Course Syllabus

The Development of Oklahoma's Black Towns

Course Syllabus

Course Readings

Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West.
Shirley Ann Wilson Moore and Quintard Taylor, African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000.
Tricia Martineau Wagner, Black Cowboys of the Old West

Walter Mosley, Devil in A Blue Dress

Bobby Seale, Seize the Time:

Course Description

Traditionally, scholars writing and studying African-American history have focused on the urban areas of the Eastern United States as well as the states of the Old South. Even when the West is covered in traditional African American history courses, the focus is still on the recent African-American experience in cities such as Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Despite this limited focus, the African-American experience in the West is just as old, multi-varied and rich as that in other areas of the country. This course will address the history of African Americans in the West, starting with the experiences of the first Africans who accompanied the first European expeditions in the West and Southwest through the African-American settlements and migrations to the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the development and impact of the “West Coast” experience on African-American culture.     

Course Objectives

This course has the following learning objectives:

• To provide students a broad interpretive understanding of the roles of Africans and African Americans in the exploration and settlement of the West.
• To increase student understanding of the “western” African-American migration.
• To provide students a more “national” perspective on African-American history and the African-American experience. 

Student Responsibilities

Students must attend class on a regular basis. Students who miss more than three classes will have their final grade for the course lowered one letter grade. Students are responsible for completing reading assignments for each class; the instructor will draw questions from the reading assignments for all quizzes. Daily preparation is essential and mandatory for this class; the instructor will assume that all students have completed reading assignments for class discussions. Students must take quizzes, the midterm exam, and the final exam on the dates that they are scheduled. The instructor will not give any make-up exams or quizzes.

Click on the Links below to go to Weekly Readings and Assignments for the Course

Week 1: The Trail of Tears & Early Black Settlement in Indian Territory