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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
** Chosen by Oprah Daily as one of the Best Books to Pick Up in May 2021 ** 'Fast-paced but nuanced ... impeccably researched ... a much-needed book' The Guardian ''[S]o dystopian and apocalyptic that you can hardly believe what you are reading. ... But the story [it] tells is an essential one, with just a glimmer of hope in it. Because of the work of Ellsworth and many others, America is finally staring this appalling chapter of its history in the face. It's not a pretty sight.' Sunday Times A gripping exploration of the worst single incident of racial violence in American history, timed to coincide with its 100th anniversary. On 31 May 1921, in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob of white men and women reduced a prosperous African American community, known as Black Wall Street, to rubble, leaving countless dead and unaccounted for, and thousands of homes and businesses destroyed. But along with the bodies, they buried the secrets of the crime. Scott Ellsworth, a native of Tulsa, became determined to unearth the secrets of his home town. Now, nearly 40 years after his first major historical account of the massacre, Ellsworth returns to the city in search of answers. Along with a prominent African American forensic archaeologist whose family survived the riots, Ellsworth has been tasked with locating and exhuming the mass graves and identifying the victims for the first time. But the investigation is not simply to find graves or bodies - it is a reckoning with one of the darkest chapters of American history. '[A] riveting, painful-to-read account of a mass crime that, to our everlasting shame ... has avoided justice. Ellsworth's book presents us with a clear history of the Tulsa massacre and with that rendering, a chance for atonement ... Readers of this book will fervently hope we take that opportunity.' Washington Post
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Praise for The Ground Breaking
‘This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in an honest grappling with our racial past and with the task of moving forward.’
Kenneth W. Mack, professor of history at Harvard University, professor of law at Harvard Law School, and author of Representing the Race
‘Those who find themselves mystified when America’s white power movement storms the U.S. Capitol in 2021 need to take a good look back at Tulsa, Oklahoma a century ago … [Scott Ellsworth’s] literally ground-breaking research and engaging prose pull us toward the call of justice today.’
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Co-chair, Poor People’s Campaign, and author of The Third Reconstruction
‘Heartbreaking and inspiring.’
Beto O’Rourke
‘Absolutely riveting … Anyone interested in America’s future should read it as a template for the reconciliation that lies ahead.’
Tim Blake Nelson, actor and Tulsa native
‘A brilliant update that recounts the events with the swiftness of an especially grim crime thriller … An essential historical record surrounding heinous events that have yet to be answered with racial justice.’
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘The Ground Breaking will rattle you, and it should. It will move you toward a harder wisdom, and it must.’
Timothy B. Tyson, Senior Research Scholar at Duke University, and author of The Blood of Emmett Till and Blood Done Sign My Name
‘I believe that the path of true racial reconciliation runs through millions of American Whites, whose hearts would be changed if they only knew our history. To those people I would simply say this: Please read this book.’
Tim Madigan, award-winning author of The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
‘Immensely readable and thoroughly engaging, The Ground Breaking is a remarkable blend of history and memoir that could not be more timely and informative. Taut, tense, and meticulously composed, Scott Ellsworth’s elegant narrative is both mesmerizing and enlightening.’
Gilbert King, Pulitzer prizewinning author of Devil in the Grove
vii
For Craig Ryan and Kathy Narramore
Amici veri
CONTENTS
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
The survivors called it the riot.
Sitting at their own kitchen tables, or in front of a television news camera crew, this was the term that they used to describe the horrific events that they endured in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31 and June 1, 1921. Sometimes they would say race riot, but most of the time the one-word version would do. “It was pride that fought the riot, it was pride that rebuilt after the riot,” was how survivor W. D. Williams put it.
Over the years, however, other names have surfaced as well. Some referred to the tragic happenings as a race war. Others called it a disaster, the Tulsa event, or a pogrom. In an interview with a journalist some twenty years ago, I once likened it to an American Kristallnacht. That wasn’t a stretch. Today, the term of choice is massacre, as in the Tulsa race massacre.
All of these terms capture something of what took place. But in truth, none of them can describe it completely. For what happened in one American city during the late spring of 1921 defies easy definition.xii
PROLOGUE
2
The Canes
Friday
July 19, 2019
Noe saw her first.
We had just dropped down to the lower level, with the railroad tracks behind us and the river in front. Pushing our way past the hickory and ash trees and through the knee-high weeds, we had followed the dirt trail down the embankment to a flat ribbon of earth, maybe one hundred yards long and fifteen yards wide. Sheltered by the high branches of the cottonwoods, the narrow shelf of land had a peaceful, almost cathedral-like feel. Tufts of soft grass carpeted the forest floor, while sparrows and chickadees flitted by overhead. Had it not been for the trash and the overbearing smell of the open-air privy, it might not have seemed like a homeless camp at all.
She had heard us coming. Rising up quickly, she was wearing a white shirt and pink shorts, with newish-looking running shoes and quarter socks. Her reddish-brown hair, in a pixie, had been recently cut, while her complexion was clear and her fingernails were clean. She was maybe in her early twenties. But out on the street, someone’s age can be tough to gauge with any degree of accuracy. Later on, I asked Noe, who was 4an outreach worker with the Mental Health Association of Oklahoma, to create a mini-biography of her, one based both on his experience and on what he’d just observed. He thought carefully before he answered. “She hasn’t been out long, but she’s likely been homeless before,” he said. “Probably not addicted to any drugs. Maybe some mental health issues.” Her name was Angel. As we drew near, she lifted the bottom hem of her shirt to show us the handle of the knife stuck into the waistband of her shorts. Above us, you could hear the wind in the treetops.
