Posts
from The Lives of Lawmen (2020) by
Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus
Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo
As a person born in Oklahoma and largely reared there, I’m embarrassed to confess how late in life I’ve come to appreciate Franklin. My excuse is that when my ancestors came to Oklahoma in the landrun of 1891 they homesteaded in the western half of the state rather than the eastern, in Oklahoma Territory rather than Indian. As a scholar of American literature, my chagrin deepens to realize how long I have waited to add Franklin's name to that honor roll of black writers from Oklahoma that carries at its capstone the name of Ralph Ellison. But Ellison left his native Oklahoma City at the age of nineteen for Tuskegee Institute and rarely looked back. Though his essays contain frequent references to his Oklahoma origins, they are not nearly so widely read as his two major novels, neither of which gives a sense of the author’s origins except that they are black and southern. Franklin, by contrast, spent his whole life in Oklahoma, as a lawyer laboring for the cause of social justice. He was among the earliest and probably the most prominent black attorney in early-day Oklahoma, contributing his efforts to righting the great wrong of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He was also, as his autobiography makes abundantly clear, a writer.
The primary evidence for this statement is the book itself, but we would do well to pause a moment to consider its introduction, written by Franklin’s son, the dean of black American historians John Hope Franklin. The world of scholarship needs no reminder of this man, former president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, whose From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and continuously updated, has sold more than three million copies. Just as important for the shaping of the world we live in was his contribution to the historic Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in the public schools. In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team led by Thurgood Marshall, and helped develop the socio-psychological case for the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
This case, challenging legally recognized segregated education in the South, was taken to the United States Supreme Court. It ruled in 1954 that the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional, leading to integration of schools. Franklin’s eloquent case argued that the south’s old separate-but-equal argument was a contradiction in terms, that separation not only implied inequality but fostered feelings of inferiority in the minds of black children.
In his introduction to the autobiography, John Hope Franklin states of his father, “He had long been a frustrated and unfulfilled writer, and I am convinced that if he could have eked out a living as an essayist, novelist, or columnist, he would have gladly done so” (xiii). He elaborates this by adding, “There were not many young African Americans living in the Indian Territory at the close of the nineteenth century would could provide posterity with a vivid account of their experiences and that of their compatriots (xv)” Among the manuscripts Franklin found in his father’s papers was the draft of a novel, “The Trail of Tears,” based on the removal of Native Americans and their African American compatriots--slaves and kinspeople--to Indian Territory.
Franklin’s introduction alerts us to the fact that rather than the category of literature, with its troublesome elitism, we would do better to place his father’s autobiography in the rich context of Afro-American autobiography. Apart from early half-forgotten efforts, this tradition starts in the 1845 with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and includes such classics as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, and The Autobiography of Malcom X, completed by Alex Haley after the author’s assassination in 1965. This list could easily be made much longer, since autobiography is a particularly rich vein within Afro-American literature. For the student of Oklahoma history, however, there is no list. There is only the solitary figure of Buck Colbert Franklin. Others have followed him, but he has no predecessors or contemporaries.
The autobiography stands out for another reason, its portrait of a nuclear black family that stays together, held firmly in place by the family values of the parents. More unusually, especially in recent decades where the father is notable mainly for his absence, we note the continued presence of the father and the warm relations between fathers and sons, extending over two generations. First it is clear from John Hope Franklin’s introduction that relations with his father were always characterized by respect and affection. Though as lawyers, they frequently argued with each other, their disagreements were candid and expressed with affection and humor. More remarkably still, this intimate father-son relationship characterized Buck Colbert Franklin’s relationship with his own father. I know of no other black autobiography in which affection and mutual respect between fathers and sons continues through two generations. As he recounts the day he prepared to leave home for college, the author states, “I’m sure [my father] did not think more of me than he did of his other children; but we had become pals and grew closer together over the years. We seemed to like the same things and sought the same answers. When together, which was as often as possible, we talked as two grown-ups” (67).
Two of the early chapters deal with schooling and give a detailed portrait of the kind of education available to a young black man of Franklin’s promise. In September 1894 Franklin left home to attend Dawes Academy, his first boarding school away from home. Now vanished and forgotten, it was located about three miles from the town of Berwyn (later Gene Autry) in Carter County, thirteen miles from Ardmore. It was presided over by Miss Mary Dawes, a New Englander and sister to Henry L. Dawes, first chairman of the commission called by his name. Their family had been prominent in Massachusetts in education, government, and business. The Dawes Academy strongly emphasized the study of scripture, with devotional exercises every morning, from Monday to Friday in addition to church on the weekend. Franklin explains, “All the schools established in the South for the education of Negroes following the Civil War placed the emphasis on religious training” (69-70). The faculty and trustees believed that the hope of the race depended upon well-trained religious leaders. These would have been men, of course, but the entire faculty of Dawes was comprised of women.
