Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place

Honey Springs Battlefield, the site of Oklahoma’s largest Civil War battle, became a feature of the state’s tourism in the 1990s. The first ever tour of the site was in 1963 for the battle’s centennial and this proved a catalyst for bolstering public attention on the battle.[1] Through the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program, the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) began acquiring acreage of the battlefield lands from private owners starting in the 1960s.[2] After this, the commemorative apparatus around the park was increasingly extended across a few decades to include an interpretive center, trails, monuments, and additional acreage by the mid 1990s. In 1994, Honey Springs was designated a national historic site.[3]

The battlefield park is now one of the state’s signature attractions on travelok.com, the promotional website through the Department of Tourism and Recreation. There, Honey Springs stands in company with other highlights such as the memorial for the 1990s victims of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Federal Building, Route 66, and western (“cowboy”) culture. The Battle at Honey Springs is at the top of the website’s list of seven state events designated as “living history” and Honey Springs is also profiled in the site’s Heritage Tourism category. In the latter, it is referenced in an article called “African American History and Culture” and noted for the battle’s reliance on formerly enslaved people of African descent.[4]

Also featured in “African American History and Culture” are the state’s Black towns, whose origins the website describes as follows:

Cheap land in Indian Territory [which later became the state of Oklahoma] coupled with the repression brought on by racism led many African Americans to settle in all-Black towns. Black community leaders began recruiting freed slaves after the Civil War to these all-Black settlements by advertising a promised land of business opportunity, wealth and safety. Between 1865 and 1920, approximately 50 all-Black towns were settled in Oklahoma. Although the number declined after the Great Depression, 13 of these settlements are still populated today.[5],[6]

The important takeaway from the site’s portrayal is that Oklahoma possesses numerous communities that date back more than a century and are associated with people of African descent in search of a “promised land.” The website goes on to mention the list of towns, notable buildings, and events that tourists can visit to acquaint themselves with the Black town history. Honey Springs is not referenced as one of the Black town attractions, which, on the surface, comes as little surprise. However, Honey Springs and Black towns are paired in Black town tourism offline. The two are often together on itineraries for private and publicly funded bus tours of Black towns. A bus tourist, on a tour advertised as a tour of Black towns, might stop at the Black towns that travelok.com recommends to see historic buildings in, say, the town of Taft. The tourist might also stop at Honey Springs in the same tour. This happens especially on tours that visit the eastern part of the state where a cluster of Black towns and Honey Springs are both located. Some Black towns and Honey Springs are as close as one mile apart. Five of the thirteen remaining Black towns are within a half hour drive from the battlefield park.

Still, although the two may be joined in offline tourism itineraries, they are largely narrated separately. Honey Springs is never referred to as a Black town, even though it is featured in a Black town tour.[7] Further, most tours of Black towns that stop at Honey Springs reference (but do not elaborate on) the battle’s significance as a multi-ethnic event featuring African American, American Indian, and White troops. Of the four tours that I have taken where Honey Springs was included, all barely mentioned Black towns during the stop at Honey Springs. Only one made an attempt to link Honey Springs and Black towns. Most included lengthy demonstrations of soldiers’ lives during the Civil War and Honey Springs battle. Indeed, the typical tour of Black towns visits Honey Springs to learn about details of the battle, its success, and the everyday life of soldiers who fought in it. Thus, in most cases the stop is implicitly profiled as a separate place and event with its own history and decidedly not as a Black town.

However, in rare cases the telling of Honey Springs on a Black town tour privileges a narrative about Black history at the site. This was true of a tour that I joined in which the tour presenter narrated Honey Springs not as a military battle but as a site of Black prominence, not due to the war events but the wealth and property ownership of 19th- and 20th-century Black residents. In this article, I discuss this alternative narrative of the Honey Springs site as a place primarily of Black significance and the more conventional narrative of Honey Springs as a national military event. I explore the differing engagements with race, history, and nation in these two distinct narratives that emerge in heritage tourism surrounding Honey Springs.