Angel’s campsite consisted of a piece of blue plastic tarp wrapped in a semicircle around a couple of bushes. Within the perimeter was a relatively new bicycle lying on its side, a Coleman lantern, a pair of rolled-up sleeping bags, and a small pile of clothes and personal items. Nearby, scattered throughout the woods and brush, were other tents, some big enough to stand up in, others sun-bleached castoffs from camping trips taken decades earlier. Most looked either abandoned or unoccupied, but it was hard to know for certain.
From her half-circle home, Angel could look out across the slow-moving waters of the Arkansas River toward the oil refineries on the other side. Sometimes fish would rise in the shallows nearest the bank. Other times, wrens and swallows would arc across the river and then disappear into the trees. High above us, maybe fifty yards downstream, the midmorning traffic rumbled along the I-244 bridge, oblivious to the trio of people and the homeless camp on the forgotten patch of riverbank below. We were less than a mile from the heart of downtown Tulsa—population four hundred thousand, with a metropolitan area of nearly one million—in a city that was proud of its beautiful homes and churches, its Art Deco architecture, and its world-class museums and vibrant music scene. Indeed, that very week, Cardi B and Shawn Mendes would each perform in front of thousands of screaming fans at the BOK Center, a glittery, $196 million arena located less than eight blocks away.5
“You want some packets?” Noe asked her.
Reaching into the day pack slung over his shoulder, he grabbed a handful of quart-size plastic zip bags. Most of them contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, and travel-size containers of lotion and hand sanitizer. Others held bars of soap, breath mints, mini-deodorants. But each and every packet included a pair of socks. “That’s the first thing to go when you’re out on the street,” Noe had told me back at the outreach center. Angel wouldn’t respond at first. Instead she kept looking behind us, her gray-green eyes darting toward the path through the trees that we had come in on. She mumbled something about her partner getting back any minute now. It was obvious that the sudden appearance of two strange men in the nearly deserted homeless camp had made her very nervous. She wouldn’t look either of us in the eye.
But Noe kept on talking. He told her about some of the services available to the homeless, about how they could help her find housing and medical care, and he asked if she needed anything. Eventually, Angel relaxed. She took some packets and some bottles of water. And once she had concluded that I wasn’t a police officer, she turned toward me.
“Just what are you doing here, anyway?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m a historian and …”
I kept on talking. But to myself I thought, Really, where to begin?
Tulsa Police Headquarters
Winter 1973
Around 4:00 a.m.
Inside the break room on the ground floor, a handful of officers unwind after the end of their shifts. Most are recent police academy graduates, young officers who pay their dues by working the fourth shift, which lasts from seven at night until three in the morning. Some have partners, 6but most work alone, one man to a police cruiser, usually either a Plymouth Fury or an AMC Ambassador, monstrous 1970s machines with V-8 engines capable of topping 130 mph. Two-way radios, mounted on the dash, have two frequencies: one for communication with the dispatcher, the other, the “backside,” where officers can talk. But most of the night, you are on your own. It is lonesome work, occasionally dangerous, sometimes stressful, and often boring. Beneath the dash, in a custom-built rack, is a loaded 12-gauge pump shotgun.
The break room, which the officers call the lounge, is a spartan affair. Linoleum floors over concrete slab, cinder block walls painted a shade of municipal beige, fluorescent lights, Formica tables, padded vinyl chairs—“But not very padded,” a former officer told me. There is also a wall of vending machines, humming quietly in the background, which sell pop, candy bars, bags of potato chips, and four-ounce paper cups of instant coffee. “Awful stuff,” the officer added. On this night, some of the men are smoking cigarettes, others are talking quietly, when Sergeant Wayburn J. Cotton enters the room, carrying a cardboard box.
“If you can keep your mouths shut,” he announces, “I’ve got something to show you.”
Fifty-three years old with big hands and bright blue eyes, Cotton was a onetime plasterer’s helper and a student custodian at Central High School before he dropped out in the eleventh grade. Married at nineteen, he’d spent eight months in the army before finally joining the Tulsa police force at age thirty-nine in 1959. Revered by some officers, tolerated by others—“a real dinosaur,” one ex-cop told me—Cotton knows how to command a room, which he now does by setting the box on the table and opening it.
Inside are dozens of fifty-year-old photographs from the city’s notorious race riot of 1921, a much-whispered-about event that, even then, existed in a kind of speculative limbo, one where hard facts were 7difficult to come by. Some people claimed that before it was all over, machine guns had been set up on the rooftops of buildings downtown, that airplanes had bombed Greenwood, the Black part of town, and that dead bodies could be seen floating down the Arkansas River. If you were to conduct a poll, a majority of Tulsans would profess to know little or nothing about it. But for these young police officers sitting in the break room on this night, that is all about to change. Sergeant Cotton tells the officers that a couple of days after the riot, the police chief ordered his patrolmen to go to every photography studio in town and confiscate any photographs they found of the riot, its victims, and its horrific destruction. And here, Sergeant Cotton adds, is what they found.
