Race is the most volatile, violent, yet unifying element
in American society. It was the mortar that was used upon
which the structure of the American republic was created.
Equally significant is the fact that race and racial hatred
was the single most important, unspoken yet covert and tacitly
understood ingredient in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential
elections. It was this same racial hatred that fueled the
flames of the most violent instance of racial domestic violence
and repression in the twentieth century. This violent civil
disturbance occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It involved thousands
of whites who invaded and destroyed approximately 35 square
blocks of the Black district called Greenwood. Greenwood
also included an affluent business section known as the
Negro Wall Street. In addition, there are still tens, if
not hundreds of Blacks who are unaccounted for and are presumed
dead lying in unmarked mass graves.
For much of the nineteenth century, Oklahoma was viewed
as something of a haven or a promised land by Black people
seeking to escape the nation’s most odious conditions.
In fact, the historian Scott Ellsworth claims that Native
Americans were the first settlers of the area which was
to become Tulsa. The next racial group to be among the area’s
inhabitants was not whites but Blacks. He states that Black
people were present in the Tulsa area probably throughout
much of the nineteenth century, owned as slaves by the Cherokees
and the Creek Indians. Others arrived with the Choctaw,
the Chickasaw and the Seminoles. After the Civil War and
the coming of Emancipation, Black freedmen remained in the
area and were not without a voice in the local government.
(1)
However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Tulsa became
a boom city in a boom state. Between 1890 and 1920, the
population of the state increased seven and one-half times;
the total population in 1920 was over two million. The vast
majority of these emigrants were white southerners who sought
to establish rigid patterns of racial segregation, manipulate
the judicial system, and if necessary, sustain unprecedented
levels of violence, brutality, and intimidation, as was
occurring in the entire white south. Yet, despite being
faced with these overwhelming odds, Blacks found ways to
resist and circumvent the system. They created parallel
institutions.
Greenwood came into existence
out of necessity when Blacks were forbidden by law to live
or own businesses in the city. They were also expected to
be out of the white section by sundown. This created two
separate cities. The author, Brent Staples, maintains that
by the eve of the riot in 1921, the Black city included
as many as 15,000 people and supported 191 businesses, including
fifteen doctors, two dentists, one chiropractor and three
law offices. Also included were two schools, one hospital
and two Black-owned newspapers, The Tulsa Star and The Oklahoma
Sun. In addition, Black Tulsa had thirteen churches, three
fraternal lodges (Masonic, Knights of Pythias and I.O.O.F.),
two theaters, a public library, several barber shops, four
grocery stores and at least one trade union, the Hop Carriers
Local #199. Their purpose was to serve the Black community.
As Tulsa grew so did Black Tulsa. Thus, the stage was set
for the historic confrontation. Here was Greenwood, a bustling
Black district segregated and proscribed where Black professionals,
businessmen and businesswomen were making a lot of money
in solid brick buildings, but whose very success inspired
dangerous jealousy and resentment among whites. (2)
Brent Staples maintains that the tensions in Tulsa were
part of a national pattern during the World War I era, when
city after city exploded in the worst racial conflicts that
the country had ever seen. Fears of Black independence and
self-determination took a Freudian form: rape hysteria.
In one town after another, racial violence was sparked by
rumors that a so-called Negro had harmed a white woman.
This happened in Washington, Omaha, Kansas City, Knoxville,
Longview, TX and Rosewood, FL. (3)
Staples states that rape hysteria touched down in Tulsa
on the morning of Monday, May 30, 1921 at the Drexel building
on Main Street. The protagonists were a Black shoe-shiner
named Dick Rowland, age 19, and a white elevator operator
named Sarah Page, age 17. The Drexel building was the only
one in the vicinity that allowed Rowland and his co-workers
to use its bathrooms. That morning, Rowland rode up with
Page, used the bathroom, and came down again as he did almost
everyday. When the elevator car reached the lobby, people
allegedly heard Page scream and saw Rowland run from the
scene. No Black man in his right mind would attack a white
woman in a public elevator, in a public building at the
height of rush hour in the busiest city in the state. Later,
Rowland was acquitted when Page refused to press charges,
consequently, he was cleared and all charges were dropped.
(4)
Rowland was arrested and taken to a jail cell atop the Tulsa
County Courthouse. The Tulsa Tribune, whose publisher was
Richard Lloyd Jones, a cousin of Frank Lloyd Wright, had
been raging for weeks against Greenwood, which it regularly
called "Niggertown" and blamed it for all of the
city’s vice and troubles. Jones was a Klan sympathizer
who sought to win a circulation war with thundering morality
and racism. Seizing on the Rowland affair, the editors published
a front-page article and an editorial that bore the headline
"To Lynch Negro Tonight" essentially encouraging
a lynching. Both articles were removed from the paper’s
archives and presumably destroyed before the Tribune went
to microfilm. The riot commission continues to search for
clippings or copies. (5)
Soon after the paper hit the streets, whites began to gather
outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Blacks
in Greenwood were determined not to let the mob get away
with a lynching, and they flocked to the courthouse too.
A shot was fired, then a barrage of gunfire followed, and
Greenwood’s hours were numbered. At first, Blacks
tried to hold their own by firing back. However, they were
overwhelmed by superior numbers, many of whom were part
of the lynch mob that the Tulsa police had deputized, supplied
with weapons, and according to court records instructing
them to in effect "Go out and kill you some damn niggers".
