History of Oklahoma
[3] The earliest known painted object in North America, the Cooper Bison Skull, which dates between 10,900 and 10,200 radiocarbon years ago, was found at a Folsom tradition site in what is now Harper County, Oklahoma.
This hierarchical structure is marked in the archaeological record by the appearance of large tombs with exotic grave offerings of obvious symbols of authority and prestige, such as those found in the "Great Mortuary" at Spiro.
[7] Archaeologists believe that ancestors of the Wichita and Affiliated tribes occupied the eastern Great Plains from the Red River north to Nebraska for at least 2,000 years.
[citation needed] The Adams–Onís Treaty thus delineated the southern (Red River) and primary western (100th meridian west) borders of the future state of Oklahoma.
The tribes that were moved after the civil war are, Apache, Lipan, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Potawatomi, Comanche, Delaware, Eastern, Fort Sill Apache, Iowa, Kaw (Kansa), Kickapoo, Kiowa, Miami (including Eel River Indians), Modoc, Nez Perce, Otoe-Missouria, Ottawa, Osage, Pawnee, Peoria (including Cahokia, Illinois, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Tamaroa), Ponca, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Stockbridge-Munsee, Tonkawa, Waco, Wea, Wyandotte[35] In 1820 (Treaty of Doak's Stand) and 1825 (Treaty of Washington City), the Choctaw were given lands in the Arkansas Territory (including in the current state of Oklahoma) in exchange for part of their homeland, primarily in the state of Mississippi.
Angie Debo's landmark work, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940), detailed how the allotment policy of the Dawes Commission and the Curtis Act of 1898 was systematically manipulated to deprive the Native Americans of their lands and resources.
[49] In the words of historian Ellen Fitzpatrick, Debo's book "advanced a crushing analysis of the corruption, moral depravity, and criminal activity that underlay white administration and execution of the allotment policy.
We will have enrolled this scholastic year not less than 140,000 children who never entered a public schoolhouse before and a vast majority of whom never attended a school of any kind a single day.
Oklahoma began consolidating schools in 1903, and the Superintendent's reasoning behind this was to "better improve the quality of buildings, curricula, student interaction, adult education and country roads".
"Facilities upgrades included such mundane items as bookcases, lunch cupboards, first-aid cabinets, drinking fountains, toilets, playground equipment, "storm caves," teachers' homes, gymnasia, outhouses, septic tanks, and water supply."
"In that case, the Court declared that because black Oklahomans had no access to legal training at a state institution while whites had studied law at the University for decades, Oklahoma was obligated, under the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, to provide Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher the opportunity for a legal education substantially equal to that provided to whites."
The administrators at the university were relieved as they could finally get rid of the restrictions that they called "embarrassing compromises with decency and justice" such as "colored only" signs or a wall in the stadium dividing the groups.
[citation needed] From 1897 to 1957, the state legislature imposed a great many Jim Crow laws:[62] On May 30, 1921, an incident occurred between a young black man named Dick Rowland and a white woman, Sarah Page.
Word of the incident quickly spread and it incited an armed white mob to demand Rowland be turned over; the sheriff and his party refused and barricaded the top floor of the building.
To regain the initiative, Walton retaliated by attacking Oklahoma's Ku Klux Klan with a ban on parades, declaration of martial law, and employment of outsiders to 'keep the peace.'
The negative images of the "Okie" as a sort of rootless migrant laborer living in a near-animal state of scrounging for food greatly offended many Oklahomans.
Notable editors of these newspapers include Roscoe Dunjee, who continued to fight for equal rights well into the nationally recognized civil rights era, including fighting for equal pay post WWII and advocating for Ada Louis Sipuel in the Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma case (1948), the case that ultimately allowed black students to attend the University of Oklahoma, though segregated .
The women auxiliary group of the Prince Hall Masons, the Eastern Star, additionally worked to provide educational support to black students and created new citizen programs in Oklahoma.
The decision of Brown v Board of education acted as one of the catalyst for the emergence of the Civil Rights era, the court case was quickly followed by the actions of Rosa Parks inspiring the Montgomery Bus Boycott, nationwide sit-ins to protest public segregation, and the rise of Rev.
One of Clara Luper's prominent efforts for the fight for civil rights in Oklahoma is the Katz Drug-Store sit-in of 1958, in protest of the segregation of public areas and dining establishments.
Luper, along with the other youth of the NAACP, sat down in "whites only" areas of the drug store and ordered food and drink as a nonviolent way to display their discontent and lack of toleration towards segregation.
Because of their close ties to the community, the struggles of the working class and internal issues, their new form of activism known as "Prairie Power" spread across young adults in the midwestern United States.
[74] This new form of protest encouraged desegregation in higher education, and groups of students who participated in prairie power activism made heavy contributions towards liberalism and leftist ideology in colleges that opened the doors to anti-racist ideas.
After a long-winded nationwide battle for racial justice in the United States, the Civil Rights act of 1964 provided equal protections under the constitution to black Americans, which gave Oklahoman African Americans the opportunity to focus more on legislative change and allow their voices to be heard through black elected officials of Oklahoma, but this did not completely erase prejudice from the South.
[75] Along with the demands of resignation, the American Indian Movement experienced collective outrage in the way that funds based on the Johnson-O'Malley Act of 1934 were ultimately detrimental to the education of Native students.
These newsletters, actively criticized and questioned Principal Chief Harry J. W. Belvin, the man who initially proposed the bill to terminate the Choctaw nation in the first place.
But Oklahoma City and Tulsa remain economically active in their effort to diversify as the state focuses more on medical research, health, finance, and manufacturing.
AAR Corporation has operations in both Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and The Boeing Company and Pratt & Whitney are building a regional presence next to Tinker AFB.
Also, Governair and Temptrol (subsidiaries of CES Group) and York Unitary division of Johnson Controls have a major presence in the Oklahoma City metro.
Timothy McVeigh was later sentenced to death by lethal injection, while his partner, Terry Nichols, who was convicted of 161 counts of first-degree murder received life in prison without the possibility of parole.