Like many organized touristic interpretations that rely on national symbols to narrate heritage sites,[8] tales of Honey Springs are a national story. These interpretations with powerfully current discourses of wartime victory, multiculturalism, military might, and struggles over the founding of the nation are wrapped in the Honey Springs narrative. But also, by situating Honey Springs in Black town tours (as well as under African American History and Culture through travelok.com), the tour stories at the Honey Springs stop possess different ways of telling and constructing the relationship of blackness to America. In the conventional narrative where the battle is highlighted, that relationship is one of distance, where the founding of America is more about a military struggle between “sides” and the role of Black participants on one of the sides is not central to the story. In the alternative narrative, that relationship is centered by blackness; Black people are critical in a story about key symbols of the nation at a national site.

These diverse narrations of Honey Springs reveal the tensions and contestations over how to tell the story of race and nation. Much has been said about the ways that Black contributions to and placement in American history and society are “whitewashed” in heritage tourism, especially plantation tourism.[9] Blacks are invisible, muted, or avoided even in tourism that purports to be multicultural.[10] This is true even for those tours that purport to correct for decades of excluding Black history from larger tour narratives of American history. But, there are examples of heritage tourism that “talk back.” This is especially through community-driven models of tourism that center perspectives alternative to official ones and, in the case of Black heritage tourism, offer tour accounts that elevate blackness through narration, analysis, or performance.[11]

In what follows I present two tours of Honey Springs that speak to these differences. One tour, a more conventional tour reflective of the state packaging of the battlefield park, acknowledges Black presence in the battle (as does travelok.com) but generally downplays the relationship of blackness to the site and its significance. The other tour, in some ways an alternative tour sponsored by a local organization serving a Black community, narrates Honey Springs in a way that centers Black experiences and status. Ultimately, the two narratives that exist separately from one another signal disagreement over the degree of inclusion of Black lives in America’s history.

The Black Heritage Industry and Black Towns

According to the Oklahoma History Center, Indian Territory—what is now Oklahoma—was the site of the founding of approximately fifty Black towns and settlements.[12] Indian Territory, the region where American Indian tribes from the southeast had been forcibly relocated in the 19th century, was part of a post–Civil War land allotment plan. The Federal Government divided tribal lands and required American Indians to possess individual private parcels. Parts of Indian Territory were also made available to non-Indians for homesteading and settlement.[13] Black towns in Oklahoma were part of the many settlements that emerged out of this process. These rural planned and intentional communities are believed to have represented residential and commercial spaces of safety and security for two different groups of African descent.[14]

Freedpeople,[15] who were formerly enslaved by American Indians in Indian Territory, sought out spaces where they could have “protection and economic security.”[16] At the same time, Blacks who migrated from the Deep South had similar motivations. Freedpeople owned land through the allotment process and they used it to create settlements. Blacks from the south were enticed to Indian Territory during the late 19th century by a perception of “available” land in the west.[17] The settlements that Blacks from the south and Freedpeople formed, near one another or with one another, enabled them to sustain themselves, thrive, and live somewhat apart from the racial hostilities of the Jim Crow era.[18],[19] Scholars, particularly historians, contend that Black towns were notable for the abundance and vigor of their institutions, services, and businesses, which were unmatched for Blacks living in racially diverse communities, urban enclaves, or rural areas not by their own design.[20],[21] As Black towns boasted banks, schools, social service institutions, and a range of businesses, various observers[22] cited the communities as remarkable examples of Black historic achievement, ingenuity and resilience in the face of palpable odds.[23] And, while many contend that Black towns began a major decline in the 1910s through the 1930s when various political, economic, and social pressures prompted large-scale out-migration and a gradual eroding of the signature Black town entrepreneurship,[24] my research suggests that the towns retained some degree of economic and social fortitude (albeit reduced from the early 20th-century period) through the Civil Rights era.[25]

Yet regardless of when and according to whom the communities’ economic and social prominence faded, Oklahoma has capitalized on an idea of the towns’ unique past through tourism. In the 1990s Black towns were identified by different public agencies and organizations as attractive spaces for tourism. In the larger scheme of Oklahoma tourism (including tourism devoted to ethnicity and multiculturalism), tours of Black towns are a small entity. While there are no official numbers, I estimate that 300–400 people per year take bus tours profiled as being about Black towns. Tourism for Black towns came about through the efforts and ideas of certain individuals. One private tour coordinator was influenced by what she saw on a tour in another state. A tour led by a municipal agency grew out of the suggestion of a board member who had personally researched Black towns. And tour plans on behalf of the state tourism department developed (in fits and starts) initially at the suggestion of a staff member who informed others in the office about Black towns.

