The African Americans, Many Rivers to Cross – Episode 4: Gone to Oklahoma

Last night, the fourth episode of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross aired on PBS.  This episode, entitled Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940), highlighted the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West from around 1910 to 1970.  This mass relocation became known as the Great Migration. African Americans left the South in droves, removing themselves from the harsh and racist climate of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas.  Even in my own family, my maternal grandmother, Minnie Davis Reed, who was the youngest child of nine children born to John Hector Davis and Mary Danner Davis, had six of her own siblings to relocate to Chicago Illinois, Evanston Illinois, and Benton Harbor Michigan. Grandma Minnie and her brother, Uncle Fred Douglas Davis, were the only two to remain in the South. They both opted to live their last years in Memphis, Tennessee, just 35 miles north of their hometown of Como, Mississippi.

Conditions were so volatile in my home state of Mississippi, that from 1910 to 1920, the state experienced the largest migration of its African-American citizens to northern states than any of the ten southern states.  Sources note that of the approximately 473,000 African Americans that left the South in that decade alone, nearly 130,000 were from Mississippi.  From 1940 to 1960, about a million other Mississippians, nearly 75 percent of them African-American, departed the state permanently.  Many of them relocated to Chicago and Detroit, especially.  So many Mississippians had moved to Chicago that I often heard the city being called “New Mississippi.”  Chicago’s African-American population tremendously grew from 40,000 in 1910 to over 230,000 in 1930.

However, little is spoken about a small sector of the migrating African-American population who chose to go west to Oklahoma during the 1889 Land Rush of Oklahoma, occurring about 20 years before the start of the Great Migration.  On March 3, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison announced that the government would open the 1.9 million-acre tract of Indian Territory for settlement at noon on April 22nd. Anyone could join the race for the land, but jumping the gun was not permitted. During those 7 weeks after Harrison’s announcement, over 50,000 land-hungry Americans quickly began to gather around the borders of Oklahoma to take advantage of the new land.  By nightfall on April 22, they had staked thousands of claims either on town lots or quarter section farm plots. The towns of Norman, Oklahoma City, Kingfisher, Guthrie, and others sprung into being almost overnight.  This is considered to be the largest land rush in American history, and within a month after April 22, five banks and six newspapers were established. By 1900, African-American farmers owned about 1.5 million acres of land in the Oklahoma territory. A number of African-American towns in Oklahoma were also established, such as Boley, Langston, Lincoln, Taft, etc.

One of those many land-hungry settlers in 1889 was my great-grandmother’s second oldest brother, Mack Danner (1859-c.1910).  Whether or not Uncle Mack was one of those 50,000+ who setup a tent on the border the night before April 22 is a matter of speculation, but he, his wife Annie, and their children had settled near Guthrie, Oklahoma sometime between 1889 and 1892. This was evident from the 1900 Logan County, Oklahoma census. Their son, Alexander (Alex) Danner, was born in Panola County (Como), Mississippi in Jan. 1889, but their next child, Laura Danner, was born in Oklahoma in May 1892.

1900 Logan County, Oklahoma census

The census-taker erroneously spelled the family’s last name as “McDanna”. Also, it was noted in this census that Uncle Mack Danner owned land.

I have been fortunate to meet and get to know a number of Uncle Mack Danner’s descendants after learning of their existence. The family had settled in Omaha, Nebraska by 1918. One of those descendants is my cousin, the late Dorothy Danner West, a granddaughter of Uncle Mack Danner, who shared the following photos of the family that were taken in Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Uncle Mack Danner (1859-c.1910)

Picture taken before 1910 in Guthrie, Oklahoma

Uncle Mack Danner’s wife Annie McGee Danner and their 10 children

Guthrie, Oklahoma

Two of Uncle Mack Danner’s sons who were killed in Oklahoma by a man who feared for his life from the two brothers

Uncle Mack Danner’s son, Alex Danner, who was the last child born in Mississippi in Jan. 1889 before the family moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma

Uncle Mack Danner’s daughter, Laura Danner Lowe, and her son, Artis Lowe. She was their first child who was born in Oklahoma in May 1892.

Uncle Mack Danner’s in-laws, Mack Henry McGee & Julia Hinkles McGee, who accompanied them to Oklahoma from Panola County, Mississippi

Omaha Sen. Edward R. Danner, youngest son of Mack and Annie Danner, was the lone African-American legislator in the Nebraska Unicameral during the U.S. Civil Rights era of the 1960’s.

