Disabled Afro-Indigenous Women’s Lives and Imaginaries in Jim Crow Oklahoma

My dissertation project unearths the lives of Afro-Native women who were legally “incompetent”—branded disabled—and navigated court systems in Jim Crow Oklahoma. Through innovative archival research methods and GIS mapping, my research brings archivally-disfigured women from the margins of the documents meant to surveil them to the center of the dissertation. My research centers on how Afro-Native women were legally-constrained and limited in their use of space and how they, in turn, claimed their own mobilities and spatial logics in urban and all-Black landscapes. 

With the support of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Research Grant, I was able to explore archival collections at the Baker Library Special Collections and Archive and travel to the Yale University Beinecke Library, the Princeton University Special Collections, and National Archives locations in Washington, D.C. and College Park, Maryland. Within these archives, I consulted manuscripts, maps, legal records, and other documents that revealed how urban areas and Black towns within the Creek Nation were established, expanded, and developed. Title digests, township committee records, maps, and classified file collections reveal how urban spaces and all-Black towns in Oklahoma were developed by federal agencies, joint tribal and federal commissions, insurance organizations, federal land allotment policies, and private corporations, and how disabled Afro-Native girls and women reclaimed their own intimate geographies. 

The documents I surveyed and analyzed with the support of the Urban Research Grant revealed the ways in which the federal government and the Creek Nation’s tribal government shaped Creek cities and towns through Townsite Commissions, land allotment, and spatial regulation. In addition, archival records such as town guides, flyers, and newspaper articles underscored both how Afro-Native and Black American communities formed Black towns and neighborhoods in Oklahoma and how they established community institutions in urban spaces. Legal records additionally revealed the complicated land laws that governed the taxation, allotment, and inheritance of Native and Afro-Native peoples’ lands. 

Researcher: Keziah Anderson