Thus, Black town history was not on the tourism map in Oklahoma until relatively recently and it still is a smaller part of Oklahoma tourism than other areas.

The Oklahoma History Center has an exhibit on Black history in the state. There are also traveling exhibits about Black towns that go to smaller museums across Oklahoma. Additionally, local libraries and small publicly funded agencies have and continue to host temporary exhibits about Black history in the state, inclusive of Black towns. Yet these pale in comparison to the tourist events devoted to other groups and topics. Among the fifteen museums in the state, none is devoted to any aspect of life for people of African descent, even if they contain a portion of their work that includes Black Oklahomans.

Today there are a variety of Black town tourism events and efforts, with some still getting off the ground. They range from those activities advertised for the general public (such as on travelok.com), to those targeted for African Americans in Oklahoma, to those for specialized audiences such as conference attendees and other visitor groups to the state. They include bus tours but also performances, self-guided tours, and, of course, online information for distribution.

Most, if not all, of these are organized by public and private organizations based outside of Black towns. That is, bus tours, exhibits, and performances are not organized by Black town individuals, groups, or agencies.[26] As such, proceeds for private tours accrue outside of the communities. Black towns may have opportunities to sell items such as t-shirts and food to tour buses that pass through but revenue from “external” tourism is not a major part of the Black town economy. Still, even though the Black town story profiled in Oklahoma tours is part of a global industry in which Black heritage is profitable, tourism devoted to Black towns is not a significant money-maker. This is true neither in or outside of the towns since most regular tours are not for profit and the few Black town tourism efforts for profit are small in scale. Even so, part of what makes Black heritage tourism (inclusive of heritage tours of Black towns) “sell” and appealing are the discourses of the present past that tours engage. Refracting the Black past through discourses and symbols that resonate with audiences’ purview and political–economic objectives today is an essential ingredient to heritage tourism focused on Black history.[27] That resonance played out differently across two tours of Honey Springs.

Near Racelessness at Honey Springs

During 2008 I participated in a Black town tour organized for out-of-town professionals attending a convention on American history and architecture. The tour was billed as a Black history tour with a focus on Black towns. It was hosted by a municipal agency that worked on the promotion and development of some of Oklahoma’s urban areas. The agency did not specialize in tours of Black towns but one of its staff members was knowledgeable about Black town history in particular and Oklahoma’s small town history in general. Pat,[28] who had written about and led other tours of Black towns, was our tour leader. The itinerary she prepared for us included four stops: Fort Gibson (a 19th-century military garrison), Honey Springs Battlefield Park, Rentiesville (a Black town), and Muskogee (not an officially recognized Black town). Thus, of the four stops on the tour, only one included a visit to an officially recognized Black town, which is not uncommon in tours of Black towns.[29] Arguably, Honey Springs battlefield—a non-Black town—was our peak stop.

Our initial stop was at Fort Gibson, the first military fortress in Indian Territory, which is often a precursor to a stop at Honey Springs. I had been on at least two other tours that paired a visit to the battlefield with a stop at the fort. As the garrison where those who fought Honey Springs resided, Fort Gibson not only invigorates a military theme of the tour but also ties the tour narrative to the battle. As we were approaching Fort Gibson, Pat engaged us in a bus tour quiz for which the answers were contained in material we received as we boarded the bus. She called out a variety of questions to test our knowledge, but she often answered herself if we did not respond. About Fort Gibson, she asked us and answered:

Q: What three American presidents lived at or near Ft. Gibson?
A: Sam Houston—president of Texas; Jefferson Davis—president of the Confederacy; and Zacchary Taylor—U.S. president
Q: What year was it built?
A: 1824. Occupied by the First Kansas Colored [Infantry] and later two African American units that were later brought into the army