The officers are astonished.
Here are photographs of death and devastation unlike any that they have ever seen. Whole sections of the city look like Berlin or Frankfurt at the end of World War II. In one snapshot, the lifeless bodies of an entire African American family—father, mother, son, and daughter—have all been draped over a fence, their arms hanging down toward the ground. In another, the corpse of a Black man is being dragged in the street behind an automobile. In the backgrounds of some of the pictures are office buildings and other local landmarks that the men easily recognize. There is no question that the photos are authentic. Here is a Tulsa that none of them had ever imagined before.
There is one photograph, however, that catches the eye of one of the officers. It shows the burial of victims in a trench. The officer, who had graduated from the police academy two years earlier, studies the photograph for a long time. Finally, he turns to Sergeant Cotton. “Hey,” he says, “I think I know where this is.” He then describes the location. The older officer, however, is not pleased. Telling the younger policemen never to mention what they have seen, he then takes the photos away. The box of photographs is never to be seen again.
8But the young officer does not forget what he has seen, and a few days later he drives down to where he thinks the photograph of the burial was taken, an unoccupied patch of land not far from Crosbie Heights, one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in town. Getting out of his car, he can see the slow-moving water in the river in front of him, and he hears the wind rattling in a bone-dry patch of river cane.
Memorandum
June 14, 2002
To: Dr. Scott Ellsworth
From: Dick Warner
Subject: Interview with Robert Patty, former Tulsa policeman
The photograph that Mr. Patty said would interest us was of a trench with bodies in it. He thought he recognized the area and mentioned it to the Sgt. The Sgt. got very tense and took the photographs away and told the officers never to say that they had seen them. Mr. Patty said the tenseness of the Sgt. was not like him. He was always cool, even under fire, but he got really tense when the location was mentioned.
The photograph was very detailed and taken from not too far a distance. Mr. Patty said that the photograph seemed to have been taken from the east looking west and in the early morning. It was taken from a railroad track. To the north (right) was a slope with a railroad track running along the base. The track made a curve to the right around the sloped hill. At the top of the slope were some trucks containing bodies wrapped in sheets or tarpaulins. Bodies were being carried down the slope. About 100 feet from the9base of the slope was a trench running east to west. Bodies were lying in the trench. He estimated there were about twenty-five bodies on the top level and he thought there was one or more levels under that one. The bodies were wrapped in sheets and tarpaulins.
A man with a shovel was throwing a white powder over the bodies which he assumed was lime. An old-style bulldozer was parked next to the trench. The men in the photograph were of two kinds. They were all white. Most of them were in work clothes, but there were several men in slacks and white shirts who were watching. The man who seemed to be in charge was in a white shirt and carrying a shotgun. He had on a black cowboy type hat and a western tie … Several of the men in white shirts were also wearing black cowboy style hats and he could see badges on some of them.
The photograph had the date, June 3, 1921, written on it.
The Canes
Friday
July 19, 2019
“I’m a historian,” I said.
Then, “About a hundred years ago, there had once been a terrible incident here in Tulsa, what some people call the Tulsa race riot or race massacre. A lot of people got killed. And, well, I’m part of the team of folks that’s looking for the bodies. And we think that some of the people might have been buried here. So that’s why I asked Noe to bring me down here.”
What I didn’t add was everything else that people were looking for 10when it came to the events of 1921. Some wanted reparations, some sought reconciliation, others were looking for justice, and some sought to push it all away. It didn’t matter, though. Because the young homeless woman slowly lifted her chin and, for the first time, looked me directly in the eyes.
Then she talked to me like she was talking to a child.
“Well of course,” she said, “there’s bodies buried here.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “How do you know?”
“Because,” she said, “I hear their voices at night.”
BOOK ONE
Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime.
—Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul”12
1
1921
Close your eyes and you can almost hear them.
It’s a Thursday afternoon on a long-ago spring day. In the alleys and on the back porches it is still jacket weather. For even though the dogwoods and redbuds are in bloom, and bursts of sparrows explode out of the trees and bushes, in the shadows there’s a lingering coolness in the air. Only they don’t care. For today is the maids’ day off and they’ve congregated, in twos and threes and fours, to stop and gossip along the sidewalks and storefronts. Gone are their uniforms, the long white aprons and striped dresses and peaked caps. Gone are the mops and the dust rags, the yes ma’ams and the no sirs, and the lye soap, starch, and bluing. In their place are smiles and laughter, felt hats and bobbed hair. Today is a day to exhale.
They aren’t the only ones out and about. Up and down Greenwood Avenue, a small parade of humanity can be seen. There are ditchdiggers and shop owners, a mother with young children, an old man—born a slave—with ancient eyes and an ash-gray beard. Preachers and hustlers, doctors and dishwashers, a newspaper reporter, a uniformed messenger, 14and a deputy sheriff can all be found within a five-block radius. Some are getting off work, others are shopping. From a window up above drifts the sound of a Victrola. Maybe it’s Mamie Smith, the Harlem singing sensation, belting out “Crazy Blues.” Or maybe it’s a rag or a Mozart piano sonata. In a second-floor office in the Williams Building, a dentist carefully sets a burr into his drill. Two doors down, an attorney inks one last contract for the day and hands it to his secretary.
