courts, obtaining a judgment of the Supreme Court establishing a voting place in Boley, prior to which time, as far back as 1910, the voting place for Boley was at Paden, seven miles away.

The reader may well wonder if this issue is important. It may well be the usual procedure by which in order to avert blame attaching to himself the perpetrator blames the victim. But we must not lose track of the central issue: the killing of Attorney William S. Peters.

The next broil in which we find Peters involved concerns Governor John “Our Jack” Walton and his supporter Dr. Isaac W. Young, who among his many accomplishments had been mayor of Boley in 1915. Walton has the dubious honor of being the Oklahoma governor who served the briefest time in office. Elected in 1922 and impeached a year later, Walton led a progressive coalition that followed the Shawnee Convention mandates and

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brought relief to poor farmers, but his administration was a failure and political radicalism disappeared from the state (Joyce 112). According to a 1930 study, Walton’s main opponents in Oklahoma politics were “disappointed office- seekers” and the Ku Klux Klan (Ewing 648ff.), and his out- and-out war with the Klan left him with few friends. Among Walton’s strongest supporters was Dr. Isaac W. Young, a practicing physician whom the Oklahoma Historical Society today proclaims as a Civil Rights leader

Dr. I. W. Young, about 1922

and a “Father of Black Democracy.” Focusing on black farmers and union workers, he succeeded in securing more black votes for Walton than had ever been counted before in Oklahoma elections. Peters must have initially liked Walton for in August of 1922, as reported in the Waurika News-Democrat, he joined with Young among “over forty Negroes coming from all sections of Oklahoma” to organize a state-wide “Walton for Governor Club.” It didn’t take long for Young to get his reward. In May of 1923 a new board of regents was appointed for “the negro Agricultural and Normal school at Langston,” all of them recommended by Young, and the next day the new members elected Young president of the school.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that Young had made genuine contributions to Langston’s extension program, so much so that A. H. Fuhr, the first black man to be a full-time extension agent in Oklahoma, said of him, “We all are willing to follow him as Israel followed Moses, for we believe he has he power to strike the rocks of ignorance, and culture and refinement will flow forth.” With the advent of the Depression and Dust-Bowl drought, it was the Langston-centered program that enabled the Extension Service to survive (Brooks 98).

For whatever reason, Peters took a dislike to Young. Either he didn’t like the politically greased appointment, or he was jealous of the success of his fellow Louisianan, or perhaps it was just his cantankerous character. His announced reason, however, was that he didn’t think that Young had the intellectual qualifications to be Langston’s president. This would not have endeared him with Young, who not only had an M.D. degree but a doctorate in letters from the all-black Wiley College in Texas.

Looking into these political teapot-tempests could occupy us for several more pages, but we are more likely to

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understand Peters’ death if we place personalities before politics. January 1924 finds Peters continuing his attack on Young, this time in published arguments with Rev. H. T. S. Johnson who is substituting for P. W. Jordan in defense of Young as a President of Langston. Though Peters mentions his love and respect for the reverend, this time the lawyer makes some harder hits at Young, calling him “absolutely unfit from every angle” to be president of Langston College and mentioning an allegation that Young “attempted to put a gigantic graft “on the citizens of Boley. With this renewed attack on Dr. Young, it seems safe to add him to the angry group of men in and around Boley who might be willing to donate to a secret campaign fund for to silence Peters.

Peters was not a man to keep silent. He may have thrived on discord, like a stormy petrel who came with bad weather. Even so, it was six years before his enemies tried a second time to kill him. The story comes from the Weleetka American for August 2nd 1928:

William S. Peters, negro lawyer at Boley, was shot from ambush last Thursday night about 11:00 p.m., and lies dangerously wounded in a hospital at Guthrie hovering between life and death. Peters was shot with a shot gun loaded with “BB” shot. The charge took effect in his face, neck and head . . .

Immediately after the shooting, Sheriff Chas. Hendrix was called and began an investigation. Sheriff Russell sent down “Mid-Night Son,” his famous bloodhound, and it was put on trail. The dog trailed to the home of George Perry, and a shotgun was found concealed under his porch. In one barrel was found an empty shell, and in the other a loaded shell. One of the men held in

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connection with the shooting had bought two shells like the one found in the gun in Boley that day.

