Creek Seminole College (1906-ca. 1925)

April 15, 2007

Creek Seminole College

Courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection (3377.E)|

The Creek Seminole College was officially opened in 1906 in Boley, a black town in Creek Nation, Indian Territory (today Oklahoma). The school’s founder and president was John C. Leftwich, a graduate of Selma University in Alabama. Leftwich built the college on five acres of land donated to him by Lucinda Holloway McCormick, a Creek freedwoman.

President Leftwich was heavily influenced by Booker T. Washington’s career at Hampton and Tuskegee, and made Creek Seminole College an agricultural and manual training school that educated the children of Indians, Freedmen, and African American migrants in “heart, head, and hand.”

The Creek Seminole College was run largely on donations. Although Leftwich traveled across the country soliciting money, the school was often in financial distress. The frequent reports of unpaid teachers, sub par facilities, and cold and hungry students aroused anger among people in Boley, and many people believed that Leftwich improperly handled the school’s funding.

After a tragic fire killed five students in 1912, the College was closed for a few years. By 1916, Leftwich raised enough money to rebuild in Clearview, another black town in Oklahoma. This time the school was opened under the sponsorship of the Baptist church and was renamed Creek Seminole Baptist College. John C. Leftwich was eventually replaced as college president by Reverend Dr. J.M. Young. Creek Seminole Baptist College operated until at the 1920s, but its actual date of closure is unknown.

Author Profile

Melissa Stuckey

Melissa N. Stuckey has been assistant professor of African American history at Elizabeth City State University since 2017. She teaches a variety of courses, including North Carolina African American History and Black Women’s History. Her research interests center on the role of African American institutions in the struggle for Black freedom and civil rights. In 2019, Dr. Stuckey won over $500,000 from the National Park Service and the Institute for Museum and Library Services to help fund the rehabilitation of ECSU’s Rosenwald School building and Principal’s House. The long-term goal is to create within these historic structures an institute to collect, preserve, and share the histories of African American life and educational pursuits in Northeastern North Carolina. She is also leading several local African American history and historic preservation projects in Elizabeth City, in Old Oak Grove Cemetery, and the historic Sheppard Street-Road Street neighborhood that borders ECSU’s campus.

A specialist in early twentieth-century Black activism, she is author of several articles and book chapters, including “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All Black Town,” published in 2017 in the Journal of African American History and “Freedom on Her Own Terms: California M. Taylor and Black Womanhood in Boley, Oklahoma” published in This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma, 1870s to 2010s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). Dr. Stuckey is currently completing her first book, entitled “All Men Up”: Seeking Freedom in the All-Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, which interrogates the black freedom struggle in Oklahoma as it took shape in the state’s largest all-black town.

Committed to engaging the public in important conversations about African American history, Stuckey is also a contributing historian on the NEH-funded “Free and Equal Project” in Beaufort, South Carolina which interprets the story of Reconstruction for national and international audiences and is senior historical consultant to the Coltrane Group, a non-profit organization in Oklahoma committed to helping these towns survive in the 21st century.

Dr. Stuckey earned her Ph.D. from Yale University and her A.B. from Princeton University.

Categories:
African American History Businesses and Institutions

Tags:
20th Century (1900-1999) Education - Historically Black Colleges (HBCU) Institutions-University

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CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Stuckey, M. (2007, April 15). Creek Seminole College (1906-ca. 1925). BlackPast.org. https://new.blackpast.org/african-american-history/creek-seminole-college-1906-1925/

Source of the Author's Information:

Melissa Stuckey, “All Men Up”: Race, Rights and Power in the All Black Town of Boley, Oklahoma, 1903-1939 (Yale University: Ph.D. Dissertation, 2007).