Welcome to Greenwood. Spring, 1921.
We are in Tulsa’s African American district, home to fourteen churches, two schools, a hospital, a post office substation, four hotels, two newspapers, and at least ten thousand residents, with the number swelling each week. A dozen physicians and surgeons live and work in Greenwood, as do lawyers, insurance agents, real estate salesmen, and pharmacists. In the shops you can buy dresses and three-piece suits, straw hats and bench-made shoes, pipe tobacco and household goods, tools and typewriter ribbon, perfume, eyeglasses, and bottles of patent medicine. There are ten tailors, four shoe repair shops, one filling station, and one feed store. Nor does the district lack opportunities for entertainment. The Dixie Theater seats more than a thousand, while the Dreamland has seating for 750. Both offer motion pictures, musical performances, lectures, and vaudeville acts. Nearby are pool halls and speakeasies.
This is no food desert. There are thirty-eight grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stands, and meat markets. Thirty restaurants serve everything from sandwiches and plate lunches to steaks and chops with all the trimmings. There’s the Red Wing Cafe and Kelley’s Lunch Counter, the Waffle House and Doc’s Beanery, as well as a slew of double-named eateries—Bell & Little, Grace & Warren, Hardy & Hardy, Newman & Howard, White & Black, White & Brown, Wright & Davidson—where ditchdiggers and dentists, chauffeurs and custodians all sidle up to the counter and place their orders. Afterward, diners can 15pick up some smokes at the Oquawka Cigar Store, or a bag of sweets or some ice cream at Loula Williams’s confectionery.
It is said that in Greenwood, a dollar bill will change hands a dozen times before it ever leaves the district. But equally important, its residents need not face the indignities heaped upon them at the white-owned shops downtown—the sighs and furrowed brows of the impatient white clerks, the ones who follow you down the aisles, then won’t let you try on clothes beforehand. Here in Deep Greenwood, as the main commercial blocks are called, African American shoppers can purchase clothes at Black-owned stores, drop off their dry cleaning and laundry at Black-owned cleaners, and have their portraits taken in a Black-owned photography studio. Here, there are Black doctors and Black nurses, Black teachers and a Black principal, Black plumbers and Black house carpenters. Whites sneeringly call the district “Little Africa,” or worse.
In Greenwood, there are African American men and women who own stores, hotels, and two-and three-story redbrick office buildings. They pay property taxes, conduct business transactions with buyers and jobbers across the country, and live in newly built homes furnished with mahogany sideboards, cut-glass chandeliers, and carports. Their daughters take piano lessons and learn poise and elocution, while their sons dream of glory on the gridiron or baseball diamond. Women entrepreneurs are far from uncommon. Elizabeth Sawyer and Dora Wells operate their own dressmaking establishments. Other women manage real estate and run their own restaurants and shops.
Armed with grit, gumption, business acumen, hard work, and sometimes a bit of luck, the leading Black merchants of Tulsa have flourished. They read the Bible, newspapers, and novels, go to church on Sunday, and dress for dinner. The white bankers downtown know who they are, as do the shipping clerks and freight agents at the railway terminals. And while the overwhelming majority of African Americans 16in Tulsa live far more modestly, in rented rooms and shacks without running water, for those who have pulled ahead, Greenwood is a wonder, a living and breathing Black edition of the American Dream.
But Greenwood is far more than just a land of fat wallets and bulging coin purses.
It is also a mindset, a bearing, a way of engaging with the world. In an age when people of color are constantly being told that they are lesser beings, here is a community who knows that they are just as good as anyone. Nationally known African American leaders, such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have visited Tulsa to see what all the fuss is about. Jazz bands from Kansas City and Chicago will regularly come to Greenwood to play the latest, genre-busting sounds of a music that is fast capturing the attention of the world. Ideas flourish here as well. In classrooms and living rooms, across shop counters and in columns in the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun, they take root and cross-pollinate, are weighed and debated. There are political clubs, reading circles, and missionary societies. Hemmed in by a white world that values only their labor, Greenwood is an outpost of vitality, achievement, and pride.
The evidence is everywhere.
You can see it in the women who drape themselves in pearls and fur for a show at the Dreamland or the Dixie. It’s there, as well, in the steely gaze and set jaws of the neighborhood’s World War veterans, who gather for reunions on Armistice Day. You can sense it in the comportment of the women and men who run their own businesses. And you can feel it in the presence of independent craftsmen who never, ever have to approach a white man with their hats in their hands. But it is there, as well, in those who take in laundry and scrub floors and wash dishes. For there is a frontier mindset here, an ironclad self-confidence and a can-do spirit. Greenwood isn’t a gift from anyone. It is something they have built. It is their own.17
By five o’clock, most of the merchants are closing up for the day and locking their doors. The maids are long gone, while the last of the shoppers make their final purchases and start to head home. As the shadows lengthen and wheel across Greenwood Avenue, and the afternoon sun glances off the top floor of the Stradford Hotel, there is once again a slight chill in the air. And while they do not know it yet, the people of Greenwood are on a collision course with the unimaginable.
Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 1921.