In the absence of forensic science, what we have here is pretty close to the smoking gun that convicts the killer. As yet, however, there was no witness apart from Mid-Night Son, and readers had to wait for the victim to regain his power of speech. Meanwhile, we get some journalistic opinion about Peters’ lack of popularity.

Peters, who styles himself the “Little Giant,” has been prominent in political affairs in Boley for a number of years. At statehood he was a republican, but in recent years affiliated with the democratic party, and was the election inspector at Boley two years ago. He has been the storm center of a number of hot political controversies at Boley.

Two points of interest emerge here. First, the self-bestowed sobriquet of “the little giant” is ominous if Peters is bragging about his physical strength (as suggested above in the “tie tamper” anecdote). There is a historical hitch as well. As a moniker, “The little giant” was first given to Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Stephen Douglas used it to suggest he was short in stature but a giant in politics, which is well enough, except that his politics were pro-slavery. The second point of interest is that the article emphasizes what we have been saying about Peters’ character. He was not exactly a troublemaker, but trouble seemed to follow him. Like the stormy petrel, who doesn’t cause the storm but when the bird appears the storm is not far behind.

An update on Peters’ story comes exactly two weeks later. On August 16th, the Okfuskee County News

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reported in a headline “Boley Shooting Case Delayed.” The reportage reads:

While the life of W. S. Peters . . . hangs in the balance, the trial of his alleged assassins will be delayed. Hovering between life and death, paralyzed in body and mind, suffering with a charge of buckshot buried in his head and face, Peters’ condition is such that death is expected momentarily.

The trial is on hold because officials are waiting to see if Peters last words could constitute a dying declaration. If so, they would have more force as testimony, it being commonly supposed that dying men don’t tell lies.

The [Negro] men charged with the attempted murder were George Perry, Dug Perry, E. A. Caldwell, and E. R. Givens. . . . Blain Hill, Okmulgee county deputy sheriff and owner of the famous police dog, Midnight Sun, testified that he was called to the scene and that the dog picked up a trail that led directly to the homes of Dug and George Perry.

The dog’s nose that leads the posse directly to the Perry household is still the smoking gun, but the presiding judge “refused to allow the state to introduce Peters’ statement, made just following the shooting as a dying declaration but granted a continuance until Peters died or recovered sufficiently to testify.” A nicely legalistic distinction: Peters’s words don’t have the force of a “dying declaration” until he dies.

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On September 13th, The Okfuskee County News declared the case of the “ambushed lawyer” was ready for trial, and in November the Weeletka American reported from Okemah that “G. W. Perry and A. E. Caldwell, negroes, were bound over to await the the action of district court on charges of assault with intent to kill.” But to no avail. In July of 1929, The Weleetka American reported that “George Perry, charged with assault and intent to kill upon Wm. S. Peters, was tried and acquitted.” The trial took three days.

Meanwhile Peters was showing signs of limited activity. In February 1929 he defended Willie Parker, accused of assault and battery, though it may have been an old case that had been on his docket for a long time. In September 1933, showing some of his old fire, he was back in court suing The Black Dispatch for things that Roscoe Dunjee or his staff had said about him, an act that might make us wonder if he’d gotten his right reason back with his fire. In July of 1935, to our surprise, he’s elected Justice of the Peace of Boley, suggesting that perhaps some of his old enemies were softening in their feelings in view of his wounded condition. Perhaps they recognized that he had one foot in the grave.

They were right about that, for the next thing we read about William S. Peters in the Okfuskee newspapers is that his will is being probated. The first notice comes in March of 1935. The time between a person’s death and his probate is variable, six months to a year, but probate is a solid sign that the man has departed this world of sin and sorrow. Probate marked the end of the life of William S. Peters, indeed, but it was not the end of his story.

Attorney Peters had a great nephew named James S. Peters II, who in 2005, retired from his professorship at the University of Connecticut, wrote a booklet about his great

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uncle William. Professor Peters had a Ph.D. but it was in the field of rehabilitation for work-related injuries. He was not a historian. If I were to compare his discipline to history and call it a soft one, I would be wrong in many cases and needlessly offend many people, but nonetheless that is how most historians would view the matter. A less risky statement would be to say that Professor Peters’ book belongs to the genre of memoirs, and is such is governed by a much looser set of criteria than is the writing of history. All of this is a prelude to my saying that Professor Peters’ book is not a very informative one because he too often ignores the importance of the local and fills his pages with canned fodder from references books, but that would be to speak as a historian.

