Oklahoma’s 1907 statehood symbolically and legally erased Black Native presence.

Evidence

In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, subsuming the majority of the former Indian Territory within it, even as tribal nations retained discrete borders and governments. A celebration of statehood held in Guthrie before twenty-five thousand people included a staged ceremony that dramatized how the new Oklahoma citizenry would be configured. In it, a woman of Cherokee descent, “Miss Indian Territory,” mock-wed a white man, “Mr. Oklahoma Territory,” symbolizing the union of the two peoples and places and excluding the African American and Afro-Native presence altogether. Among the first acts taken up by the new state legislature in Senate Bill No. 1 was the passage of Jim Crow laws that categorized Native Americans with white people and segregated Black people based on a one-drop racial rule. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 508

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Miss Indian Territory wedding Mr. Oklahoma Territory’ staged ceremony is a potent image for an essay on how states perform their founding myths and who gets written out of them.
• XREF: Directly echoes the book’s core origin-story-as-infrastructure idea: what a founding ceremony includes vs. excludes defines who counts as citizen versus deviation. — connects to: Georgia’s layered disfranchisement laws erased black voters by 1908. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 54