Sarah Rector

Sarah Rector was born in 1902 near the all-black town of Taft, located in Indian Territory, which became the eastern portion of Oklahoma.^[2] She had five siblings. Her parents were Rose McQueen and husband Joseph Rector (both born 1881),^[7] who were the Black grandchildren of Creek Indians before the Civil War,^[8] and were descendants of the Muscogee Creek Nation after the Treaty of 1866. As such, they and their descendants were listed as Freedmen on the Dawes Rolls, by which they were entitled to land allotments under the Treaty of 1866 made by the United States with the Five Civilized Tribes.^[9]

Sarah's father Joseph was the son of John Rector, a Creek Freedman.^[10] John Rector's father, Benjamin McQueen, was enslaved by Reilly Grayson, who was a Creek Indian. John Rector's mother Mollie McQueen was enslaved by the Muscogee Opothleyahola, who fought in the Seminole Wars and split with the tribe, moving his followers to Kansas. Sarah Rector was allotted 159.14 acres (64 hectares).^[11] This was a mandatory step in the process of integration of the Indian Territory with Oklahoma Territory to form what is now the State of Oklahoma.^[12][13]

The parcel allotted to Sarah Rector was located in Glenpool, 60 miles (97 km) from where she and her family lived. Its infertile soil was considered unsuitable for farming, with better land being reserved for white settlers and members of the tribe. The family lived simply but not in poverty; however, the $30 (equivalent to $1,000 in 2023) annual property tax on Sarah's parcel was such a burden that her father petitioned the Muskogee County Court to sell the land. His petition was denied because of certain restrictions placed on the land, so he was required to continue paying the taxes.^[14]

To help cover this expense, in February 1911, Joseph Rector leased Sarah's parcel to the Standard Oil Company. In 1913, the independent oil driller B.B. Jones built a "gusher" well with a daily yield of 2,500 barrels (400 m³) of oil and US$300 (equivalent to $9,800 in 2023) of income. The law at the time required full-blooded Indians, black adults, and children who were citizens of Indian Territory with significant property and money, to be assigned "well-respected" white guardians.^[15] Thus, as soon as Sarah began to receive this windfall, there was pressure to change her guardianship from her parents to a local white resident and family acquaintance named T.J. (or J.T.) Porter. Her allotment subsequently became part of the Cushing-Drumright Oil Field. In October 1913, she received royalties of $11,567 (equivalent to $357,000 in 2023).^[14]

As news of Rector's wealth spread worldwide, she received requests for loans, money gifts, and marriage proposals, though she was only 11 years old.^[14] Due to her wealth, in 1913, the Oklahoma Legislature made an effort to have her declared an honorary white, allowing her the benefits of elevated social standing, such as riding in a first-class car on the trains.^[7]

In 1914, an African American journal, The Chicago Defender, began to take an interest in Rector, just as rumors began that she was a white immigrant who was being kept in poverty. The newspaper published an article claiming mismanagement by the white guardians of her estate.^[16] This caused national African American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to become concerned about her welfare.^[7] In June 1914, a special agent for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), James C. Waters Jr., sent a memo to Du Bois regarding her situation. Waters had been corresponding with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Children's Bureau over concerns regarding the mismanagement of Rector's estate. He wrote of her white financial guardian: "Is it not possible to have her cared for in a decent manner and by people of her own race, instead of by a member of a race which would deny her and her kind the treatment accorded a good yard dog?"^{[citation needed]}

This prompted Du Bois to establish the Children's Department of the NAACP, which investigated claims of white guardians who were suspected of depriving black children of their land and wealth. Washington also intervened to help the Rector family.^[2] In October of that year, she was enrolled in the Children's School, a boarding school at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, headed by Washington. Upon graduation, she attended the Institute.^[7]

Rector was already a millionaire by the time she had turned 18 in 1920. She owned stocks, bonds, a boarding house, businesses, and a 2,000-acre (810 ha) piece of prime river bottomland. At that time, she left Tuskegee and, with her entire family, moved to Kansas City, Missouri. She purchased a house on 12th Street.^[17]