An African American teenager walks along a downtown sidewalk. His name is Dick Rowland. Nineteen years old, a former football player at Booker T. Washington High School, he lives with his mother, Damie, in Greenwood, but works during the day in a white-owned and-patronized shoeshine parlor located downtown on Main Street. When done correctly, a proper shoeshine takes more skill than meets the eye. Seated on a short-legged wooden stool in front of the thronelike chairs where the customers sit, Rowland will use a stiff horsehair brush and a soft rag to remove any caked-on dirt and grime. Then, with a cotton ball stuck on the end of a twisted length of wire, he will daub edge dressing, ink-black and smelling of alcohol, along the outer edges of the sole and heel. As that dries, he will dip a second rag into a tin of shoe paste and expertly apply it to the uppers, paying special attention to the cracks and creases of well-worn brogans and cap-toe oxfords, and to the delicate drilled patterns on the collars and facings of wing tips. Then he will buff and polish each pair to a glimmering shine.
There are no toilet facilities in the shine parlor for Dick Rowland and the other African American bootblacks. So the white owner has arranged for his employees to use the “Colored” restroom on the top floor of the Drexel Building, a block away on Main Street. This is where Rowland is headed now. To get to the washroom, he must ride the 18elevator located in the back of the building. The elevator is operated by Sarah Page, a white seventeen-year-old who, it is said, is saving her money to attend night school. At the very least, Sarah knows Dick and all the other shoeshiners by sight, as she carries them up to the fourth floor and back down again practically every day.
Only today is not like all the others.
Shortly after Dick enters the Drexel Building, Sarah screams.
And Dick is seen running away.
The police are summoned. Two detectives arrive and speak with Sarah. But they do not appear to be overly concerned. No all-points bulletin is issued, no squads of armed officers are dispatched on a manhunt. For whatever happened or did not happen in the elevator, Sarah Page will not press any charges. A white clerk in Renberg’s, a high-quality clothing store located on the ground floor of the Drexel Building, however, is convinced that he knows just as plain as day what occurred between Rowland and Page. And while he did not actually witness anything, he talks to anyone who will listen.
The next morning, police officers arrive at Damie Rowland’s home in Greenwood.
They don’t stay long.
Dick Rowland is arrested and is taken downtown. He’s booked at police headquarters and then, pending arraignment, is locked inside a jail cell located on the top floor of the county courthouse.
By late afternoon, there is lynch talk on the streets of white Tulsa.
But in Greenwood, there is talk of a different kind. At the Dreamland Theatre, an angry veteran jumps up onstage. “We’re not going to 19let this happen,” he shouts. “We’re going to go downtown and stop this lynching. Close this place down.”
Tuesday evening, May 31, around 7:00.
By now, more than three hundred white men, women, and children are gathered outside the Tulsa County Court House, a handsome Greek Revival edifice located at Sixth Street and Boulder Avenue, along the southern edge of downtown. In the soft spring twilight, with the sky slowly turning pink and gold, they pack the nearby sidewalks and have spilled out into the streets. The women are wearing straw hats and light summer dresses, the men in overalls, suits, or dress shirts and ties. Groups of twos and threes and fours are talking and smoking, some sitting on the grass in the front yards of nearby houses. The mood is light and celebratory, with mockingbirds and chickadees chattering in the nearby oaks and elms. But the crowd is also determined, and expecting action.
Only nine months earlier, a large crowd of whites had gathered on these same streets and sidewalks. They had come to demand the release, into their custody, of a white eighteen-year-old former telephone company worker named Roy Belton, who had been charged with the cold-blooded murder of a white Tulsa taxicab driver. Belton had been arrested and was being held in a jail cell on the top floor of the courthouse when the crowd gathered and pressed its demand. At first, the sheriff refused. “Let the law take its course,” he said. “The electric chair will get him before long.” But it was all a show. When a handful of armed men wearing masks appeared at the courthouse door, the sheriff willingly handed over his prisoner. “We got him, boys! We got him!” the men shouted as they led Belton out of the courthouse. Within a half hour, Roy Belton was lynched a few miles outside town. Tulsa police officers directed traffic.20
“It is my honest opinion,” the police chief was quoted as saying a couple of days later, “that the lynching of Belton will prove of real benefit to Tulsa.” The sheriff agreed, stating that “it shows to the criminal that the men of Tulsa mean business.” So did the Tulsa World, the city’s morning newspaper. “There was not a vestige of the mob spirit in the act of Saturday night,” it argued. “It was citizenship, outraged by government inefficiency and a too tender regard for the professional criminal.”
Now, one year later, they have come for Dick Rowland.
Only there is a new sheriff in Tulsa County, a veteran lawman named Willard McCullough. Fifty-four years old, with whiskey-colored hair, a piercing gaze, and a prominent mustache, McCullough worked as a ranch hand, farmer, general store owner, and teacher before starting a career in law enforcement. He is also made of sterner stuff than his predecessor. Not only does McCullough refuse to hand Rowland over to the crowd—“Let us have the nigger,” they tell him—but he disables the elevators inside the courthouse, blockades the stairwells, and positions six of his deputies, armed with high-powered rifles, on the roof. Despite the fact that the crowd has steadily grown by the hour, McCullough is prepared to defend Rowland. The Tulsa police, meanwhile, are again nowhere to be seen. But a well-known white minister, Reverend Charles Kerr of First Presbyterian Church, arrives on the scene. Mounting the courthouse steps, he exhorts the crowd to go home but is hooted down.
