February 23, 2024
BLACK HISTORY: Descendants Of Oklahoma’s 1st Landholding Black Children Owed Reparations
The headstone of young Herbert and CaStella Sells in Blackjack Cemetery stands as a poignant tribute to the muted pleas for justice, beckoning us to confront history and forge a path toward a more equitable future.
Gravesite of Herbert & CaStella Sells, Blackjack Cemetery in Taft, Oklahoma. Photograph courtesy of Kelvin Brown, 2008.
By Stacey Patton
I met a Black woman at a bustling tribal conference in Oklahoma a few months ago. We struck up a conversation about the deep threads of Black history in Indian Territory, grappling with themes of slavery and Jim Crow, land ownership, and the topsy-turvy shifts brought on by the state’s early 20th-century oil boom—seismic changes that propelled some residents to sudden wealth overnight while leaving others as tragic victims.
As our conversation unfolded, she divulged a shocking truth about her own home. Fifteen years ago, upon inspecting the title history of her property, she uncovered that the initial owner of her land was a four-year-old Black child.
This had to be a mistake, right?
As an immediate assumption of error lingered in the air, I leaned in as if I was about to share a clandestine secret about a buried past.
It wasn’t a mistake. That four-year-old child was among 5,000 Black children who owned 40-acre allotments of land outright, without mortgage or tax encumbrances, before Oklahoma became a state in 1907. That’s right, 5,000 Black children held hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Oklahoma. In the early 1900s, many of the former child slaves of The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole), which were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) as part of the Indian Removal policy in the 1830s, were awarded 40-acre land allotments that were sometimes rich in oil and minerals. Born before statehood, these young Creek nationals lived in colored tribal towns of Muskogee County in the eastern portion of the state and came of age during Oklahoma’s first major oil boom, which lasted from just after statehood through 1930. Their tremendous wealth and land were systematically stolen by greedy white men.
With the help of county court officials, white men set out to disqualify Black parents as competent and to position themselves as legal custodians of Freedmen minors and their estates. These white guardians then exploited the estates of Black children through lucrative oil leases, personal purchases, real estate deals, and interest–free loans. When guardianship could not be secured, some resorted to marrying Freedmen minors, kidnapping them, or resorting to murder. The extent of this exploitation, decried at the time by Black journalists and academics like W.E.B. DuBois, has gone largely undocumented. A.J. Smitherman, editor of the Tulsa Star, wrote: “In Oklahoma we have thousands of wealthy Negro children whose incomes amount to from $500 to $8,000 a month. This money, of course, is handled by guardians appointed by the county courts of Oklahoma.” Only a small number of cases went to court, and so only a very small number of these have been fully investigated.
Postcard of the Glenn Pool oil fields where the Sells children and other Creek Freedman minors owned land allotments.
A decade prior to statehood, Oklahoma had become the largest oil-producing region in the world with 40 million gallons being pumped out of the state each year. Between February 1914 and May 1920, The Crisis reported the cases of Dan Tucker, Sallie Hodge, Luther Manuel, Sarah Rector, the twins Edith and Edna Durant, and siblings Herbert and CaStella Sells whose lives were dramatically altered with the discovery of oil on their lands. These three boys and five girls had enormous incomes from oil revenues ranging from $500 to $50,000 a month at a time when 90% of Black people living in the United States were confined to a life of poverty in the South and the average annual income of American families in 1914 was just under $750 and $1,340 in 1920.
Let me tell you about what happened to Herbert and CaStella Sells. On the night of March 14, 1911, two Black men and a full-blooded Creek Indian arranged a secret meeting to discuss the final details of their plot to blow up two wealthy Black children living in the tiny all-Black town of Taft. The men, John C. Norwood, D.R. “Doc” Allen, and Sam Lowe, met at Ford’s Gin, a local watering hole not far from where 14-year-old Herbert Sells and his 10-year-old sister CaStella lived with their mother and stepfather on a spit of land in a four-room, 20-square-foot prairie house. The siblings owned several hundred acres of oil-producing land 39 miles away in Glenpool, a small town located about 20 minutes south of Tulsa—the self-proclaimed “oil capital of the world.” With production in Glenpool reaching over 43 million barrels in 1907 alone, Oklahoma became the nation’s leading oil producer by 1907 and held that distinction until the late 1920s.