Soon after moving to Kansas City, when she was 17 or 18, she married local businessman Kenneth Campbell in 1920.^[4] The wedding was a very private affair with only her mother and Campbell's paternal grandmother present. The couple had three sons, Kenneth (born 1925), Leonard (born 1926), and Clarence (born 1929), and they divorced in 1930.^[7] In 1934, she married restaurant owner William Crawford.^[4][18]

Rector enjoyed her wealth, with a comfortable life and a taste for fine clothing and cars. She hosted lavish parties and entertained celebrities such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington.^[19]

She lost most of her wealth during the Great Depression and had to sell the house.^[20] It became known as the Rector House, purchased in the 2010s by United Inner City Services, the neighboring nonprofit organization with the intention of restoration and historical and cultural preservation.^[17]

Sarah Rector was a Black Creek woman who, because of her status as a "freedman" was provided with a 160-acre land allotment in Cushing Field at the age of 10 years old.^[21] This allotment would soon prove highly profitable, resulting in Rector becoming known as "'The Richest Colored Girl in the World'" because of the royalties she collected from the Prairie Oil and Gas Company.^[22] Due to Rector's status as a minor, guardianship of this land and its royalties was overseen by Rector's father; however, once the royalties grew to a certain size, it was deemed necessary for a white man to "oversee the girl's finances."^[23]

Sarah Rector's story has been highlighted for numerous reasons – as a post-Civil War symbol of the Black wealth that resulted in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the destruction of "'Black Wall Street'", as another example of racially driven abuse of power by the U.S. federal government.^[24] However, this article attempts to illuminate this narrative as an extension of Boxell's work to reveal how Rector's life can also be interpreted as an example of how the abuse and commodification of Native land can be viewed as a contemporary form of cultural genocide. In God's Red Son, Warren presents this image in which land was valued for its crop production and thus could "pay for a new stove or some ready-made clothing from the Sears Roebuck catalog." ^[25] Through this description, it becomes evident that land itself was consumed, becoming both a product and victim of the Second Industrial Revolution and Westward Expansion, the latter of which directed the financial abuse to which Rector was subject. And, while Deloria's God Is Red describes Native land as sacred and as a "permanent fixture in their cultural or religious understanding" in the context of the first Indian Removal, Native land continues to hold the same significance into the twentieth century. Therefore, the profitization of Rector's land was just another example of both forced possession and disregard for the immense value of land in Native culture and ritual, therefore representing another example of cultural genocide. ^[26]

This notion is substantiated further by Ostler's article, "'To Extirpate the Indians': An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes" – which describes how the United States Government encroached upon and stole Native land, again in the context of an earlier century – setting this precedent for the ways in which the abuse of Sarah Rector's land allotment could be viewed as an example of cultural genocide. This idea is understood through the forced appropriation of this land parcel, which also simultaneously disregarded Native sovereignty and tradition of tribal land preservation and celebration. And finally, as Boxell also illuminates, Rector can be viewed as another example of neglect for Native sovereignty and cultural legacy due to the enforcement of systemised racism and sexism against non-White and non-male parties allotted land and thus wealth and power through the imposition of White male guardianship over non-White women, such as Rector. This maintained the legacy of a racialized and sexualized hierarchy within Indigenous communities. As highlighted in Smithers Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal and Sovereignty in Native America, this patriarchal power structure was created and enforced by the U.S. Government, further revealing how Sarah Rector can be viewed as a symbol of the pervasive cultural genocide of Indigenous communities, especially as the abusive practices of oil culture by the U.S. Government and white America hold true in the present day.

She died on July 22, 1967, at the age of 65. She is interred in Blackjack Cemetery in her childhood hometown of Taft.^[27]

Sarah Rector's fight for her oil wealth was adapted into the film Sarah's Oil, shot primarily in Okmulgee, Oklahoma in mid-2024.^[28]

• Osage Indian murders, about oil wealth in Indian Territory