Pictures by the late Dorothy Danner West

The African American Blogging Circle is a group of genealogy bloggers who are sharing their family stories, seen through their own personal lens, from the PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.  Click here for a list of the participating bloggers and check out their stories.

Watch Episode 4

You Have A Story, Too!

     On June 26, 2012, I attended Rachel Swarns’ book presentation and signing at the National Archives – Atlanta branch.  She wrote the new book, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama.  The title of the book is pretty much self explanatory.  Beginning in the 1800's, the book narrates the story of the First Lady Michelle Obama’s ancestors and their five-generation journey from slavery to the one of the most prominent positions in this country.  Her great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, was enslaved on the Shields farm in what is now Clayton County, Georgia, where she ultimately birthed several “mulatto” children, including the First Lady’s great-great-grandfather, Dolphus Shields.

     In an June 14, 2012 article in the New York Times, author Edward Ball noted, “Rachel L. Swarns, a reporter for the New York Times, has uncovered the story of an ordinary black American family, typical in so many details: generations of forced work on Southern farms; sexual exploitation; children born half white; attempts to flee slavery; emancipation at the end of a rifle barrel; terrorization by the Klan during Reconstruction; futility stirred in with pleasure and church in the 1900s; a stepladder into the working class — and finally, the opportunity that allowed for Michelle Obama’s superior education and unlocked 150 years of bolted doors.” (See source.)

     Although Rachel Swarns’ book is a story that should be told, I desire for African Americans to realize that we all have family stories that should be unearthed and told.  Many are great ones. Others will be not-so-great, but they all are noteworthy.  Sure, we might be a little fascinated and curious about the ancestral stories of the First Lady that ultimately made her what she is today – an elegant, brilliant woman and the first African-American First Lady.  However, the stories of Melvinia Shields and the rest of the First Lady’s ancestors are not any more special or unique than your family story simply because she’s the First Lady.  That type of thinking is absurd, in my opinion.  Her family stories mirror a lot of the histories of African-American families – the descendants of slaves. 

      Like me, many of us can relay accounts about:

·           That ancestress who was used as a concubine and bore “mixed” children; mine was my great-great-grandmother, Lucy Kennedy Cherry of Leake County, Mississippi, whose children could have passed for white if they desired. My great-grandfather, Albert Kennedy, did so when he traveled by train to Louisiana to visit his sisters so that he could sit at the front.

·            Those ancestors who were sold away or taken away from their family like Melvinia was taken away from her family in Spartanburg, South Carolina; mine were named Bill Reed, Pleasant Barr, Polly Partee, Bob Ealy, Caroline Morris, Jack Bass, Edward Danner, and many more.

·           Those ancestors who persevered and accumulated some form of wealth like Dolphus Shields; mine were Bill Reed, Paul Ealy, and others.

·         That ancestress who looked “Indian-ish” and who had “hair so long that she sat on it”; mine was my great-great-grandmother, Louisa Bobo Danner of Como, Mississippi.

·           Many of us even have stories of ancestors fighting over hard-earned land; mine was my great-grandmother’s conniving oldest brother, Jim Danner, a root doctor who was sued in 1924 by the rest of his siblings for selling off land without their consent (a future blog post).

·            AND, if we are really lucky, a few of us may even have oral history about an ancestor from Africa who was captured, endured the Middle Passage, and was disembarked in Charleston, South Carolina, Virginia, New Orleans, Savannah, Mobile, or in Maryland.

     The point is: The First Lady's family stories are our stories, and our stories are the First Lady's stories.  This sentiment was echoed by a Facebook friend and National Archives’ Education Specialist, Kahlil Gabrin Chism, who wrote the following in his Facebook comment after reading an NPR.org article entitled The Complex Tapestry of Michelle Obama’s Ancestry: “Umm….couldn’t this article just as easily be titled ‘The Complex Tapestry of INSERT RANDOM AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERE’s Ancestry’? Duh.” 