Nineteen wells underneath the Sells children’s Glenpool allotments netted the pair nearly $2,000 a month in royalties in addition to fees paid to them by the Gypsy Oil Company (then a subsidiary of the Gulf Oil Corporation) which held a lease to drill on their property. The net value of their lands was $200,000 (worth millions today). For one prominent white land dealer, the Sells children were the only things standing in the way of his big payday. It would take two years of planning, multiple trips to Mexico, and thousands of dollars to pay an imposter and a group of accomplices to get rid of Herbert and CaStella with kerosene, powder, and seven sticks of dynamite.
That time came nine days later, on Thursday, March 23 at about two or three o’clock in the morning. As Doc Allen and Sam Lowe approached the home where the Sells children and their parents were sleeping, Norwood suddenly backed out without saying a word and ran off to his sister’s house about a half mile away. Undeterred, Doc Allen and Lowe continued as planned. First, they spread kerosene-soaked rags around the base of the tiny house and then placed the bucket of powder, coal oil, and dynamite directly underneath the children’s bedroom without waking the family’s dog. Sam Lowe lit the fuse. Moments later, the entire west side of the house blew to pieces, shaking the tiny town of less than 1,000 residents. The blast tore a large hole in the ground where the galvanized bucket was planted. A section of the house was hurled some 50 yards away into a local merchant’s yard and the dog’s burned carcass was buried under the southeast corner of the dining room.
Immediately following the explosion, the roof fell in and what remained of the house quickly caught fire. The children’s mother, Priscilla Mackey, and their stepfather, Zeb, escaped the flames unscathed. They had been sleeping in another section of the house separated from the children’s room by a thin partition. Herbert was killed instantly in the blast, but his sister was not so fortunate. A neighbor saw the parents, dressed in their nightclothes, hollering for help. As the couple tried digging through the burning shingles to save CaStella, neighbors rushed toward the flames.
CaStella’s legs were caught underneath the collapsed roof. The girl’s stepfather tried to pull her from underneath the hot, heavy timbers while other men worked to lift the roof, but the timbers were wedged so tightly together that the roof could not be moved. When the intense heat forced the men to give up, Priscilla tried to rush into the flames in a desperate attempt to rescue her last living child. A bystander grabbed the distraught mother and held her back from the flames while “neighbors and friends were compelled to stand impotently by and see the unfortunate girl screaming with agony die a horrible death in the flames,” the Muskogee Times-Democrat reported.
By daybreak, a posse of townsmen formed and launched a search for the murderers even though local, state, and federal authorities dispatched to the scene of the crime had no leads about possible perpetrators or a motive for the crime. Meanwhile, William Irvin, one of the conspirators who helped hatch the plot to kill the children, paid $3.26 for a first-class, one-way train ticket out of Taft. The ticket salesman, a porter, and a conductor would later testify that Irvin was the only white man seen boarding the Midland Valley train out of the all-Black town that day. Those witnesses also recalled that Irvin wore a black coat and vest, light shirt, dirty blue overalls, and a black crusher hat and carried a distinct brown leather grip.
On Friday morning, March 24, investigators had a few theories about the murders of the Sells children. The dynamiting was either a plot to murder the children’s stepfather or a conspiracy to kill the poor rich children to get possession of their property. The first news report on the incident from the Muskogee Times-Democrat focused on the children’s stepfather, “an intelligent negro,” with “plenty of bitter enemies.” Zeb Mackey had numerous shooting scrapes with other Black locals and had threatened to expose certain corrupt town officials for mismanagement of funds. “It is possible that these plotted to blow up the entire family,” the report stated. There were also accusations that Mackey was involved in the crime and that he hatched a plot to dynamite the house to get rid of his wife, Priscilla, and her children. The Muskogee Times-Democrat report also told readers that the Sells children owned valuable oil allotments each worth $100,000. Their guardian, former Muskogee Mayor Thomas H. Martin, had $20,000 invested in the first mortgages of the children’s properties. Though the children earned nearly $2,000 per month in oil royalties, Martin, as required by law, regularly paid their mother a monthly allowance of $75 for their care—less than 5% of their royalty earnings.
