Jesse Franklin (1817-1882)

January 30, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Gary Zellar

Oklahoma counties

Oklahoma counties

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Jesse Franklin was an influential African Creek politician and minister who lived in the Creek Agency settlement in the years after the Civil War. Franklin was born about 1817 as a slave in the Creek Nation in Alabama. He emigrated to the Indian Territory in the 1830s as part of the Creek removal.

Details of Franklin’s early life are sketchy, but after the Civil War he emerged as a leader and minister in the African Creek community. He served several terms as a representative from Canadian Colored Town in the Creek House of Warriors during the early years of the Creek constitutional government (1867-1875).

In 1874 Franklin was appointed by the Creek Council to the Creek Supreme Court, the first African Creek appointed to the Court. Franklin was also active in African Creek Baptist Church and served as a delegate to the Freedmen’s Baptist Association for the Indian Territory.  Franklin died in 1882 and is buried at the Creek Agency cemetery outside of Muskogee, Oklahoma.

About the Author

Author Profile

Gary Zellar received both his B.A. and M.A. in history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He did his doctoral work in the Race and Ethnicity of the American West under Elliott West at the University of Arkansas, and worked closely with Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., one of the pioneers in the study of African-Indian relations at the Native American Press Archives at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. His dissertation, “‘If I Ain’t One, You Won’t Find Another One Here:’ Race, Identity, Citizenship and Land: The African Creek Experience in the Indian Territory, 1830-1910,” won both the Oklahoma Historical Society’s 2004 award for the best dissertation and the Phi Alpha Theta /Westerners International award for the best dissertation in History of the American West for 2004. His African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation was published by the University of Oklahoma in 2007. In addition, Zellar has published several articles and given numerous presentations dealing with the history of the estelvste. He is currently teaching as an adjunct history instructor for Montgomery College and Angelina College in Texas and is at work on a manuscript dealing with the Civil War in the Indian Territory.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Zellar, G. (2007, January 30). Jesse Franklin (1817-1882). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/franklin-jesse-1817-1882/

Source of the Author's Information:

Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); “Occupying the Middle Ground: African Creeks in the First Indian Home Guard Regiment, 1862-1865.” Chronicles of Oklahoma Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring 1998), 48-71.

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