Before Franklin’s next step up the educational ladder there is an important historical detour, which starts with the land run of 1889 and proceeds to matters of more personal importance. Franklin gets his first view of government-in-action at Guthrie, which brings him an acquaintance with several of the black ministers, educators, and lawyers who arrive in Oklahoma at this juncture. These half-forgotten figures include: Judge G. N. Perkins, who was born a slave in Tennessee and yet founded a weekly newspaper in 1892 called the Oklahoma Guide through which he influenced blacks in the Deep South to move to “God’s country” in Oklahoma; Inman Page, the first black graduate of Brown University, Principal of the old Douglass High School attended by Ralph Ellison, and the first president of Langston College; and Roscoe Dungee, who founded the Black Dispatch,“using its columns to advocate freedom through education for all the children of the human race in Oklahoma and everywhere throughout the world” (54).
The next step was Roger Williams University in, Nashville, a historically black college founded 1866 as the normal institute by the American Baptist denomination, which established numerous schools in the south. Renamed for Roger Williams, the founder of the First Baptist Church and a promotor of abolitionism, it became the largest Baptist college in the area for educating African Americans. It was founded in a period when Protestant mission groups sponsored numerous educational facilities for freedmen in the South. In 1905, its buildings were destroyed by arson. Rebuilt, it continued until the stock market crash of 1929. The site is currently occupied by the American Baptist College, a historically black college.
At this period, no teacher taught just one subject, and no subject was more important than the Greek New Testament. Among the most influential in Franklin’s life was John Hope, the science teacher, who became a close friend and after whom he would name his first son, the historian John Hope Franklin. Though it was not Franklin’s ambition to become a lawyer, he also began working in a law office, the traditional manner of legal studies in his day. He asked his employer Colonel Stokes if he could ever be a lawyer, to which he received this reply: “Certainly, why not? It will not be tomorrow, or the next day, measured by the years; but it will be before you die, or your children at the fartherest” (84).
Feeling the need for new challenges, Franklin transferred to Atlanta Baptist College, a sister school where his mentor John Hope had taken a post. A school this famous, linked to such luminaries as Booker T. Washington--Franklin calls him “a brand new educational star”--and a science teacher named George Washington Carver, needs no commentary here. Suffice it to say that to Franklin the ABC faculty “seemed destined to revolutionize the entire educational thought of the nation” (113). Even so, here he ends his formal education and returns to his home, where he would find himself immersed in the legal struggles over land allotments. He had intended to return to school, but found too much to do in Oklahoma as Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory prepared for single statehood. The latter was prepared for this development, of course, in a way that the former was not. This story also is too familiar to merit retelling, but for the historian there is an immense wealth of local detail here.
As for Franklin’s own story, he marries, tries his hand at farming, and about 1904 “started to study law under a correspondence course put out by the Sprague Law School of Detroit...I purchased a set of saddlebags and carried my textbooks with me everywhere I went, studied hard, and devoted myself to it as never before. I had decided to make the legal profession my life’s work” (126). His situation is not promising. “I had no land save 20 acres--raw and unimproved and worthless--which had been allotted to me as a Choctaw freedman. Had Mother lived until the enrollments, she would have been enrolled as a Choctaw Indian….Her Choctaw Indian kin were allotted 160 acres each” (121).
The bleakness of his situation encourages him in the study of law, and in 1908 though lacking in formal education, he was admitted to the Oklahoma bar. The bleakness, the sheer weight of necessity, was, I think, the key to the turning point of his life, as he returns to his mother’s Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
At Ardmore I connected myself with a church for the first time in my life, a C.M.E. church in a small, poorly-painted building on an eastern spur of the Santa Fe Railroad. The CME was my mother’s and all her people’s church. It was the weakest of all the denominations in town. My friends and my father’s kin thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, considering the fact that there was not a member of the church who had enough business to need a lawyer. But it wasn’t sentiment that influenced me to join the church, even if it was my mother’s church. There has always been a stubborn streak in me, a desire to team up with the underdog. I’ve always thought it was there where I was most needed. 135
Fighting for the underdog, however, is not the highroad to success, and by 1912, with the avalanche of anti-black legislation--the Separate Coach Law, the Separate School Law, the grandfather clause--and the continual cheating of the Indian out of the land so forcefully described in Angie Debo’s eloquent books, he “was at the point of throwing in the sponge and yelling quits” (144). It was in this mood of desperation that he heard about Rentiesville and the seeming paradise of all black communities. Located four miles north of Checotah, Rentiesville was one of three all-black towns in McIntosh County, and the county itself was half black. (It is also one of the thirteen still surviving today out of an initial total of more than fifty.)