Flash forward to Sept. 11, 1911. Six accused men arrived at the Muskogee County District Court shackled together, their chains rattling and reverberating through the halls of the courtroom. Their trial dates were set for mid–September, the men lock-stepped out of the courtroom just as they arrived. Among the indicted were three Black men – Doc Allen, Jim Manuel, an ex-con once convicted of defrauding a Creek Freedman girl of her land, and Stout Ham, who lived less than one mile from the Sells children. In addition to William Irvin, the indictment also included two other well-to-do white men –John Coombs, and F.L. Martin. All five men were charged with “knowingly, willfully, unlawfully, purposely and feloniously, with malice aforethought, and without authority of the law, and with the premeditated design then and there to effect the deal of the said Herbert [and CaStella] Sells,” who suffered “mortal wounds” and “burns” which led to their deaths.
“BIGGEST MURDER CASE COMING UP,” blazed the headline of The Muskogee Times-Democrat the next morning.
After deliberating for 16 hours, a jury found William Irvin guilty of murder and conspiracy and sentenced him to life and hard labor in the state penitentiary at McAlester. Charges against the wealthy oilman Coombs, Manuel, and Ham, whose roles in the murders were unclear in the surviving press accounts and trial transcripts) were all dropped. Prosecutors cited insufficient evidence and the potential expense to taxpayers if the state proceeded with three more trials that might be lost. Irvin appealed his conviction, but the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals upheld his sentence in March 1915. His prison ledger indicates that he died at McAlester on May 19, 1916, from an unknown cause. After serving eight years of his life sentence, Doc Allen was paroled in December 1918 and pardoned in October 1926.
It is important to recall that Priscilla Mackey had set aside $5,000 through the probate court to pay for the trials of Doc Allen, Irvin, Martin, and Lowe. It is possible that those funds ran out after the first round of trials. The point is that when these two wealthy black children were viciously murdered, funds from their own estate were used to obtain some semblance of justice. Had there been no monies, it is safe to speculate that there might not have been such a political charade put on by local, state, and federal authorities to hunt down Irvin in Mexico, arrest five other men, and proceed with prosecutions and convictions.
This case was not about protecting the property and civil rights of two wealthy Black children. The trial itself was a spectacle and a political dodge; its function being to legitimize the new state’s power and legal apparatus and to show that it protected the rights of its citizens even as thousands of other land-owning children across the state continued to be exploited with the help of the probate court and unscrupulous leaders and businessmen. While Herbert and CaStella Sells suffered the worst possible fate of children who were unlucky enough to inherit oil-rich lands, Sarah Rector, Luther Manuel, Edith Durant, Dan Tucker, Sallie Hodge and others spent years caught in the middle of court battles between their parents and greedy men vying to be their guardians.
Land and oil created a different kind of Black childhood in Oklahoma that did not exist elsewhere in the country. Months after Oklahoma joined the Union, the new state legislature immediately enacted anti-Black laws that assisted in the wholesale robbery and murders of young people in various oil-producing counties. Following patterns already set by southern states, Jim Crow’s arrival ushered in voter disenfranchisement, segregated facilities, miscegenation laws, and lynching in addition to further loosening of federal protections of lands owned by Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes and their freedmen. The construction of a new kind of racial hierarchy severely altered the status of freeborn Blacks, former slaves of Indians, the first generation of slave descendants, people of mixed race, and “state Negroes” that migrated to the territory prior to 1907.
