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Thread: The Richest Black Girl in America - and her fight for freedom.

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    Post The Richest Black Girl in America - and her fight for freedom.

    The Richest Black Girl in America

    When an 11-year-old Black girl in Jim Crow America discovers a seemingly worthless plot of land she has inherited is worth millions, everything in her life changes — and the walls begin to close in. The untold story brought to life from thousands of pages of archival documents.

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    Sarah Rector, 11, stood up and wiped her hands on her sweat-soaked shift, a simple loose dress. She had to squint to block out the radiating sun. It was another hot August in rural Oklahoma — hot enough for her barefoot soles to grow numb from the scorching dirt. She wasn’t much taller than the cotton plants surrounding her. They were Black farmers in the heart of Jim Crow America. They were relegated to the poorest parts of town, to the most menial lifestyle, and to degrading reminders of the long shadow of slavery. Like many other Black families from Oklahoma, the Rectors’ ancestors had been enslaved by the Creek tribe. That meant Sarah and her eldest siblings were eligible to be added to the Creek Nation’s Freedmen Roll, which under federal law entitled them to receive free land allotments.

    For the most part, the program was a misplaced band-aid on centuries of mistreatment. Sarah’s allotment was almost 100 miles northwest of their town, too far away from the family’s farm to be practical. And that “free” land was hardly free. The properties given to Black residents tended to have uncultivable soil and a hefty annual tax bill. Sarah’s plot was called “a rocky piece of wasteland” by one observer. Joe Rector, a hard worker who protected the best interests of his family, wanted nothing to do with his children’s allotments. He petitioned the Muskogee County Court to authorize a sale of a few hundred dollars, but no buyer could be found. However hard Joe tried, it seemed that he was stuck with them.

    Joe decided to lease Sarah’s land to an oil company. The lease offset some of the tax payments, and came with a royalty if a splash or two of oil happened to be found. The allotment might change from a dreadful burden to a tolerable inconvenience. On this particular day, August 29, 1913, Sarah continued the demanding manual labor that helped support her family. She was too far away from her plot to see one of the countless sets of drilling equipment on the horizon twisting into the ground. She could not witness the oil start to bubble up. And then more. And more. If Sarah had found Aladdin’s lamp, as one newspaper later noted, she could hardly have commanded the genie to conjure a wilder scenario than this.

    It was a gusher.

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    Read how her life changed and how she was "helped" by all those "good" people - and how she outsmarted them all: https://medium.com/truly-adventurous...a-ca8aebe054dc

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    Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect. -- Woody Hayes​

  2. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to DGUtley For This Useful Post:

    Dr. Who (02-26-2021),FindersKeepers (02-26-2021),MMC (02-26-2021)

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    I emailed the author for any information on this woman's legacy. Very interesting story.
    Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect. -- Woody Hayes​

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    What a fascinating story!

    Oil truly was black gold!

    She lived in the Rector Mansion in KC during her later years, although it's probably not a mansion by some standards, she definitely had a better life than many.



    The Rector family’s ancestors had been enslaved by Creek tribal members, and after the Civil War, the U.S. government declared freedmen, such as the Rectors, citizens of the respective tribes in which they had been enslaved. Sarah Rector was thus both black and an enrolled member of the Creek tribe.
    U.S. government involvement resulted in individual Native freedmen, including Rector and her siblings, each receiving the regulatory allotment of 160 acres. Contributor to Crisis, Stacey Patton, writes, “Since the actual distribution of lands lasted from 1898 until 1906, Rector and the other 4,407 Black children living in the Creek Nation together received nearly one million acres of land in eastern Oklahoma.” The Curtis Act opened up “surplus” lands to white settlers for purchase; approximately 90 million acres were stripped from tribes and made available to whites. The federal government, unsurprisingly, pushed what was thought to be the least valuable land upon tribal members; this land was rocky and largely unsuitable for crops. If the government had realized the amount of oil that rested underneath many of those “undesirable” allotments, including Sarah Rector’s, her narrative would have looked very different.
    https://pendergastkc.org/article/biography/sarah-rector

    Unfortunately, the photos we're seeing might not be of Sarah.

    https://newsantafetrailer.blogspot.c...n-america.html
    ""A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul" ~George Bernard Shaw

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    DGUtley (02-26-2021)

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    Enslaved by the Creek Tribe after the Civil War.....The Creek Tribe better hope that Black Lying Marxists dont find out.
    History does not long Entrust the care of Freedom, to the Weak or Timid!!!!! Dwight D. Eisenhower ~

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