Staking a Claim Review by Charles Johnson: ‘Equal To Anyone’.                           Throughout “Staking a Claim,” financial reporter Jonathan Greenberg presents us with the inspirational saga of a black Oklahoma family whose history inter­sects significantly not only with important civil-r...

A Biography that reads like a novel   The visions of equality and acceptance that had kept hope alive in the slaves before this country’s bloody Civil War diversion widely from the day-to-day reality many of them lived in in the war’s aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of blacks were liberated from physical slavery onl...

Unlikely Oil Magnate He was a militant, a patriot, a African nationalist, and an American capitalist all wrapped in one. Jake Simmons Jr. was his own kind of original, a man whose life begged the descriptions, “self-made man,” “beating the odds,” and “rugged individual.” But as Jonathan Greenberg explains, oilman Simmons...

Black gold: Jake Simmons Jr.’s oil dynasty   ‘How the hell can a black man stay in bed in the morning while white men rule the world? “ This was the guiding principle of Jake Simmons Jr., an Oklahoman who became the most successful African American in the history of the oil industry. Success in the oil fields of Oklahoma...

Staking A Claim: The Story Of Black Indians And Oil In Oklahoma   As there are among the Creeks many persons of African descent, who have no interest in the soil, it is stipulated that hereafter these persons-and their descendants-shall have and enjoy all the privileges of native citizens, including an equal interest in the soil...

Deep Roots of Black History Month   The idea goes back nearly 70 years. In the 1920s while teaching in the Washington DC Carter G Woodson started what was then called Negro History Week.  Woodson, a harvard-trained Pioneer black historian founded the association for the study of negro life and history.  but there was a need fo...