Who were the United Socialists: The Black anarchist squatters you’ve never heard of

For a brief moment, newspapers across the country spread word of a “secret society” of “Negro fanatics” called the United Socialists. Police, journalists, and ordinary settlers didn’t know what to make of them. Were they revolutionaries, a religious cult, or a swindling scheme? A scattered historical record suggests that they were an unusual kind of messianic movement, one that drew from the spiritual practices and political contradictions of poor Black people in the American West. In the process, they defiantly challenged the logic of political sovereignty and land ownership that shaped Western expansion. Their ideology consisted of two basic tenets: The group could “seize any property and occupy it,” and “the United States had no authority to interfere.”

The origin story of the United Socialists can be pieced together primarily from newspaper accounts. They were rumored to have chapters across the eastern side of modern-day Oklahoma, but the group was based in the Muscogee (or Creek) Nation’s area of relocation. They were powerful in their own right. Although a White-led socialist movement flourished in the region, the United Socialists “had no direct connection” to any established party.