For the memoir writer, different rules apply, and he can be as subjective as he likes. Prof. Peters’ published volumes about rehabilitation are well respected, but his book on his great uncle was his third small volume of memoirs, all of them written in retirement, all of them about his relatives, and all printed by vanity presses. Writing memoirs for publication with a vanity press certainly admits the writer into an area of freedom, and with that said let us turn to the book itself. Though published in 2004, it is already a very rare book, which suggests that the vanity press run was a short one, with the author buying the run and giving copies to friends and acquaintances. Today World Cat finds only three libraries in the United States holding the book. It’s title is William S. Peters: A Forgotten Hero of the Civil Rights Movement (Bookman Press, no place of publication, 122 pages), and it was published with the following blurb from the author:

My great uncle Bill was truly a versatile man, a lawyer, educator and civic leader at a time when

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African-Americans were, for the most part, limited to menial jobs as sharecroppers, cooks and maids--“hewers of wood drawers of water.” He was a hero in every sense of the word, and he gave his life for the civil rights of Negroes and Indians. . . . Bill’s accomplishments may not seem so special today, but then he managed without the benefit of full citizenship, facing discrimination at every turn. His is the remarkable story of a black man who earned a law degree in 1903, was active in politics and the development of his community, and was assassinated in Boley in 1936 because of his activism.

Prof. Peters admires his great uncle and sympathizes with his difficulty in being a lawyer while living under Jim Crow, and all of that is right and proper. When, however, he states that Uncle Bill “gave his life for the civil rights of Negroes and Indians” he has moved from memoire to history, and the reader would like to know what the evidence is that backs up this assertion.

I submit that a statement like this is easier to make from Storrs Connecticut than it is from Boley Oklahoma. To investigate this matter, the foregoing immersion in the man’s life Boley between his arrival in 1903 and his death in 1935 was necessary. The availability of historical newspapers online nowadays makes this research easy to do--easier certainly than it was for Prof. Peters doing his research prior to 2005. (By that year newspaper databases were coming online, but it’s impossible to say how complete they were.) Also, as a full professor with retirement income, he could have visited the National Archives in Washington DC and looked at censuses and

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other vital records. There’s no evidence that he did this, but that is where we began our exploration in the present essay.

When I say “no evidence,” I’m looking at the 39 entries which comprise the notes to the Professor’s biography. Of these, 25 cite articles from The Black Dispatch, Oklahoma’s premier African-American newspaper, the latest of them dating from 1925, three years before the shooting of Uncle Bill; 8 are about Langston College, some of them from the Dispatch and 6 of them describing the controversy surrounding Gov. Walton’s appointment of Dr. Isaac W. Young as president of Langston University; and some 7 are general background books and articles about “negro education,” journalism, and state history. Of the notes referring directly to Uncle Bill there are only two, both citing the open letters exchanged between him and Roscoe Dunjee.

My point here should be clear. The newspapers provide no hard evidence that Uncle Bill was a “Civil- Rights hero,” unless he is one, not because he contributed to a cause, but by virtue of his own position. He started from poverty in darkest Louisiana, did brutal and low- paying work to pay his way through law school, and attained a reasonable success in a highly competitive profession. Many other blacks around the state had comparable achievements, and their names should be remembered with honor, but to call them all heroes would be to devaluate the meaning of the term. Perhaps it would be sufficient encomium to note that they all lead lives of struggle, and there was something heroic in their struggles.

James Peters wrestles with this subject, but in his ignorance of history takes a fall. In the first pages of his book, he writes:

The New Deal advocated right for Negroes and 265

Indians . . . and opportunities to regain voting and other rights they had lost after the Supreme Court’s decision [Ferguson vs. Fletcher, 1898, allowing the states to adopt segregation and discrimination laws] . . . . Uncle Bill and other staunch Black republicans felt deserted by the party of President Abraham Lincoln. When the Roosevelt administration promised a new deal for Blacks, Uncle Bill became an advocate for Blacks and Indians to become Democrats . . . . This made him a very unpopular man in a Republican state. He became marked for extension [sic!--s.b. extinction.]

