Mixed Race Studies

A Tale of Two Seminole Counties

Indian Voices
August 2013
page 7

Phil Fixico

Some coincidences can’t be ignored, like February the 26th, in both Florida’s and Oklahoma’s Seminole Counties. What does this date and these counties have in common. Trayvon Martin was killed on February 26th, 2012, in Seminole County, Florida. He was born on Feb. 5th, 1995, not in Seminole County, but that, is where his young life would tragically be ended.

My grandfather Pompey Bruner Fixico, on Feb. 14th, 1894, a hundred and one years before Trayvon’s birth, was born in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Eighty-seven years before Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of an armed killer, who felt entitled to take Trayvon’s life, a similar scenario would end Pompey Bruner Fixico’s life on Feb. 26th, 1925, by someone else, who also didn’t hesitate. Pompey was a good deal older than Trayvon, he was 31 yrs. old and a WW1 Vet who had served his country in France during the War. He left a wife and four children, all younger than Trayvon’s 17 years, who by many, would be considered a child in a young man’s body. Pompey’s death took place, not far from the site of the “worst racial violence in American History”, “The Tulsa Race Riot”. The Riot had occurred 4 years earlier in 1921. Pompey Bruner’s (his father was Caesar Bruner) Draft Registration Card lists, his place of employment, in 1917, as the Brady Hotel, in Tulsa, Ok. It was owned by Mr. Tate Brady, the Grand Wizard of Oklahoma’s Ku Klux Klan, in that area. Grand Wizard Brady was reported to have had a hand in the, “Tulsa Race Riot”…

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Indian Voices Creates a Bureau of Black Indian Affairs

Indian Voices
July/August 2011

Rose Davis, Publisher
Indian Voices

At last a true Separate But Equal—For the Good of the People

The Dawes Rolls (a census, used by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] to determine identity of Tribal members and citizens) came into existence in the 1890’s. It was a time of “Separate but Equal” and this “flawed U.S. policy” became the basis for the Full-Blood/By-Blood vs. Freedman (no Indian Blood counted) rating system for Tribal Membership. US Dawes Rolls Enumerators using Separate but Equal techniques left the Freedman with an identity crisis which continues to this day.

The policy of using Separate but Equal data gathering techniques negated the U.S governments requirement in the 1866 treaties that Blacks be treated as equal citizens.

No one other than Phil Fixico has aggressively championed the cause of addressing and reversing this issue. As a Seminole Maroon descendant he has written, lectured, networked and labored exhaustively to bring this issue into the social consciousness. The resulting Bureau of Black Indian Affairs is his “brain child.” He has generously offered the project to the collective consciousness of the Indigenous community and has stated that he will take no part in it’s operation or management. As a networking partner Indian Voices humbly takes on the task of launching the first Bureau of Black Indian Affairs in this July/August 2011 issue…

Read the entire article here.