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James W. Loewen (1942-2021)

We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague and remain committed to the work he began.

Henryetta

Oklahoma

Basic Information

Type of Place
Independent City or Town
Metro Area
Politics c. 1860?
Unions, Organized Labor?

Sundown Town Status

Sundown Town in the Past?
Surely
Was there an ordinance?
Don't Know
Sign?
Perhaps, Some Oral Evidence
Year of Greatest Interest
Still Sundown?
Probably Not, Although Still Very Few Black People

Census Information

The available census data from 1860 to the present
Total White Black Asian Native Hispanic Other BHshld
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930 7,964 0
1940
1950 7,987 7647 7 95
1960 6,551 1
1970 6,430 6095 19 5 289 22
1980
1990 5,872 16
2000 6096 4858 35 20 751 134 432 4
2010
2020

Method of Exclusion

  • Violent Expulsion
  • Threat of Violence
  • Reputation
  • Unknown

Main Ethnic Group(s)

  • Unknown

Group(s) Excluded

  • Black

Comments

“My Daddy was a wolf-hunter %u2014 that’s a white sport.
He had white friends. But even he had to be out by
sundown.”
-former OK resident, interviewed in 2000

In the early 1900s, Henryetta had a black community
that may have comprised as much as 200 people. In
December of 1907, James Gordon, a black man, shot a
white man in the course of an argument. After being
caught by a white posse, “he confessed and implicated
two other blacks whom he said had hired him. . . .
When the crowd discovered what had happened, they
were incensed. They surrounded the jail, battered
down the door, smashed the jail lock with a sledge
hamme, and dragged Gordon across the street to a
telephone pole.” He was hung and repeatedly shot.
“Within a day or two, the whites rallied together with
guns, rocks, bricks, ‘anything and everything’ and ran
the other black families out of town. ‘We didn’t care
where they went and don’t know,’ said one irate
resident. From then on, Henryetta was off-limits to
blacks except for business during the day.”
-from History of Okmulgee County, published 1985 by
the Okmulgee Historical Society

The daughter of an African American man who had visited Henryetta recalls that her father was attacked, beaten, and chased in his car by a group of white men during his visit with a white woman there. The men cut his car’s brake line, resulting in a fatal crash in 1958.