NORTH TULSA OKLAHOMA
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Legal Shield
John Hairston
Director
918.262.1472
jhjonathan306@gmail.com jthairston1st.legalshieldassociate.com
USA
100% AMERICAN
I was born in and grew up, K-12, in NORTH TULSA.
After five years in Norman, OK (OU), I returned home to work for about 5 years mostly in retail and as assistant manager at a skating rink before flying the coop (I was homesick the entire 5 years in Norman) and working for the rest of my 20s and nearly all of my 30s in New York and even living in England for a year. On one of my trips home from NY, a taxi driver on the way to Newark (airport) looked in his rear view mirror and told me..."You're the American."
In his African accent, he explained to me that he'd met a lot of people, he'd driven people from all over the world, from all over America, but "your accent," he said, "it's not Black, it's not White, it's AMERICAN.
In those days, I was not given to talking to or smiling in front of strangers, so I'm not sure I did much of either. Today, I'd smile.
american
The Constitution of the United States of America
To be from Oklahoma, makes you pretty likely to be THE AMERICAN. As SMU grad Brian Hoskins pointed out years ago, Oklahoma is set apart from other states by it's clear heritage of Native American nations, Enslaved Africans, Freedmen, and European Immigrants still in the middle of living and breathing history. Dr. Hoskins, who today is a Professor at SMU, revived the history of Oklahoma's ALL-Black Towns, of its Native Nationhood and of its Pioneer settlement leading to statehood in 1907.
How I became American. Hatchers, Harrisons, Tiptons, Clardys, Turrentines, Smiths, Murphys, Scoggins, Pegues.
Harrison and Hatchers were two English families, one elite Slave owners, one ordinary Slave catchers, both mercenaries who beginning in the 1600s arrived in the Americas, began pillaging and burning native towns, killing the adults, kidnapping their children and selling the children into slavery. W. Sloan Harrison, my 4th great-grandfather was, according to Dawes Commission testimony, full-blood Choctaw. By the 1800s he and his young family lived in nations that are today parts of Alabama and Mississippi.
Present-day Choctaw nations are located in Mississipi, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Mound Builders of the Lower Mississippi Valley region lived around 3,400 BCE. Watson Brake ln Louisiana predates Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge. Our ancestors were building here, in our part of the world, 2,000 years before the Hebrew Bible was written.
AMERICA Human settlements in the Americas are believed to have existed, at least, 33,00 years ago.
Our family has been AMERICAN a very long time
WHITE HOUSE
Executive
CONGRESS
Legislative
SUPREME COURT
Judicial
In the 1800s, Harrisons and Hatchers married Africans who were enslaved in America. By the late 1800s, two Harrison daughters married two Hatcher brothers. Ella Harrison and Will Hatcher were my mother's grandparents. One of their daughers, Lula, was my grandmother.
Lula married a Tipton. The Tiptons were a Mexican family who stayed in far northern Mexico after fighting turned it into the Independent Republic of Texas. By 1920, however, Brian Tipton, my grandfather's brother was living much farther north in the Greenwood District of NORTH TULSA. My mother's family followed him there, moved from Bristow, and were living on his property in Greenwood in 1922. (Ironically, Uncle Brian and his wife, Julia, would, into the 1960s, own two other buildings, one their home, the other their restaurant at the corner of Pine and Peoria and one of my dad's brother-in-laws would own a gas station, also at the corner of Pine and Peoria in the 60s.)
AMERICA California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming. Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas are US states, today; some were once entirely Mexican, while parts of others belonged to Mexico.
Our family has been AMERICAN a very long time
Read the literature of or about Oklahoma just after statehood to understand why many families who were Black, Native American or Mexican were identified as and often safer identifying as "Colored" in many parts of the new state.
Project 2025
OKLAHOMA REPUBLICAN PARTY AGENDA
One of 5 Tipton girls, there were six boys, my Mother graduated from Booker T Washington HS in NORTH TuLSA and went to work for ONG and at a dress shop in Utica Square. She would actually marry at least twice before she met and married my Dad who was older and had, himself, been divorced for years before she met him...I think, through family.
Clardy. My father was a Clardy.
The family of Dr. Clardy of Laurens County, South Carolina migrated to the Americas in the 1700s from Scotland. My Dad told me stories that his grandfather told him about his life on the Clardy Plantation. My dad told me, just matter-of-factly while he was driving down to a Clardy Family Reunion in Lockesburg, Arkansas, something I'd never heard, never thought possible...his grandfather's older brother, James, an enslaved African, ran the Clardy Plantation.
My dad made it clear to me that these owners' lives, their families' lives and futures...their legacies were on the line and they wanted the most skilled workers, most trustworthy and talented manages. There were owners who realized productivity rose with leadership who could manage their fields like a well-run small town.
It turns out, people had not just been snatched willy-nilly out of Africa and brought to the 13 original US colonies to work. People were purchsed from areas known for tobacco, cotton, indigo, rice cultivation. Plantations were the corporations of their day and Africans were the machinery, labor force, architects, builders, inventors, experts and profit all rolled into one. And like my great-great Uncle James, in many instances, African men were also the managers of these concerns. Why else would owners spend the equivalent of what today would buy a house or a top of the line Range Rover...for a single SLAVE?
named Lul Mom
When slavery ended in the states in rebellion against the United States, Great-Great Uncle James joined the Union Army.
I have been told various stories. My mother's mother, Lula, either died the year I was born or the year before I was born. I think of her so often that I sometimes think she must have held me, at least, as a baby. My Mom used to tell me that I looked more like Lula than she looked like herself. Not sure how that is possible, but I loved hearing it. Also named Lula, my dad's mother, Lula Turentine Clardy, was Irish and Cherokee.. She was the greatest grandma...so exactly like my dad, kind, gentle and so patient. She lived almost until my senior year at OU.
So, it's ironic or very American/human that I know the absolute least about the Irish Turentines and the Cherokee family of my great-grandmother, Jennie Smith. AI says all Turrentines/Turentines in the US are, likely, descended from two brothers, Alexander and Samuel, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1745 as indentured servants. The brothers were, ironically, trying to escape rising rents, food crises and religious persecution. They were Presbyterians whose freedoms were being eroded by the ruling Anglicans. Their indenture was for four years in payment for their passage to America from Northern Ireland. They moved to North Carolina where political turmoil and poverty greeted them. They both fought in the Revolutionary War and were granted land for their service.
AMERICA Since the 1600s, Harrison, Hatcher, and Clardy families have been working and building the wealth and infrastructure of the United States. For 250 years, we were the wealth. Before, during and since the US Civil War, I am certain our families have fought battles from ancient America up to modern America. Irish soldiers may have made up as much as half of the Continental Army that won our Independence from Britain. Alexander and Samuel Turrentine fought in the Continental Army for North Carolina.
Our family has been AMERICAN a very long time
The American People have paid hundreds of millions of TRILLIONS of dollars for services from, to and for OUR GOVERNMENT.