Then, sometime around nine p.m., the crowd suddenly grows quiet. A small caravan of automobiles pulls up in front of the courthouse. From them emerge some two dozen African American men. Many are veterans, and some are wearing their three-year-old army uniforms. The men are armed. Getting out of their cars, they march single file to the courthouse steps, where they are met by McCullough.
We are here to help defend the prisoner, they tell the sheriff.
Get the hell out of here, McCullough replies.21
The Black vets pile back into their cars and leave.
But the effect on the white crowd is electric. As bad as the sheriff’s refusal is to hand over Dick Rowland, the appearance of armed African Americans at the courthouse causes members of the white mob to see red. Some dash home to get their own guns; others, to spread the word of what just happened. Dozens take off for the National Guard armory, a half mile away, in order to get their hands on the Springfield rifles that are stored there. But when they try to break into the armory, they are held at bay by a group of armed guardsmen, who threaten to open fire if anyone makes a move on the building. Only it doesn’t matter. For a dark energy is at work on the streets of Tulsa.
Two hours later, the lynch mob gathered outside the courthouse has swelled to more than two thousand. The mood is now edgier and uglier, and the jokes and the laughter have run dry. Instead, there are questions. What if she was your daughter or your sister? What are we waiting for? But Sheriff McCullough still refuses to hand over Dick Rowland, and his deputies are still on the roof, cradling their rifles in the thick night air. As the courthouse crowd teeters on the brink of taking matters into their own hands, rumors explode across Tulsa like heat lightning.
In Greenwood, anxiety has given way to resolve.
Knots of African American men and women cluster outside the offices of the Tulsa Star, the city’s premier Black newspaper, awaiting news of what’s happening downtown. Some of the men are still wearing their old army uniforms. Many are armed. Inside the newspaper office, Barney Cleaver, deputy sheriff, speaks with McCullough on the phone, monitoring the situation at the courthouse. In the residential districts off Lansing 22and Cincinnati Avenues, in the Addition—an African American residential enclave located along the sides of Standpipe Hill—and out toward Pine Street, nervous parents bring their kids inside and exchange sketchy bits of information with neighbors across the back fence. Not everyone, however, is aware that anything unusual is happening. At a rented hall off of Archer Street, members of the class of 1921 at Booker T. Washington High School are putting up decorations for their prom, to be held later that week. Elsewhere across the district, it is just another late spring evening, with dishes to wash, bedtime stories to read, and lamps to dim.
Then, at around ten p.m., an electrifying piece of news hits Greenwood:
The whites are storming the courthouse.
There is no time to lose. “Come on, boys,” A. J. Smitherman announces. “Let’s go downtown.” In short order, a second caravan is assembled. Only this time it is considerably larger. Now, seventy-five armed African American men have climbed into and onto more than a dozen automobiles, jammed into the seats and riding on the running boards. Some have double-barreled and single-shot shotguns, others hunting rifles, many with pistols. Turning west on Archer, their headlights sweep across the shuttered storefronts as they begin the short drive back downtown, back to the courthouse.
Only the news proves false. The white mob at the courthouse is now bigger and angrier than ever. But, well aware of Sheriff McCullough’s men on the roof, it is also hesitant. No one has made a move yet to storm the building. McCullough and his men are still inside, still holding on, still in control. Once again, the Black vets present themselves to the sheriff, and extend their proposal to help defend the jail. It is an astonishing offer. Now outnumbered more than twenty-five to one by the armed whites outside the courthouse, the African American vets are laying their lives on the line for a Black teenager few if any of them actually knew. Once again, the sheriff sends them away.23
As they are leaving, an older white man approaches one of the vets.
“Nigger, what are you doing with that pistol?”
“I’m going to use it if I need to,” the vet replies.
“No, you give it to me.”
“Like hell I will.”
There is a brief struggle. Then a shot is fired.
Then another, and another, and another.
George H. Miller, a white doctor who was working late in his office in the nearby Unity Building at Fourth and Main, hears the sharp staccato of gunfire and rushes out into the street, where he comes upon a wounded Black man surrounded by a crowd of whites. He tries to reach the man but cannot. “The crowd was getting more and more belligerent,” Dr. Miller will later recall. “The Negro had been shot so many times in the chest, and men from the onlookers were slashing him with knives.” The police do nothing to stop it.
Instead, officers start handing out “Special Deputy” badges and ribbons to members of the lynch mob. Nor is that all. Breaking into Dick Bardon’s sporting goods store and some nearby pawnshops, white Tulsa policemen begin doling out rifles, pistols, shotguns, and boxes of ammunition to members of the lynch mob who gathered at the courthouse. Laurel G. Buck, a white bricklayer who is sworn in as a “Special Deputy,” will later state that a police officer told him to “get a gun and get a nigger.”
Nobody is thinking about Dick Rowland anymore.
On the heels of the outbreak of gunfire at the courthouse, the African American vets fight a retreating battle back to Greenwood, slipping into the district well before midnight. The angry whites who were a part of 24the lynch mob, meanwhile, now have an additional quarry—any African Americans who are seen downtown. Most are janitors, restaurant employees, and others getting off work. Few know anything about the events at the courthouse. One African American woman is gunned down as she runs for safety along Boulder Avenue.