The elaborated answers about the First Kansas Colored Infantry, a regiment of Black soldiers recruited by the state of Kansas to fight for the Union,[30] is probably why many Black heritage tours stop at Fort Gibson. The Kansas Colored, as they are commonly called, is the “black part” of the Fort (and Honey Springs). Buried within travelok.com’s description of the Fort is mention of a Black presence at Fort Gibson even if the Fort is not situated in the African American History and Culture section of the website: “ … Fort Gibson also has a unique place in African-American history. From 1867 to 1873, buffalo soldiers served intermittently at Fort Gibson. Eventually, the outpost became the headquarters for the all-Black Tenth Calvary.”[31] In Pat’s narration, Black presence at the site was not discussed at length beyond a mention of the Kansas Colored’s (or the Buffalo Soldier’s or Tenth Calvary’s) existence. The origins of their formation as a group, their experience as a regiment, or any race-specific experiences they had were not part of the narration, even though this information was available to us in the materials we were given. Indeed, once the bus stopped at Fort Gibson, the highlight event for us was a demonstration of how the oven in the garrison worked. While we ate deliciously warm bread from the oven, a man from the OHS, dressed in a Civil War military uniform, explained the ingredients and the techniques used for making the bread and gauging oven temperature. We then boarded the bus again to head to Honey Springs.

Another OHS historian came on the bus to tell us about the significance and events of the battle from his expert knowledge. Those details are chronicled on OHS’s website[32] and also travel.ok.com.[33] Our new narrator, the OHS historian, reiterated them on the tour when he explained, as I jotted in my notes below:

The 1863 fight between Union and Confederate soldiers was over Fort Gibson and the Texas Road, along which resulted the battle’s site. Fort Gibson and the Texas Road were two areas in Indian Territory that each side sought to control. Prior to 1863, Indian Territories were reigned over by Confederate authorities. Creek and Cherokee tribes signed a treaty with the south and then organized regiments. They eventually came back to Ft. Gibson in 1863. When, on July 18th, Union General Blunt had his men march twenty-seven miles and nine hours south on the Texas Road, they fought skirmishes along the way and ended up at Honey Springs, where for 1 hour and 15 min., Blunts’ guns bombarded confederate guns.

He told the story’s detail effortlessly, speaking as if he knew every minutiae of the event. His account of the battle seemed designed to captivate the audience, with intrigue of conflict, gore, and the battle’s crescendo into the Union-side victory. In this way the account was positioned as one of the tour’s pinnacle parts.

It was followed by another highlight: a partial re-enactment of the life of a soldier who fought in the battle. This was a small taste of the larger scale bi-annual re-enactment that occurs at Honey Springs.[34] Our expert historian introduced his “associate,” Rupert, an older man with a long white beard and a deep southern drawl. Rupert, who joined us on the bus and was dressed in a Union soldier’s uniform, told us about the hard life of a soldier. He said:

In [Oklahoma] in July it gets hot and muggy. It rained during the battle so soldiers’ uniforms were wet. They were thirsty. And they would take coffee cups and fill [them] with water in [streams] of [the] Texas Road. Horses do business in the road so [that] is why more people died from dysentery.

To further engage us in Civil War military life, he followed this graphic depiction with an exercise. He led us off the bus and told us to line up to participate in a soldier’s drill. Commanding us to face forward while he was still in character, he shouted at those of us who did not follow orders well. Rupert lined up the entire group in perfect file formation alongside the bus and said, “Now, everyone count off.” Then he had us step back. He dismissed someone for not following orders and, amid stifled laughter from all of us, he then had the rest of the group face forward and turn right into line. The action was complete when he explained, again leaving character, that “this is the life of a soldier.”

Together, the OHS historian and Rupert’s accounts said little about the Kansas Colored beyond the fact that they existed, participated, and were important to the battle’s success. The soldier’s life that was recounted and demonstrated for us was undifferentiated. Instead, we were drawn to learn about the soldiers as a general group, sources of historical information about the country’s major moment and also sources of entertainment for bus tourists. Like Civil War tourisms and reenactments elsewhere, the Honey Springs narration on this particular tour focused on the fight, the victory, and nostalgia and imitation of history to make it an experience of the present.[35] Despite the marketing of Honey Springs as a multicultural site, race and ethnicity were barely there. What is more, there was no explicit attempt to connect the battle or the soldiers to Black towns, a purported focus of the tour.