Franklin’s old home in Rentiesville, birthplace of John Hope Franklin
“As my wife and I became more acquainted with our neighbors, we discovered that Rentiesville was torn right down the middle by petty jealousies bases on religious differences, spelling doom for the promotion of harmony and good will among the inhabitants” (168). In retrospect his years in Rentiesville seemed a failure: “In the long days and nights of my life that have unfolded and becomes a closed chapter, I have had few successes and many failures; but this one at Rentiesville was the bitterest and hardest to swallow. It blotted and our made blank eight years of my life …” (187). Religion wasn’t the only problem. He was also ostracized for being a Democrat, though he explained that he was a Jeffersonian Democrat, and Franklin believed (erroneously) that Jefferson had been opposed to slavery.
In the crucial year 1921, he moved to Tulsa, a city where racial tensions were extremely high. The town had one of the most affluent black communities in the nation—the Greenwood District, also known as ‘Black Wall Street’ which created a sharp divide between blacks and whites. In May of 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was in an elevator with a white woman named Sarah Page. It was alleged that he attempted to assault her, and he was promptly arrested. There was an altercation between a group of black and white people at the courthouse which, in the next twenty-four hours, would escalate to a massive one-day race riot that left approximately three hundred dead, much of the black population imprisoned, and the Greenwood District in ruins. Franklin is arrested in the general roundup of blacks, and the ensuing fire consumes his law office with all his books and papers.
It would be superfluous to describe the riot itself, which in recent decades has been the subject of several fine books. Franklin’s self-reproaches are noteworthy:
I might have done some good . . . had I then understood mob psychology. That was my shortcoming. Suppose I’d had then a knowledge of the working of the minds of a mob, and the foresight to keep my mind, eyes, and ears open to everything about me. Who can say that I, singlehanded, would not have been able to marshal an alert and righteous force of law-abiding citizens that would have stopped the mob…? (200).
Noteworthy but surely excessive. One doubts the ability of any single person, no matter how knowledgeable, to stop a frenzied mob. Still, Franklin had an important roll to play. In the aftermath of the carnage, the Tulsa City Council passed an ordinance that prevented the black people of Tulsa from rebuilding. The city planned instead to rezone the area from a residential to a commercial district. Franklin led the legal battle against this ordinance and sued the city of Tulsa before the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where he won. As a consequence, black Tulsa residents could and did begin the reconstruction of their destroyed community.
Then in 1925 came the opening of the great Seminole oil field and the resultant dirty deals (“gouging” was word used by the tricksters, as Angie Debo tells) to fleece blacks and Indians out of their allotments. As a freedman himself, Franklin was implored by his friends and former associates to return to Seminole County, which he did and there immersed himself in the legal battles. These stories are widely known in a general way, but Franklin gives us the anecdotes with specific names, places, and details. Here indeed he is the voice of reason countering a mob driven by the frenzy of greed. His court cases established useful precedents, but the gouging went on.
He’d prospered in the years leading up to 1929, purchasing large acreages, but with the onset of the Great Depression he couldn’t pay taxes on his holdings and lost them. What was true across the old Indian Territory was truer still in Tulsa, where the new homes that had sprung from the ashes were heavily mortgaged. “The Federal Home Loan Corporation came into being and was a godsend” (221). Surprised that the federal government, known to be slow and cumbersome, could move so quickly, his wonder was dispelled in 1935 when he visited Washington and “found a Negro, alert and highly educated, serving in many departments as adviser . . . Here was our government fulfilling . . . the needs of the colored people as well as others; conducting for the first time in its history . . . a ”government of the people, for the people, and by by people.” This causes him to conclude, perhaps with too much optimism, that “If Lincoln gave the Negro his physical freedom, I think Roosevelt gave him his spiritual liberty” (221).
