Will's Race for Home

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s novel is set against the backdrop of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, a real historical event that saw some 50,000 settlers race to claim plots of “Unassigned Lands.” Beginning in the early 1800s, millions of Indigenous Americans were forcibly relocated to the so-called “Indian Territory” in modern-day Oklahoma. As western expansion continued, acts aimed at the systematic dispossession and forced assimilation of Indigenous Americans further reduced tribal land holdings. By the end of the 19th century, the US government opened for settlement millions of acres that had previously been home to resettled Indigenous Americans. The Land Rush of 1889 was one of the most prominent of these rushes, with two million acres being made available for settlement.

For many African American families like the Samuelses, the Land Rush represented a tangible opportunity to escape the exploitative sharecropping system of the post-Reconstruction South. Despite the victory of the Civil War, many Black people in the American South still faced violent racism and systemic disadvantages like extreme poverty. Following the Civil War, thousands of African Americans known as Exodusters left the South seeking economic independence and a refuge from racial violence. Many migrants traveled West, establishing numerous all-Black towns along the frontier. This pursuit of self-determination is the driving force behind the Samuelses’ arduous trek. Their dream of claiming “[their] own acres” and “owing nobody” (11) was shared by thousands of real Black homesteaders who saw the western frontier not as a land of conquest, but as a potential “promised land” where they could build a life of freedom and dignity.