![]() ![]() “We came from a place that was important and survived. “Other people need to know that we didn’t just materialize,” says Shelton. “This little Black town is where they’re getting their riches.” And as young people continue to leave in search of jobs, the mayors are tasked with protecting these communities from being forgotten. “They’re coming through here, taking all the oil and gas,” says Mayor Ella DeShazer, who is fighting to get the companies to repair the roads. Our Clearview, Oklahoma Classic Established T-Shirt is the original Hometown Apparel design that started it all. In Tatums, the roads have been torn up by oil-company trucks. It was historically an all-black freedmens town. The population was 41 at the 2020 Census. Because these towns lack a strong tax base, many rely on grants and grassroots funding to cover basic infrastructural needs. Dispatchers in Oklahoma received a call from a Clearview man saying he killed his wife and he would be waiting unarmed in the front yard with their three kids, authorities said. Clearview is a town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, United States. In recent years, all of Tullahassee, the oldest surviving Black town in Oklahoma, was at risk of losing its water services because of an overdue bill. Photo: Courtesy of Shirley Ann Ballard Neroīut exactly 100 years after the Tulsa massacre and one year after the murder of George Floyd - two acts of spectacular violence, sanctioned by the state - these mayors face a slower kind of violence in the form of governmental neglect and economic isolation. The school closed in 1964 due to decreased school population as a result of integration efforts. Members of Clearview School’s graduating class of 1953. “When people fled Greenwood, they came to the Black towns,” says local historian Shirley Nero. By 1921, Greenwood’s segregated Black community had built a robust economy, which was destroyed on Memorial Day Weekend when white residents - many of whom had been deputized by city officials - torched and bombed it to the ground. It was this same desire for self-determination that birthed the Greenwood district of Tulsa, 50 miles from Boley. Founded in Indian Territory after the Civil War, these 50-plus settlements attracted Black Americans from throughout the South, offering them the chance to build communities safe from racist violence. Armstrong, had helped found Boley in 1903 and served as its first mayor, a post Shelton would take up in 2015.īoley is one of Oklahoma’s 13 remaining all-Black towns. She decided to purchase the hardware store, both for the business and to preserve its history: The original owner, T.B. ![]() “Our elders were so interested in training us on how to make a living that they didn’t teach us how to make that living here,” says Shelton. ( 1) Creek Nation Behavioral Health and Substance Abuse Services. She had gotten her degree in another town and worked for years as a biochemist in Oklahoma City upon returning to Boley, she noticed how many buildings had fallen into disrepair, how commerce had declined. Treatment Centers within 120 miles of Clearview, OK. Francis Shelton moved back to Boley, the Oklahoma town where she grew up. The mayors - gathered for the first time in history - in front of The Bucket, an old juke joint in Clearview, Oklahoma.
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