(6)
The mob burst in house after
house, sometimes killing the occupants outright. They often
moved methodically, frequently accompanied by white women
carrying shopping bags for loot (later Black Tulsans would
encounter white people on the streets wearing familiar clothing
and jewelry looted from Black homes), side by side with
armed white men toting gasoline, who set the house on fire
from within. Brent Staples claims the scenes were reminiscent
in the manner of the programs carried out against Jews in
Eastern Europe. The fire bombings, shootings, looting, and
eyewitness reports that airplanes bombing buildings went
on for a day before the National Guard arrived and martial
law was declared. By sundown the next day, thirty-five square
blocks had been reduced to rubble, 1,256 houses and buildings
were gone, and with them the hopes and dreams of a community.
(7)
Ellsworth states that after martial law was declared, violence
generally ceased and some relief began. The Tulsa Race Riot,
the most devastating single incident of racial violence
in the twentieth century was over within twenty-four hours
of its inception. While most rioters returned to their homes,
most of Tulsa’s Black population was imprisoned; over
six thousand on the night of June
1. Eventually, roughly one-half of the city’s Black
population was forcibly interned and given forced labor
assignments. The police were either nowhere to be found
or were busy disarming and interning Blacks. Many Black
Tulsans who were taken as prisoners were rounded up by the
lynch mob. Some of these "arrests" were made by
white women. Not surprisingly, many Blacks fled the city;
some never to return. (8)
Embarrassed, ashamed and intensely humiliated (so they said)
by the horrendous events, the city told the outside world
that it would provide a generous rebuilding fund; however,
they actively discouraged money-raising efforts that had
begun all across the country. The city fund never materialized.
The mayor and the city commission did everything they could
to ensure that Greenwood was never rebuilt. The ashes were
scarcely cooled before the city passed an ordinance that
forbade the building of anything but fireproof structures.
This was a law that was expensive to comply with and would
have kept Greenwood a vacant lot. However, B.C. Franklin
(the father of the great historian John Hope Franklin) and
his colleagues defeated the ordinance in court. Black Tulsans
filed a total of 200 damage claims, but the insurance companies
declined to pay any of them because of a riot-exclusion
clause in the policies, and the city refused any claims
as well. (9)
There were multiple times that the mob did not move as methodical
or efficient as stated above, but reacted randomly in a
diabolical, demonic fashion recording terrifying atrocities.
For example, an elderly Black couple was murdered on their
way home from church. Another senior couple was shot in
the head as they knelt in their home praying. Dr. A.C. Jackson,
named by the Mayo brothers as "the most able Negro
surgeon in America" was murdered by whites, after he
surrendered to one group of whites who had promised him
protection. A white man was mistaken for a Black man and
killed. One Black male was shot in front of the Convention
Hall after he had surrendered. (10)
The exact numbers of people
killed in the riot were never determined. Newspaper accounts,
at this time, varied with some reporting as many as 76 dead.
The city fathers played down the horror and placed the death
toll at 35. However, in 1999, a multi-racial commission
of citizens and historians are trying to determine how many
people were really killed in the riot and whether survivors
are entitled to reparations. The 11-member Tulsa Race Riot
Commission created by the Oklahoma Legislature in 1997,
is looking for mass graves where the bodies of dozens of
Black people were dumped. Based on new interviews and newly-discovered
records, Ellsworth, the riot commission’s historian
is convinced that as many as 300 were killed, ninety percent
of them Black. The commission’s hardest task may be
how to determine who is eligible for reparations and what
those reparations should be.
Staples writes that the case has attracted considerable
interest from legal scholars, like Alfred L. Brophy, a law
professor at Oklahoma City University. Brophy compares the
Greenwood case to that of the Japanese-Americans who had
property confiscated and were placed in internment camps
during World War II, and then waited fifty years before
receiving an official apology from Ronald Reagan in 1988,
along with $1.65 billion in compensation from the Federal
Government. What links Greenwood and the Japanese-Americans
is the fact that the Government permitted the harm that
was committed in both cases. Brophy claims that the city
made the riot worse by deputizing a lynch mob. He argues
that the city backed private citizens with the authority
to arrest almost surely instructed them to kill and quite
likely instructed them to burn Greenwood. Consequently,
the Government is directly responsible for the massacre.
(12)
Finally, DeWayne Wickham recently wrote an article about
the riot in which he laments that Johnnie Cochran, the best
known member of the legal team, has filed a reparations
lawsuit on the behalf of 126 (the commission discovered
many others since 1997) living survivors of the riot. He
is on edge according to Wickham, not because of the merits
of the case, but because of the ages of his clients. The
oldest is 103 and the youngest is 82. "This is really
a just cause, but time isn’t on our side," says
Cochran. The survivor’s legal team is gambling that
it can get the case to a jury before death and the debilitating
effects of old age depletes the ranks of its clients. (13)
Cochran emphasizes, "We have some victims who can look
you in the eyes and say we were there. I hope the other
side doesn’t try to keep this case out of court, until
that’s no longer true." (14)
ENDNOTES
1. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa
Race Riot of 1921, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press,1982. p.12
2. IBID. pp.12-14; Brent Staples, “Unearthing a Riot,”
The New York Times Magazine, December 19, 1999, pp. 64-69
3. Staples, “Unearthing a Riot”, The New York
Times. p.67
4. IBID. p.67
5. IBID. p.67
6. IBID. p.68; Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction,
and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. St. Martin’s Press,
2001 passim.
7. Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land, pp.61-62;
Staples, “Unearthing a Riot”, p. 68.
8. Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land , pp. 61-62; Staples,
“Unearthing a Riot”, p. 68.
9. IBID.
10. Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land pp.59, 61.
11. IBID. pp. 66, 67, 69.
12. Staples, “Unearthing a Riot,” p.65; see
also Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The
Tulsa Riot of 1921. Oxford University Press, 2001;
James Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and
Its Legacy. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
13. DeWayne Wickham, “Tulsa Case is Key Reparations
Test,” USA Today, March 25, 2003.
14. IBID.
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