hey called it the Eden of the West. When boosters crafted tales of the land known as the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, and eventually Oklahoma, they wrote of fertile soil that could grow any crop, yielding shoulder-high acres of wheat and melons ready to burst in their succulent ripeness. They described a righteous realm where any newcomer would have “equal chances with the white man,” while those who remained in the old world, the Deep South, were “slaves liable to be killed at any time. Most important to J.H. and Carlie Goodwin, they spoke of good schools for colored children, places where the seeds of prosperity could be sown in the one terrain that could not be burned, stolen, or erased by an interloper—the terrain of the mind.
James and Carlie did not decide to move to Oklahoma spontaneously, for spontaneity was not a luxury that Black people could afford. James was a quiet, deliberate man who sought success with a patient vigor. In the early 1910s, he and his wife lived on a segregated street in a small town in Mississippi called Water Valley, along with their four children: Lucille, James Jr., Anna, and the baby, Edward. They knew their offspring deserved better than what little had been possible for them in the hardscrabble aftermath of Reconstruction. In Water Valley, Black children were offered no schooling beyond the eighth grade, and a Black man was expected to scurry into the gutter when he encountered a white man on the sidewalk. “He did not want to be in a place where the safety of a Black man could be so lightly treated,” J.H.’s grandson Jim explained decades later. “He didn’t want his kids exposed to that.”
