ABSTRACT
Picking up his plate of food, my father shoved it in the Black man’s face. Often, I heard this family story about the first time a Black person sat down next to my father at a lunch counter. Sometimes, racism can be the result of a historical thread running through the family and the community. In my father’s family, the historical thread of racism begins in the early 19th century with the purchase of enslaved Africans. In the Choctaw community, racism was condoned by the failure of missionary educators to condemn slavery publicly and their acceptance of slave owners into houses of worship. Racism existed at the Choctaw Academy and academies in Indian Territory that used enslaved Africans to serve students. The powerful force of racism is reflected in the 1840 story, told in chapter 6, of the mixed-blood boy who killed himself after finding out his mother was an enslaved African.
