When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it joined the union with a constitution that included provisions for racial segregation in public schools and other public institutions. The Jim Crow infrastructure that had been built in other Southern states was imported into Oklahoma from its first days of statehood. Bass Reeves’s commission as a federal deputy ended not because he was old or incapable but because the state structure that replaced the territorial structure had a different racial calculus.
The Muskogee Police Department, where he worked in the last years of his active career, was a different kind of institution than the federal deputy service. It was a city police force, operating under local and state law, in a newly formed state whose racial politics were those of the Jim Crow South. That Bass Reeves could serve in that department at all, in his late sixties and early seventies, speaks to his local reputation and to the specific circumstances of Muskogee — a city with a significant Black population and a tradition of Black civic participation that was not fully suppressed by statehood. But it is not evidence that Oklahoma in 1908 was a hospitable environment for Black Americans in positions of authority. It was not.
## The Freedpeople of Indian Territory
Among the most complicated populations that Bass Reeves encountered in his work were the people known as Indian Freedpeople or Freedmen: the Black people who had been enslaved by the Five Civilized Tribes and who, after the Civil War and the postwar treaties, had been granted varying degrees of citizenship and land rights within the tribal nations.