A white civil engineer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate named William Holway is watching a movie inside the Rialto Theatre at Third and Main when someone runs in, shouting about a fight going on outside. “Everyone left that theater on high you know,” Holway will later remember. “We went out the door and looked across the street, and there was Younkman’s drugstore with those big pillars. Just got there when a Negro ran south of the alley across the street. The minute his head showed outside, somebody shot him.” No one helps him. “We stood there for about half an hour watching,” Holway will recall. “He wasn’t quite dead, but he was about to die.”
One block away, in the alley behind the Royal Theatre, a group of white men chase a lone African American man, who bolts through the stage door and rushes inside. “Suddenly he was on the stage in front of the picture screen and blinded by the bright flickering light coming down from the operator’s booth in the balcony,” a white teenager named Choc Phillips will later recall. “After shielding his eyes for a moment, he regained his vision enough to locate the steps leading from the stage down past the orchestra pit to the aisle just as the pursuing men rushed the stage. One of them saw the Negro and yelled, ‘There he is, heading for the aisle.’ As he finished the sentence, a roaring blast from a shotgun dropped the Negro by the end of the orchestra pit.”
The first fires break out at around midnight. Along the southwesternmost edge of the African American district, a group of angry whites smashes the windows of a pair of businesses, the glass shards spilling 25out onto the sidewalk along Archer Street. Then they set the businesses ablaze. When a fire truck arrives from Fire Station No. 2, the white rioters prevent the firemen from turning their hoses on the flames. The arrival of the fire officials and the close proximity of white businesses, however, put a damper on this crowd’s efforts at further arson, at least for now. Besides, they have other things to do.
A little farther up Archer, an elderly Black couple is kneeling inside their home in prayer when armed whites break down the door, walk into the bedroom, place the muzzles of pistols against the back of their heads, and shoot them to death. Gunshots can now be heard elsewhere across Greenwood as well. Just south of the African American district, armed whites pile into coupes and roadsters, their engines revved and running, and head north. With gun barrels bristling out their windows, the cars roar down residential streets in Greenwood, their occupants shooting into the homes on either side of the street, the bullets smashing into windows, doorways, parlors, and children’s bedrooms.
A much larger battle, meanwhile, erupts off Greenwood and Archer, at the foot of Deep Greenwood. From midnight on, armed bands of whites try to sneak across the Frisco and Santa Fe railroad tracks to torch the heart of the African American business district. They rake the Williams Building and the offices of the Oklahoma Sun with gunfire, shattering windowpanes, splintering casings and window frames, and peppering brick and mortar with bullets and buckshot. But when they try to cross the tracks, they are met with fusillade after fusillade of shots fired by African American property owners, armed with shotguns and .30-30s, who had positioned themselves on upper floors in Deep Greenwood’s flagship buildings. “These brave boys of ours,” Mary Parrish will later record, “fought gamely and held back the enemy for hours.”
For many in Greenwood, the gunfire proves to be too unnerving, and a quiet exodus from the city begins by starlight, as hundreds of African American families, mostly on foot, begin to make their way 26toward the countryside north of town. Others decide to ride out the storm, and when the shooting at Greenwood and Archer stops, it appears that they have made the right choice. “Nine p.m. the trouble started,” Tulsa Star editor A. J. Smitherman will later write. “Two a.m. the thing was done.”
Greenwood has survived. Dick Rowland is safe.
It’s over.
But across town, a different story is taking shape.
Word of the initial shootout at the courthouse races across the white neighborhoods on the south side of town. But in the telling, passed by word of mouth as there are no commercial radio stations yet—the first in Oklahoma, WKY, wouldn’t appear until the next year—this is no longer the tale of a lynching that never happened. Instead it becomes both a warning and an appeal to arms. What if it was your sister or daughter? metamorphoses into alarms over a Negro uprising. Shadows and stray sounds metamorphose into Negro gunmen waiting to take over Tulsa, just like the demons in The Birth of a Nation. Worse, there are reports that a trainload of armed Blacks is on its way from Muskogee. The situation is intolerable, and bound only to worsen, goes the thinking. It is time to act.
In all-night cafés and eateries in white neighborhoods, groups of grim-faced men suddenly appear. Pushing past startled waitresses and busboys, they are looking for recruits to take part in an assault on “Little Africa” the next morning. At the intersection of Fifteenth and Boulder, a man jumps on top of a roadster and tells the crowd gathered there to join another group that’s meeting at Second and Lewis. There, by the glow of automobile headlights and kerosene lanterns, perhaps as many as six hundred whites gather to share arms and ammunition and discuss plans for the next day. Again, men jump up onto the hoods of cars and 27shout out instructions. “We are going in at daylight,” one man declares. Another adds, “If any of you have more ammunition than you need, or if what you have doesn’t fit your gun, sing out.” Then comes a third. “Be ready at daybreak,” he tells the crowd, adding, “Nothing can stop us.”
Nor is that all. Sometime during the night, a group of unknown individuals slips into the American Legion post at Second and Main. Working together quietly, they remove the machine gun that is on display there, and haul it seven blocks to the grain elevator just across the tracks from the foot of Greenwood Avenue. And in white neighborhoods across the city, others gather over cups of coffee at kitchen tables, counting off the hours on pocket watches. For the night hasn’t slowed their ardor or dimmed their determination. Instead, it has given them time to plan.