An irony to the near-invisibility of blackness in a Black history tour with Honey Springs at its center is that Honey Springs is right next to a Black town. To get to the battle site you must enter the town of Rentiesville (as travelok.com directs you in their directions to Honey Springs). Rentiesville is one of the thirteen officially recognized Black towns. But the proximity of Rentiesville to the battle site is the exact opposite of how the two were inserted in the tour as Honey Springs and Rentiesville were presented as separate entities. We were touring Honey Springs to learn about the war and we were touring Rentiesvile to learn about the cultural and social prominence of particular Black residents in the town. Our historian mentioned that Rentiesville was founded partially by veterans of the Battle of Honey Springs, but he did not elaborate and his next comment was to respond to a question about General Blunt. Yet the battlefield is indeed part of a Black town story (and the OHS historian acknowledged a connection even if he gave the point scant attention). Moreover, when we went to Rentiesville, we learned about the background to two streets that form the intersection of the town: John Hope Franklin Street and DC Minner Way. We heard about historian John Hope Franklin who was born in Rentiesville and we saw the house where he grew up. We visited the club of blues musician DC Minner. We heard from his wife who, after Minner’s death in 2007, received tour buses at the club to tell tourists about Minner, his life growing up in Rentiesville, and his return. But once we were in Rentiesville, we did not hear about Honey Springs a short walk up the road.

Native Africa at Honey Springs

In 2006 I participated in a tour of Black towns organized by an urban social organization, the Black Heritage Society (BHS), which is a community center devoted to documenting and increasing awareness about Black history and culture. The BHS serves a predominantly Black community although, as a public center, it is open to anyone. This is true of its tour of Black towns, that has included people from across the state and nation but especially recruits participants from the local community it serves. The tour’s focus on Black towns is in keeping with its broader mission: to document and raise awareness of African American history and culture. The BHS’s tour of Black towns, a regular event, goes to different locations each time the tour occurs. In the 2006 tour that I joined, the focus was on churches and cemeteries, with an apparent designation of Black churches and cemeteries as Black towns. As with the tour led by Pat (and other tours I would take), all of our tour stops were not officially recognized Black towns. Rather, this tour made stops at churches and cemeteries somehow linked to Black Americans in Oklahoma.

Unlike on Pat’s tour, there were two buses and two tour narrators, one for each bus. Each narrator had a distinct approach to telling Black town history on the tour. I started out on Allen’s bus and finished the tour on Gena’s. However, in many ways, Allen set the itinerary and tone for the tour. He was recognized as especially studied about Black towns and Oklahoma’s Black history and some have told me that BHS tours of Black towns were his brainchild. The idea to organize a tour of cemeteries and churches was also his. Some also felt that Allen was more “authentic” than Gena because, unlike Gena who had researched Black towns extensively and was not raised in Oklahoma, Allen was “from” the state and had knowledge from experience as well as research. It was little surprise, then, that I was encouraged to take Allen’s bus.

Our first stop was at a cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second largest city and not one that was recognized by the Oklahoma History Society as a Black town. I was sitting in the front of the bus when I heard Allen announce: “Although this is a Black town tour, we are going to put the cart before the horse …. [W]e are going to show you some of Tulsa’s best kept secrets.” With this reference to Tulsa as a feature in the itinerary, Allen began immediately reconstructing conventional definitions of Black towns as broader than how they are typically conceived. He told us that Black towns in Oklahoma are divided into “State” or “Native” towns. While State Negro Towns were organized and delineated “after enrollment,” he said, Native Towns were those that existed “on Native lands.” His reference to enrollment suggested that State towns were formed on lands that individual tribal members possessed as a Federal requirement of their membership. But Native Towns were a bigger emphasis for Allen. As the tour progressed we gleaned that, according to him, Native Towns were formed by pre-Colombian era Africans settling in what was once Indian Territory. For him, Native Americans are misidentified when they are not recognized as African in origin and, having been “here from Day 1.” Tulsa, he would tell us, is a Native Black town because it was formed on Native lands possessed by people of African origin. Thus, a central argument on Allen’s tour was that Blacks were original to state of Oklahoma and, by inference, America. Africans were, for him, native to America and, in fact (and therefore), Native Americans.

