KARLA SLOCUM: While there are studies of Black rural communities, they pale in number to those focused on urban sites. And so my study helped me understand that the Black rural condition actually have significant ties to the Black urban conditions. If you think about things like gentrification and economic fragility, Black communities being targeted for quote unquote development, being sites on which the prison-industrial complex plays out in different kinds of ways, and also being places and spaces for active social movements and projects for Black self-reliance and Black cultural elevation—I think these are all kinds of things that we can find in Black communities writ large.
I am Karla Slocum, professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. And my book is Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West.
I really consider this book to be about the under-recognized contemporary currency of historic Black-identified places. And in the larger sense about Black-identified places writ large. What makes a Black community attractive? To whom is it attractive and why? What does someone who is attracted to a Black place invest in that place financially, but also socially, culturally, politically? What are the politics of that investment? What’s the unevenness or challenges associated with that investment? In this book, I get to these kinds of questions by focusing on historic rural communities in Oklahoma. They’re known as all-Black towns, or just Black towns, and they are these communities that began forming in the late nineteenth century, largely in the United States. Well, in Oklahoma, they began in the late nineteenth century, for sure. They’re known for having been attractive places because they had vibrant locally economies and a fairly cohesive social life. And these sorts of features were what sustain Black residents during several decades of the Jim Crow era. Oklahoma had more than 50 such communities, and the US had hundreds of these Black communities, Black towns. And few people know that history.
My grandfather was a sociologist and his doctoral research was on Black towns in Oklahoma. I didn’t really know that growing up. I knew that he was a sociology professor, but I didn’t know about this part of his research. So it wasn’t until I went to graduate school and after he had passed away, and my grandmother had passed away as well, that I learned more about his career. I had my mother’s stories: I started talking with her and learning more about Black towns and told me lots of things about growing up in the town of Langston, Oklahoma. My grandfather was teaching as a professor at the historically Black university in that town. I really became so intrigued and decided this is what I wanted to explore one day. I went into graduate school knowing that I wanted to study farm communities in the Caribbean. So I stayed true to that project and aim. And so I just had tucked this away, and it was once I finished that research in the Caribbean, that I then came back to this.
When I went in 2004, that was my very first exploratory research, just to go to Oklahoma and go to the communities and start exploring the possibilities of a project there. And I did that exploration for probably about three years, but it took a while before I finally settled into the active research and data collection for this project, which I considered to really have started in earnest around 2007. I’ll admit that I went there thinking that, because I had this background with my mother and my grandfather, that there would be some interest around that. And I realized that they’ve heard this before. I did end up meeting one person who remembered my grandfather at that time, and one person who probably went to school with my mother. So there were those sorts of curiosities and intrigues that people had about that sort of thing, but it wasn’t enough to kind of get my foot in the door in ways that anthropologists like to do. You know, we need to build up the rapport, we need to build up the connections. You need to build up the trust for us to be able to engage with people in meaningful ways that helps us understand what their lives are about. And I became convinced that it wasn’t enough just to have the family background.
So as I describe in the book, despite their small size and their uncertain economies, the towns remain attractive, but in different sorts of ways. They remain attractive as places that allow us to tell a compelling story about Black success. As places that have a variety of economic possibilities. As places that support Black community. There are Black town rodeos, the draw throngs of diverse Black people who attend. There are town leaders who put in a lot of effort to write grants that will support community economic growth. There are town residents, who start new businesses and hope to boost the community. There are regular tours of the towns, which I also describe in detail, but tell the history of the communities, which highlights the communities’ success through narratives that center Black people’s contributions to the history of the state of Oklahoma and the United States more generally.
And all of these are ways that allow people to assert a Black sense of place. And what do I mean by that? In the introduction I talk about that. I’m actually borrowing that term from the geographer Katherine McKittrick, who talks about a place that centers Black people and elevates a way of life where things like inclusion and democracy and Black worth and value are essential. These are the features of a Black sense of place. But as I point out, there are others who are attracted to the towns that complicate that sense of a Black place. And these are the kinds of people and institutions that capitalize on Black towns’ fragile economies, fragile economic status, and their existing resources. So that’s sort of the other side of the appeal of a Black town, that while some people are working to tell a story and put forward an existence or a Black place where Black people are not marginal, there are others like rural gentrifiers and land grabbers and others that complicate that project.
If anybody had researched Black towns, it was historians. I wanted to tell the contemporary, the more contemporary, and the current story of Black towns. But I needed to contend with the history, and I always knew that. I didn’t go in there naively thinking that, you know, the history of Black towns doesn’t matter. I knew that mattered. I think what I hadn’t come to initially, was an understanding about the ways that the history was going to show up in the present day story of Black towns. The narrative about the Black town historic success story has so much currency in the twenty-first century. If anybody is going in the twenty-first century, who’s not a Black town resident—anybody who’s a quote unquote outsider—is going to be drawn to a Black town. They are almost certainly going to be drawn to the Black town because of the history and the significance of the history and what that historical narrative is all about. That it’s a story that elevates Black success and tells a story about a group of successful Black people, across many communities, that had really vibrant, active, successful Black places. That’s a really powerful story for a lot of people. The other reason it’s compelling is because the residents themselves are also very proud of that story. And it is also what they are connected to as a feature of who they are as a Black town even today.
When I started research for this book, I set out to answer a very specific question, and I boil that question down to: Does the racial dimension of the Black town identity still hold in the twenty-first century? And really what I wanted to know by that question was if people still find it useful to talk about Black towns as Black towns in the post–civil rights era. And I found the answer to that question, actually, fairly quickly. And I realized that it wasn’t as compelling as I originally thought it was. The answer to the question is actually kind of a qualified “yes.” People still mobilize that identity and label regularly. Black town is still what the towns are called ubiquitously, even though there’s some people that feel that slight changes in demographics and other recent developments complicate the exact applicability of the label “Black town.” But my research impacted my sense of the importance of this question. I realized that a much more compelling question was about how these communities appeal to people all the way into the twenty-first century, despite this pervasive narrative that their significance is in the past. And I think ethnographic research is actually what allowed me to see this. Spending extended time in the towns over years, talking with a wide range of people, and observing various aspects of town life and engagement led me to see that this was a story about Black towns that we did not know, in part, because the focus is so much on what they were and what their appeal was rather than what their appeal is. And it’s also led me to see that getting recognition for what they are matters to folks in the towns.