Ten-year-old Dan Tucker owned 160 acres of land producing 2,400 barrels of oil daily, bringing him a monthly income of $6,750 in royalties. Sallie Hodge held title to rich bottom farmland worth $600, in addition to $100,000 in cash and $50,000 in notes and mortgages. Luther Manuel, believed then to be the richest Black boy in the world with an income of $50,000 a month, owned land on top of a gusher in the heart of an oil field in Glen Pool.
Land allotment card belonging to Dan Tucker, certified by the United States Department of the Interior, December 20, 1905 (Courtesy of the Ft. Worth National Archives)
Edith Durant, who turned 18 in July of 1918, owned an oil well in Tulsa County and was to receive $150,000 in cash and title to land worth a million dollars, while her sister, Edna, owned $50,000 worth of oil-producing land nearby. By the time the twins reached their age of majority their estates significantly dwindled because their white guardian executed bad loans and other business deals with the authorization of the Muskogee County Probate Court.
The one-story prairie house in Taft, where Rector lived with her parents and her five siblings. (Courtesy of The American Magazine, 1915)
A copy of Sarah Rector’s application for a land allotment submitted to the Dept. of the Interior on March 24, 1906.
The application shows that Rector’s 160 acres of land appraised at $556.50. The wealthiest girl among the group of children was Sarah Rector, whose estimated income in 1914 from lands she owned in Glen Pool was $50,000 a month. Despite her wealth, Du Bois noted that the 10-year-old was one of six children living in “a shack with only one bed for the entire family.” Yellowed news articles, court transcripts, and interviews with living descendants of these children reveal a weary record of racial exploitation and kleptocracy assisted by the State of Oklahoma and the United States federal government.
A story about Sarah Rector’s wealth published in the Jan. 25, 1914, edition of The Washington Post.
The stories of Dan Tucker, Sallie Hodge, Luther Manuel, Sarah Rector, the twins Edith and Edna Durant, and siblings Herbert and CaStella in The Crisis, reveal how white guardians, attorneys, judges, banks, oil, and gas companies benefited financially from the estates of these children. The stories also demonstrate how local and state governments used the law and guardianships to re-establish Black children’s lives as disposable capital to be governed and exploited by whites.
Despite increased awareness of the destruction of Black towns, lynching, and land theft along with the investigative work of Black journalists and figures like W.E.B. DuBois into issues of race and class, one of the most extensive fraud schemes in American history remains largely uninvestigated and unreported. However, we have concrete evidence of how systemic racism has long hindered the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of wealth within Black communities. This is exemplified by tragic events like the destruction of Black Wall Street in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, along with the enduring impact of Jim Crow policies such as underfunded education, discriminatory hiring, and “redlining” practices that denied Black people the opportunity to secure mortgages for home purchases. Such exclusionary measures, intentionally cultivated in some regions, aimed to stifle Black prosperity, and prevent the building of intergenerational wealth.
As the movement for reparations continues to grow, the historical archives offer Oklahoma’s Freedmen descendants an opportunity to explore how legal systems were manipulated to facilitate the theft of land and wealth from Black children. It also invites Black people to discover their family history and gain insight into the lasting impact of past injustices on their present circumstances. Understanding the economic exploitation and manipulation endured by their ancestors is essential for these communities to assert their rights and grasp the historical roots of current economic disparities.
Shown above, are loans executed by Edith Durant’s guardian, R. Lee Hays.
Between August 1912 and September 1914, the Muskogee County Probate Court approved 16 loans to the individuals shown above with funds from Durant’s estate totaling $38,250. In the forgotten shadows of exploitation and injustice, the tragic saga of Herbert and CaStella Sells echoes through time, a sobering reminder of the systematic brutality and plunder endured by Black children who once owned vast acres of oil-rich land in Oklahoma. As we unearth these buried narratives, it’s not just a call for reparations but a demand for acknowledgment, an unearthing of truths that have long languished in obscurity.
The headstone of young Herbert and CaStella Sells in Blackjack Cemetery stands as a poignant tribute to the muted pleas for justice, beckoning us to confront history and forge a path toward a more equitable future.
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