This claim was affirmed with our first visit to a Tulsa cemetery. Arriving at a cemetery in midtown Tulsa he told us about the Perryman family, known by most as a prominent and pioneering Creek family whose African origins Allen was about to expose. Walking among headstones in the cemetery where we noticed numerous references to Perryman family members Allen told us that most people do not think of the Perrymans as Black but, he said, their Black ancestry is denied. He mentioned how many Perryman men married African-descended women, implying through a biological reductionist argument that the Perrymen offspring would be Black as a result. In this sense, Allen was performing what some have called vindicationism, correcting what he saw as misinformation about and pejorative assessments of Black people.[36] Others have taken up the argument about African origins in the Americas, as a corrective to theories of pioneering migratory patterns into the region. Most notably is Ivan van Sertima who wrote They Came Before Columbus.[37] Allen’s analysis echoed van Sertima’s claims about Africans’ first arrival in the Americas, applying them to the Oklahoma context. That context includes denials or silences around cases of extreme racial violence against Black communities, especially the failure of the state to publicly recognize, until very recently, the obliteration of a Black residential and business district in Tulsa in 1921 during a “race riot” and efforts to dis-enroll people of African descent from particular tribes. Thus, the backdrop for Allen’s argument that elevated blackness and denied Native American existence distinct from Africa was a history of Black marginalization and exclusion from citizenship followed by mobilizations among Black Oklahomans to correct for and challenge[38] this.

With tourists’ “oohs” and “aahs” in response to Allen’s provocative claims reverberating in my thoughts, I left Allen’s bus to join Gena’s bus for the 30-minute ride south for our next stops. After watching a documentary on the bus about the Tulsa “Race Riots” of 1921, making a brief stop in the officially recognized Black town of Taft and driving by Rentiesville, we were approaching Honey Springs. Gena was the first to introduce us to the battle and the battlefield site, reading us a quote from General Blunt about the battle and the role of the Kansas Colored. We would get more exposure to the battle details later once we arrived at the interpretive center and explored the tiny, one-room building and the information they had on display. Then, we returned to the bus where Rupert, who I would hear from on Pat’s tour, also got on and narrated the story of Honey Springs in the way that, I would learn, contained key pieces heard in most narrations of the event. As Rupert talked I jotted down these notes:

Solders with general Blunt were marching. There was rain. Soldiers were thirsty and filling their canteens with water accumulated on the road. Soldiers were drinking this water and died from dysentery. [They] came down to Honey Springs to live. The Union only had four guns. Confederates had three. The Union won because they had more artillery. General Blunt had military training.

While the grit and hard life of a soldier resonated with what tourists would hear in 2008, this time there was no re-enactment of weapon use or soldier drills (even though Rupert was in Civil War military garb). Nor did he mention the Kansas Colored Regiment. As in Pat’s tour, the emphasis was on the facts of the event and the undifferentiated soldiers who fought in it.

Difference came in when we entered the battlefield park and heard again from Allen. As we approached the entrance, Gena said she regarded the battlefield park as adopting an inclusive approach by recognizing the various participants in the battle. She was referring to the five rust colored monuments at the park’s entrance that bore inscription about those who fought in Honey Springs. Some of the monuments (like the one depicted on the cover of this issue) were devoted to acknowledging American Indian and African American participation in the battle. One monument focused on the Kansas Colored Infantry and another on the Five Tribes that were removed from the southeast to Indian Territory and also fought in the war.[39]

We learned more about Native Americans and Blacks at Honey Springs from Allen who began talking to us while we were finishing up looking at the monuments in a self-guided tour. Shielding ourselves from the sun by standing in an open stone structure that had plaques on the wall explaining further about the Honey Springs battle, we heard from Allen who would not focus on the Civil War. Instead, he would tell us a different story about the land on which we stood. Allen’s earlier analysis showing well-established, wealthy, and founding Black families wrongly identified as American Indian would emerge at Honey Springs. Instead of telling us about the details and successes of the battle, Allen told us that Honey Springs belongs to different families and he wanted to tell us about one in particular, the McIntosh family, after whom the county where Honey Springs sits is named. The MacIntoshes he told us were a large, plantation owning and slave-holding family. He went on to say that they were a mixture of African and European but have been misidentified as Indian. “You don’t get an Indian out of African and European,” he said. “So, political reasons are why they [the MacIntoshes] became Indian.”

