Right now, it is time for the way Black History Fact. In Today's Way Black History Fact is sponsored by Major Threads for innovative, fashionable sportswear. Check major threads dot com. This comes from ktalnews dot com. And we're going to talk about uh, black owned oil companies. How about that. I might never conceived of the Let's talk about it.
Let's talk about it all right. So his name was Odessa sat Strickland, and in the early nineteen hundreds he invented a device that traced and defined the boundaries of oil and gas deposits. In nineteen forty alone, one hundred and thirty nine out of one hundred and forty of the locations discovered by Strickland's and mention produced oil and gas.
But Strickland his big claim to fame came about because of his involvement, sorry in what many newspapers of the nineteen thirties referred to as the first black owned oil company in the United States. Universal Oil, Gas and Mining Companies headquarters was located at ten fifty one and a half Texas Avenue in Shreeport. Uog MC got its start at the very beginning of the Great Depression, when the company had only twenty dollars left in its entire treasury
after paperwork was filed for the charter. The charter was filed with the Caddo Parish Clerk in October of nineteen thirty. General manager O. S. Strickland grew the corporation until it owned and controlled oil lands, wells, drilling machinery, and carrying lines that were worth more than half a million dollars. In April nineteen thirty one, the company completed its number one J. T. Brown for a daily estimated production of eight thousand barrels. According to the Longview News Journal. The
well was in the PRU survey. By next August, the company amended its charter to increase capitalization to ten thousand shares of ten dollars per value. In nineteen thirty two, three black women were on the board of directors. Fast forward to nineteen thirty seven and four of the nine directors were women. Jail Jones was president. By nineteen thirty seven. Jones had been a beloved educator and principal in Minden. He had been president of the Louisiana Colored Teachers Association.
The company was known to shape and train young black men and turn them into oil engineers and mechanics oil drillers as well, But in nineteen thirty seven oil field workers had to hold their ground when they were shot at by a white mob near Lulling, Texas. By nineteen forty one, Universal had acquired a cable tool drilling rig
that they installed on a well in Kentucky. The rig was destroyed completely in August of nineteen forty the culprit a gas blowout, but in the same year, daily oil production from all Universal wells in Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana
hit three hundred and eighty barrels. A day before his death, Strickland wrote an editorial for Black citizens of Shreveport, quote, it has been our ambition to organize a company that could take in all phases of the oil and mining industry with an exclusive Negro personnel, and employ men and women to operate every phase of the business in which
we have been considerably successful. For we have Negro drillers, lease operators, field agents, and geologists and engineers, all of whom are negroes and trained in their particular line of work. Strickland was writing on the subject of World War two and the oil industry quote. We pledged to do our bid for the safety and protection of our country, he promised. He died on September sixteenth the same year and was
buried in the Shepherd Street Cemetery in Minden, Louisiana. Now where we move on, I want to say something times very different and to have an exclusive black, exclusively black roster of employees was a remarkable feat because many of these people could not be educated to that point at the time normally, so for them to be independent and successful without relying on white folks was a badge of honor,
especially back then. Nowadays, a lot of people would say that that's reverse racism or something like that, but I wanted to have its proper historical context that at the time that was quite accomplishment. So shout out to them.