BLACK GOLD

The first of Smitherman’s major contributions is his work to assist Native Americans and Freedmen (blacks born on reservations) retain possession of their “Black Gold,” Black Gold was a term for the oil that was discovered in Oklahoma on land allotted to Native Americans and Freedmen by the U.S. government. Native Americans and Freedmen were supposed to be given 160 acres of land for every man, woman, and child. In many cases that land struck oil.

As Smitherman describes in detail in both his newspaper, The Tulsa Star, and in his autobiographical installments, an immense amount of wealth was generated by the oil discovered on those lands. But the bulk of the wealth fell into the hands of others through corrupt deals negotiated by crooked government-appointed guardians within a system that failed to protect the rightful landowners and instead conspired in dispossessing them of their wealth.

Smitherman, an attorney who had attended La Salle University and Northwestern University, and his employer, newspaper owner W.H. Twine, also an attorney, diligently worked for a Native American and black client, Warrior A. Rentie, and ultimately prevailed in his plight to maintain guardianship of his children and control their land. This motivated Smitherman and Rentie to form the Negro Guardianship League, created to continue the fight for other blacks and Native Americans to maintain guardianship of their children and control of their land and ultimately their wealth.

Rentie’s victory made history and created a legal precedent that brought national attention to the corrupt guardianship system in Oklahoma. The amount of wealth that Native American and Freedman retained as a result of Smitherman and his associates’ work is not quantifiable but is estimated to be in the millions.

BLACK WALL STREET AND THE TULSA MASSACRE

The thriving Greenwood District in Tulsa was also known as Black Wall Street. The second great contribution is Smitherman’s influence on shaping not only what blacks were thinking in Black Wall Street but nationwide. His newspaper was distributed throughout the United States. And as President of the Western Negro Press Association for eleven consecutive years, he also influenced other editors who were helping to shape their communities as well.

Beyond blacks, Smitherman was a respected leader amongst whites in Tulsa and throughout the state of Oklahoma. He regularly corresponded with each Oklahoma governor elected while he was in Tulsa.  He also actively helped promote Democratic politicians and assisted them in getting the black vote.

Smitherman used his newspaper to “clean up” Tulsa, ridding it of many of the “lower elements” he discovered when he moved with his family from Muskogee. Smitherman’s autobiography retells stories of how he came to discover the true power of the press. He used that power to drive law enforcement to do their duty and shut down prostitution, gambling, and other criminal activity rampant there at the time.

In his articles published in his Tulsa Star, Smitherman was adamant about the need for blacks to arm and protect themselves from the growing danger of mob rule, particularly the KKK and their lynchings, which is a major reason he was indicted for inciting the biggest riot and massacre in American history. According to the indictment, the riots on Black Wall Street began because blacks were determined to keep an angry mob from lynching an innocent young black man who had been falsely accused of assaulting a white woman. A fight broke out and shots were fired in front of the county courthouse where the boy was being held by the Sheriff on May 31^st , 1921, and so began what would be a devastating 36 hour massacre ending in the 35 blocks of Black Wall Street burned to ashes, with over 1,200 homes and 600 businesses destroyed, and 12,000 people homeless.

Smitherman and other black leaders, including J.B. Stradford, were arrested and indicted for inciting the riots and had to flee Oklahoma for fear of being killed. White newspapers and some white officials blamed Smitherman for what they saw as “riling up” blacks. However, an official commission report on the riots prepared in 2001, drew a different conclusion. The report assigns responsibility and attributes liability to the government officials, who not only failed to protect the black citizens and their property, but also provided ammunition as well as airplanes for bombing, to those that would destroy Black Wall Street.

Smitherman and Stradford were both exonerated of all charges posthumously, decades after their deaths, but neither returned to Tulsa as long as they lived.

BLACK POWER

The third major category of contribution, described throughout this book, is summarized as black power. Using his newspapers, Smitherman consistently beckons his black readership to patronize each others’ business and to pool the resources of blacks to support one another.  He often wrote about the duties of wealthy blacks to give to those who were newly emancipating themselves from the lives of share-croppers and other less economically empowering occupations. Educating blacks was a top priority for Smitherman and other blacks who had already been afforded an education. This was also embraced by those who were not educated, but wanted more for future generations.

The other component to increasing black power was Smitherman’s visionary mission to convince blacks to diversify their vote between the Democratic and Republican Parties. At the time he started the Muskogee Star in 1912, which became the Tulsa Star in 1913, Negroes were voting almost exclusively for Republicans. Smitherman observed that Republicans did nothing to earn the vote of black citizens because the party took their vote for granted. Democrats did nothing to capture the vote of black citizens because they assumed they could not get the black vote.

As Smitherman refers to it, his “experiment“ was to see if blacks would gain political power by diversifying their vote, and whether whites would then have to appease blacks with their political agendas. As history would show, his theory was correct. This was indeed the reaction of politicians once they realized lobbying blacks was necessary to win elections. Sadly, Smitherman died before writing any autobiographical installments about the fruition of his visionary strategy.  However, drawing from articles he wrote in his papers, as well as other newspapers that published articles on the topic, Part II of this book will provide the evidence of his plan prevailing, as blacks began to diversify their vote and influence policy in a way they had never achieved before. And one of the first and most important pieces of policy birthed out of the newly found influence of black voters was their demand for a federal anti-lynching bill. The biography will reveal how even after his paper was burned down during the riots, and he had to flee to Boston with his family, Smitherman’s influence and respect in the black community continued. He was elected to the National Equality League in 1922 and their first order of the day was demanding and fighting for the passing of the Dyer Bill, the federal anti-lynching bill.

Once settled in Buffalo, New York, Smitherman began his Buffalo newspaper, the Buffalo Star (later to be named the Empire Star) in 1932. His work while in Buffalo for blacks both locally and nationally  is well documented in the archives of his Empire Star newspapers and those achievements are worthy of their own book, which will undoubtedly be written in the future. Smitherman continued to advocate for empowerment of his race until his death in 1961.