The identity of the McIntosh family has been discussed in a range of sources, from scholarly research to public material for tourist consumption. Most sources identify particular McIntosh patriarchs as leaders and large planters of the Creek Nation in the early 19th century. Chief William McIntosh—perhaps the most referenced—is identified as the son of a Creek woman and Scot man, Captain William McIntosh of the McIntosh merchant colonists who originally came to the United States in the 18th century.[40] Chief McIntosh, who led Creeks in military battles and negotiations with the federal government over Indian removal to the West, is the ancestor of Chilly, Roley, and John McIntosh. These three male MacIntoshes lived in Indian Territory, and were prominent landholders, missionaries, and military leaders. According to John Meserve,[41] “[a]t the outbreak of the [Civil] War, the MacIntosh family was one of the wealthiest in the Creek Nation. They were large plantation and slave owners …. The MacIntoshes were men of high, Christian character and ability and capable of forming an intelligent conviction upon questions of public moment … ” On our tour, Allen too emphasized the MacIntoshes’ wealth, especially through his reference to the large land base that they held in the region. But his final point was that the MacIntoshes were actually Black or African in origin, which is not claimed by other historical sources even if most acknowledge slave ownership and influence among the McIntosh clan.[42] As with his analysis of the Perrymans, Allen’s was an argument rooted less in phenotype and more in ancestry. Having arrived midway through his analysis of how the MacIntoshes are African descendants, I approached Allen to get clarification on what he was saying. I over-heard him use the phrase “half-breeds” for the MacIntosh family when mentioning their African and European ancestry. As with many heritage tours, the information he provided was brief due to limited time, so I asked him if he was suggesting that the MacIntoshes were trying to “pass” as Native American. A look of frustrated bewilderment fell over Allen’s face. “They were Native American,” he stressed. “Africans are Native Americans. That’s what I’ve been explaining. We’ve got to break the myth of Native America.”

Thus, in Allen’s reading of Honey Springs, the important thing for tourists to know was not that the Confederate troops were defeated by the Union. It was not that American Indian and African American troops fought in a major national battle in Indian Territory, helping to chart the Union’s victory for the nation. It was not about the grueling everyday life of Civil War soldiers or the details of the battle itself. Indeed, during Allen’s narration, we were left with an idea that the important battle at Honey Springs was over race and status. As Allen informed us that the wealthy, slave-holding, plantation owning Black family was more significant to the region than troops and generals, he repositioned the conventional Honey Springs narrative about near racelessness at the heart of a signature event in the nation.

Conclusion

Tours that go outside of officially recognized Black towns, such as tours that go to Honey Springs and Fort Gibson, link the towns to centers of American and Oklahoman prominence. Yet the irony is that they can also render blackness remote precisely by avoiding a clearly Black-identified space. How American and Oklahoma history are analyzed and presented is what distinguishes different tours from one another. On the one hand, tours that highlight American themes to the near exclusion of Black history may avoid drawing attention to the contemporary (and less appealing) physical, geographic, and social remoteness of Black towns. But, on the other hand, they may render blackness remote precisely by avoiding a clearly Black-identified space and narrative that centers Black life. As in the case of what I am calling “conventional” tours of Honey Springs, they can suggest a separation of blackness from Americanness when they do not do the work of unpacking what connects Black American communities like Rentiesville to American centers of importance, like the Honey Springs battle, or detailing what the lived Black experiences in major American events contributed to those events and the nation.

Tour narrators like Allen, with his provocative and contestable claims, are attempts to place blackness back at the center of the American story. Indeed, they are to lay Black claim to America precisely when blackness has been repeatedly sidelined in a range of tellings and constructions of American history, from the Tulsa Race Riots, the Cherokee citizenship rolls, and accounts of Honey Springs.[43]

Acknowledgments

I thank the contributors to this special issue, audience members at the 2015 bi-annual Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora conference, and Kamela Heyward-Rotimi for helpful comments and questions on earlier drafts of this work.

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC–Chapel Hill, and an R.J. Reynolds Junior Faculty Development Award at UNC–Chapel Hill.