The penultimate chapter, “Climbing the Ladder of the Law” gives an overview of the development of legal cases affecting questions of the civil status of black people, beginning with the Dread Scott case of 1857 and arriving a century later at the case concerning the Topeka School board that, in effect, desegregated schooling in the U.S., the case in which Franklin’s son, John Hope Franklin, contributed the socio-psychological argument. The chapter pays particular attention to cases tried in Oklahoma
The final chapter is called “The World Today and My Beliefs,” and here Franklin attempts to state what he has learned from his life. “Being past eighty, and having been part of three generations, I am now in my mellowing years, looking toward the sunset of life, and holding absolutely no hate or prejudice toward any human being” (260). Finally, he seems to pins his hopes on education and on the black church led by an educated ministry. The education he desires would supplement the curricula of his day by adding something which in our own day we call “black studies,” alerting both blacks and whites to the suffering and the achievements of American blacks. Franklin was withering into the silence of old age when the Black Power movement arrived on the American scene, and he died before it made its presence felt.
The book ends by returning to Franklin’s dream of being a novelist, the author of”Blood Bath,” the story of the forced removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to the old Indian Territory. I have hope and faith that I will be able to accomplish and make come true this long-held dream” (273). Alas, it never happened. Franklin passed away on September 24, 1960, unable to see the final publication of his work. John Hope Franklin and his son (Franklin’s grandson) would finalize My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, marking yet another generation of intimacy between fathers and sons.
Family Background: The Colberts and the Burneys
In his autobiography, Franklin devotes only a single paragraph to family history. “Dad was born in Tennessee not far from Gallatin, and Mother was born in Mississippi, not far from Biloxi. I was christened ”Buck” in honor my my grandfather Buck [Franklin], who died long before I was born. As a slave, he was the property of a full-blood Chickasaw Indian family, the Birneys, and he must have been above the average slave in intelligence and business, for he purchased himself, his wife, and their ten children long before the Civil War” (1).
Franklin’s other major statement comes in a 1938 interview for the WPA’s Indian Pioneer Papers. Like other material in this collection, it’s called an interview, but in fact it’s a carefully prepared, academic composition. There in the first paragraph he writes:
My people came from Mississippi. My grandfather belonged to the Burneys back there and when they came to this country in the '40's they brought my grandfather with them, as a slave. My father, David, belonged to Wesley C. Burney, brother of Ben Burney, who later became governor of the Chickasaws. My mother was Minnie; she was a most unusual colored woman. She was owned by the Colberts and Pitchlynns of Mississippi. They were Choctaws. They raised my mother and allowed her every privilege of their own people. She was a Bible student. My parents were married after the war.
We are given two family names here, Colbert and Burney, of which the Colberts were historically the more important family. They provided Franklin his middle name and thus suggest a starting point. It doesn’t go very far, however, since like any large and healthy tree, the roots and branches are innumerable and most of them are lost to the dust of time.
The Colbert family of Oklahoma was an important family in the politics and government of Indian Territory. Its trunk is represented by the British half-Scot and half-Chickasaw trader James Logan Colbert (1721 - 1784) of Alabama, who had four sons by Chickasaw women, and three of these became important chieftains whose descendants occupied tribal political offices when they arrived in Oklahoma.
Their names are pivotal to the history of the Chickasaw Indians. Mixed-blood control of the Five Civilized Tribes by the early nineteenth century was fairly common, but only among the Chickasaw's did one family, the Colberts, enjoy complete domination. The Colbert dynasty reigned over the Chickasaw people for seventy years, and so it is not surprising that their name is so frequent in the history books.
The Colberts’ memory is preserved in geographic names. In the vicinity of Colberts Ferry in Alabama, there are two Colbert creeks flowing into the Tennessee from opposite sides. The state of Alabama remembered them in 1867 by naming Colbert County in honor of George and Levi, two sons of James Logan Colbert. In Mississippi there is Itawamba County from Levi’s Indian name. When one member of the family sought to give a Mississippi post office his name, he found that a town of Colbert was already in existence so he spelled his backward and we have Trebloc in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Old maps of Mississippi show a Colbert Creek near Cotton Gin Port (Braden 330-335).
In Oklahoma, the route of the Butterfield Stage Line in 1858 takes Colberts Ferry across the Red River in the Chickasaw Nation. Today near the same location is the town of Colbert, Oklahoma. It is also notable that Franklin says that his mother knew Bill Colbert’s people (61-62), the black-Choctaw U.S. marshal associated with Atoka, about whose ancestry nothing is known. (See the essay about Bill Colbert in this book.)
