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
| 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.