The New Deal is relevant here but doesn’t come into existence until 1933, while the first shooting of William Peters took place in 1922. Until the New Deal, blacks had shown their traditional loyalty to the party of Abraham Lincoln by voting overwhelmingly Republican. As one online source summarizes the matter:

By the end of Roosevelt's first administration, however, one of the most dramatic voter shifts in American history had occurred. In 1936, some 75 percent of black voters supported the Democrats. Blacks turned to Roosevelt, in part, because his spending programs gave them a measure of relief from the Depression and, in part, because the GOP had done little to repay their earlier support.( https:// www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm? smtID=2&psid=3447)

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The great-nephew Jame Peters’ dating appears badly confused. Nor does he seem aware that his uncle William switched his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican.

The nephew does, however, supply some fact-like tidbits. Early in the book he writes, “In 1930 my family received words from my father’s Aunt Rachel Peters Barker that her brother, his uncle, William S. Peters had succumbed to his wounds while in the Sanitarium for the mentally ill. It was known that the superintendent was his friend and had admitted him to his care after the third and last shot to his head, which damaged his brain. He was buried in his beloved Town of Boley” (22). The remembered date 1930 is clearly in error, but it is understandable as the kind of trick memory plays after the passage of many years.

James Peters is more accurate on the first page of his book, where he writes, “My great uncle Bill died of his gunshot wounds in Taft, Oklahoma’s Mental Asylum in 1936. He was shot three different times for his effort to help Negroes and Indians receive the civil and legal right that had been taken from them following the enactment of “Jim Crow” and “Black Code” laws by Oklahoma and other Southern and border states” (1). Uncle William did die in the Taft asylum in 1936. That is correct and important. The newspapers, however, report only two assassination attempts, not three.

James’ best epitaph for his great-uncle comes at the very beginning of his book, in the Acknowledgements section. There he writes, “For sixty four years I have done research on this project which makes up material for this book of William S. Peters, my great uncle whose murdered body has not been found after all of these years of seeking.”

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Coda

Good news for James Peters: the search for William Peters’ grave resumed in the year 2022, and we found his great uncle William’s place of burial. First came the death date 16 Mar 1936, obtained from the erratic database at OK2explore.health.ok.gov, and then came the Certificate of Death from the State of Oklahoma. The latter agrees about the date and further shows that Peters was buried at the “Hospital for the Negro Insane” at Taft. That old graveyard has either disappeared or been absorbed into the Taft Cemetery.

My good friend Bo McCarver of Austin TX visited the Taft cemetery in July 2020. He found many graves about 200 yards west of Taft Cemetery toward the prison. His email report to me stated:

After taking pictures, I went on to Taft Cemetery which had about 200 graves with stones with death dates dating back to around 1900 and some recent ones. I found no William Peters but many of the older stones were illegible. There was a reoccurring design on roughly 20 stones that stated “At Rest” at the top and the eroded names and dates of the dead under the statement. Could these have been the work of the state hospital or a local gravestone carver?

No marker has been found, but at least we know William S. Peters’ final place of rest. A Find-a-Grave memorial has been created for him and linked to his family. Please visit https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2368884/taft- cemetery, search William Peters, and and leave a flower in remembrance.

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Print

Taft Cemetery, photo by Bo McCarver, July 2020.

Sources

Bittle, William E., and Gilbert Geis. The Longest Way Home: Chief Alfred C. Sam’s Back to Africa Movement. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964.

Brooks, Cecelia. “‘Touch the Bottom and Lift’: Black Women Home Extension Agents in Oklahoma, 1912-1935.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 86 (2008) 88-108.

Ewing, Cortez A. M. “Impeachment of Oklahoma Governors.” American Political Science Review. 24 (3): 648-652.

Joyce, Davis D., Ed. “An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before”: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History.

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Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1994.
Peters, James S., II. William S. Peters: A Forgotten Hero of

the Civil Rights Movement. Bookman Press, no

place of publication, no date [2005].
Shaw, James Sr. Boley: Oklahoma’s Famous Black Town.

Moore OK: Yes Publishing Group, 2012.

Digital

Digital History. “African-Americans and the New Deal.”

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/ disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3447. Accessed June 2022.

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