The Burneys were a breed of similar background but of slightly lesser importance. The name Ben Burney in Franklin’s interview provides a firm starting point for this exploration. Benjamin Crooks Burney (1844-1892) was governor of the Chickasaw Nation for one term, 1878 through 1880, and is remembered for his efforts to promote education. The Burneys, like the Colberts, left their name on one town in Oklahoma.
Burneyville is a small unincorporated community located in Love County. It was named for David C. Burney, father of Benjamin (“Ben”) Crooks Burney, the one-term Governor of the Chickasaw Nation. David C. Burney and his wife Lucy James, Chickasaw Indians and natives of Mississippi, accompanied by their family and some eighteen negro slaves, had arrived in 1844.
When Franklin was a boy, he once traveled with his dad to Gainesville Texas. They passed through Burneyville and there follows an interesting closeup:
Dad learned that the little railroad town through which he had passed many times, on the north bank of the Red River, called "Burneyville," was founded by the Birney family, the Chickasaw Indians who had once owned his father back in Tennessee....
As we road down the hot dusty road that the inhabitants called "Main Street," we could catch glimpses of a few scattered, unpainted houses through the trees and over tall sunflowers. I scented the smell of Jimson weeds, and my mind flashed back to the time when Mother used to prepare a concoction of this revolting stuff to "clean us out" just before giving us blood tonic, which she brewed with a mixture of sassafras roots and bark and high-powered whiskey that Dad would bring back from Gainesville on his annual trips there. Farther down the road appeared a two-story building on the left with a sign thereon, "Hotel." . . . .
Dad and I dismounted, leashed our horses, and went over to the blacksmith shop next door. Being told that a family of Burneys (Birneys) lived on another street, we proceeded to look for the place. Through the gathering dusk we could see two elderly people sitting in an unfenced, littered yard, and all around were flea-bitten dogs and cats.
Conversation with the residents brought out the fact that their family name was spelled "Birney" and that they were full-blood Chickasaw Indians from Tennessee. Back down the road, the aged Indian explained, someone misspelled the name as “Burney.”
The Indian remembered that his parents once owned a slave named Buck Franklin. He had been told that, and also that the slave had run away. Dad told him he had been misinformed--that the man Buck was his father and had purchased his freedom and his family's from his former master.
At this point an argument ensues between the Indian and Franklin's father, when the former comments, "I think the government made a mistake giving the slaves their freedom," to which the father replies, "I think the biggest mistake was made by your people in buying slaves from the white man" 34-35).
With this survey of the Colberts and Burneys in early-day Oklahoma, this genealogical excursion comes to a end. There are too many links missing to permit linking Buck Colbert Franklin to either family. Here, we can stop to recall that Franklin was born in Homer, Pickens County, Indian Territory. It was the original Homer who some twenty-eight hundred years ago gave us these words: “Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away."
Sources
Ackerman, Lawrence. ”Bricktown and Deep Deuce, Oklahoma City (1889- ).” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bricktown-and-deep-deuce-oklahoma-city-1889/. Accessed October 2019.
Braden, Guy B. “The Colberts and the Chickasaw Nation.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17.4 (1958) 318-335.
“Buck Colbert Franklin.” Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/franklin-buck-colbert-1879-1960/. Accessed October 2019.
“Burneyville, Oklahoma.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burneyville,_Oklahoma accessed October 2019.
Ellison, Ralph. “Roscoe Dungee and the American Language.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995, pp. 449-460.
_____. “Portrait of Inman Page.” Going to the Territory. New York: Vintage Books, 1986, pp. 113-19.
Franklin, Buck Colbert. My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. https://archive.org/stream/isbn_9780807122136#page/n5. Accessed October 2019.
Franklin, Jimmie Lewis. Journey Toward Hope. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
“Interview with B. C. Franklin.” Indian Pioneer Papers. Oklahoma Historical Society. February 4, 1938. Accessed October 2019.
Interview with Paul Burney. Indian Pioneer Papers. Oklahoma Historical Society. February 4, 1938. Accessed October 2019.
Interview with Thomas Franklin. Indian Pioneer Papers. Oklahoma Historical Society. February 4, 1938. Accessed October 2019.
“Rentiesville.” Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=RE027. Accessed Oct. 2019.
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