     Let me briefly demonstrate how any random African American’s family story can involve a fascinating and complex tapestry.  During Black History Month in 2007, while I was a full-time graduate student at Clark Atlanta Univ., my grad school buddy and possible cousin, Travis Lacy, and I had a discussion about tracing his family history.  He had never done it and was curious about his ancestry.  We both were consumed with graduate classes, reading assignments, papers to write, presentations to give, and thesis preparations.  However, Travis found the time to do something that many should do to start uncovering their family history – talk to the elders.  He called his aunt in Phoenix, Arizona and got some background information about his maternal grandmother’s family, who had migrated to Arizona from Okmulgee County, Oklahoma.  His great-grandmother was Irene Erath McCuin Sanders, who was born around 1908 in Oklahoma.  She and her family were known to have been rather fair-skinned.   

     Easily accessible via ancestry.com, census records were researched to see what I could quickly find.  Travis’ great-grandmother Irene was found in the 1910 Okmulgee County, Oklahoma census.  She was in the household of her parents, John Wesley & Phennie Erath; everyone in the household was noted as “mulatto”, which corroborated the oral history about the skin tone of Irene and her family.  Interestingly, John Wesley Erath’s birthplace was reported as Texas, around 1880.  Travis did not know that there was a Texas link on this side of his family.  Here’s an image of that 1910 census:

John Wesley & Phennie Erath, 1910 Okmulgee County, Oklahoma census, Boley Township 

(Note: Irene was erroneously spelled “Arene”.)

     I was then able to locate Travis’ family in Texas in 1900.  They had migrated to Oklahoma from McLennan County, Texas sometime before 1908. The city of Waco, Texas is in this county.  John Wesley Erath was in the household of his father and stepmother, John & Annie Erath.  Here’s that census image:

John & Annie Erath, 1900 McLennan County, Texas census, Justice Precinct 1

     Further investigation of the earlier census records revealed that Travis’ great-great-great-grandfather John Erath was the son of John Wesley & Nancy Erath, who were born into slavery around the late 1830’s.  I soon discovered that the Erath name in Travis’ family came from the last slave-owner, George Bernard Erath, who had migrated to America from Vienna, Austria in the early 1800’s. George B. Erath, his wife, and children were the only white Eraths in McLennan County. In 1860, he owned 11 slaves, as per the 1860 McLennan County slave schedule. (Note: slave schedules only report the names of slave-owners and the age, sex, and color of their slaves.) Here’s that 1860 census image:

1860 McLennan County, Texas slave schedule, George Bernard Erath
The 25-year-old black male was most likely Travis’ 4th-great-grandfather, John Wesley, and the 25-year-old mulatto female might have been John Wesley’s wife, Nancy

George Bernard Erath (1813 – 1891)

(Source: Memoirs of Major George Bernard Erath by Lucy Erath)

     However, I soon learned that George B. Erath was not only a slave-owner, but he was a surveyor and a Texas Ranger who laid out the plans for the city of Waco, Texas, which was founded in 1849, as well as the plans for the town of Stephenville, Texas.  Travis’ fourth-great-grandfather John Wesley was a teenage boy at the time, but one can plausibly assert that John Wesley may have assisted George as he surveyed the land that was to become Waco, Texas.  This research of a random African-American named Travis from Los Angeles led to me discovering that his history is directly connected to the establishment of Waco, Texas.  More in-depth research in Texas just may uncover a “complex Tapestry” between the white Eraths and the African-American Eraths that were Travis’ ancestors.  We all have that “complex Tapestry” in our history. It just needs to be dug up and told.  Collectively, all of our family stories provide a microscope into American and African-American history.

Statue of George Bernard Erath in Waco, Texas

(Source: Wendi Lundquist)

 Aerial View of Downtown Waco, Texas. In 2010, the city had a population of 124,805.

George Bernard Erath, the enslaver of Travis' 4th-great-grandfather John Wesley Erath, was noted as the surveyor who surveyed the area and laid out the plans for Waco, which was established in 1849. The 1850 slave schedule reported George Erath with one male slave, a teenage boy who was likely John Wesley. One can plausibly assert that John Wesley may have assisted George Erath with the survey and plans for Waco, Texas.

Travis Lacy, his wife, Lerniece, and their daughter, Asia, reside in Los Angeles, California.  He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in African-American Studies at the University of Nevada at Reno and is currently working on his dissertation.  An aspiring professor and ethnomusicologist and a music enthusiast, writer, and historian, his blog is Just SOul You Know and can be read at http://justsoulyouknow.wordpress.com/.