To this day, nobody knows how many there were. Likely in the thousands.
Before dawn on June 1, they have roughly organized themselves into three main groups, each of them now waiting along the railroad lines that separate Tulsa’s white and Black worlds. One group is hunkered down near the Katy Railroad tracks off North Main Street. A second is perched near the Frisco freight depot, where some lie crouching behind overturned baggage carts and neat stacks of oil well supplies. The third, perhaps the largest, is encamped near the Frisco and Santa Fe passenger terminal. They are largely men, but there are women as well as boys, some as young as twelve or thirteen, clutching their own single-shot .22s and breech-loading shotguns. Most are seated, talking quietly. Some are smoking. Across the tracks in Greenwood, you can see the glow from their cigarettes.
Just before sunup, a group of white men in a Franklin touring car pulls up alongside the crowd hunkered down near the Frisco station. 28“What the hell are you waiting for?” one of the riders asks. “Let’s go get ’em.” But no one in the crowd moves, and the Franklin heads off alone. Later that day, the bullet-riddled car, and the bodies of the men inside of it, will be seen off Archer.
At a little after five a.m., just after daybreak, a mysterious kind of siren or whistle can be heard echoing across downtown. “A very peculiar whistle,” James West, a teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, will later remember. “This seemed to have been a signal for a concerted attack.” With it, the whites began to move. At the Frisco station, a lone police inspector, Charles W. Daley, draws his sidearm and threatens to shoot anyone who crosses the tracks, but the crowd ignores him and walks right on by. Gunfire can now be heard again along the edges of the African American district, the pops and cracks of pistol and rifle fire, as well as the deeper roar of shotguns. Only there is a new sound as well. It is the rhythmic blast of the American Legion machine gun, which is now raking the heart of Deep Greenwood from the top floor of the Middle States Milling Company grain elevator.
For Mary Parrish, the time for waiting is over.
Twenty-nine years old, she is a stenographer who earns extra income by teaching evening secretarial classes to young African American women at the Woods Building. Born in Mississippi, she has moved to Tulsa from Rochester, New York, with her husband, a clothes presser and book publisher. While the marriage did not last, Mary has retained full custody of their seven-year-old daughter, Florence Mary, a bright and lively girl who could operate a typewriter all by herself by the time she was three. Mother and daughter live together in a rented room on Greenwood Avenue. Florence Mary, who has her mother’s pretty eyes and delicate chin, sleeps on a duofold, a wood-backed sofa.
29The night before, Parrish rushed home when she ended her class. “After my pupils were gone I immediately began reading a book which I was very anxious to finish,” she would later write, “so did not notice the excitement until a late hour.” But her daughter, who was looking out onto Greenwood Avenue from their apartment window, did.
“Mother, look at the cars full of people.”
“Baby, do not disturb me, I want to read.”
Later that evening, when Florence Mary says that she sees men with guns, Parrish sets down her book. “My little girl and I watched the excited groups from our window until a late hour, when I had her lie down and try to rest while I waited and watched,” Parrish will write, adding that later that night she heard gunfire. “When it dawned on me what was really happening, I took my little girl in my arms, read one or two chapters of Psalms of David and prayed that God would give me courage to stand through it all.” By three o’clock in the morning, Parrish could see that the Midway Hotel had been set on fire. As the night wore on, there was more gunfire. “Yet, seemingly, I could not leave. I walked as one in a horrible dream. By this time my little girl was up and dressed, but I made her lie down.” But when Parrish sees a man get shot and fall, she can wait no longer.
“I took my little girl … by the hand and fled out of the west door on Greenwood,” she will write. For the first couple of blocks, the avenue is largely empty. “Get out of that street with that child or you both will be killed!” someone yells, while behind them they can hear the steady firing of the machine gun that has been set up in the granary across the railroad tracks. Clutching her daughter by her hand, Parrish is trying to reach a friend’s home in the Addition. But as she nears the Addition, her heart sinks into her stomach. “I could see homes on Detroit and Easton burning.” There is also a new danger. Machine gun fire is now coming from the west as well, where the local National 30Guardsmen have positioned themselves. And above their heads, Parrish and Florence Mary can now hear the steady drone of something else.
Airplanes.
Daylight has changed everything.
With the sun now up on June 1, Greenwood’s defenders are no longer facing handfuls of armed whites jacked up on booze, rage, and adrenaline. Instead, looking out from their bedroom and office windows, they witness, for the first time, the nightmare that is about to crash down upon them. A wall of white people is calmly headed their way. Most have guns. Some also carry torchlights and cans of gasoline.
Among the first to go are the businesses off Archer and Cincinnati.
Caver’s French Dry Cleaners goes up in a roiling wave of greasy black smoke, along with Brown’s Restaurant, T. D. Jackson’s barber-shop, Leon Williams’s billiard parlor, and W. L. Anderson’s jewelry store. The Little Pullman Hotel, a two-story brick building, takes longer to ignite. But the whites have brought safety matches and kerosene, and smoke can soon be seen curling up over the roof. Within minutes, Thompson’s Drug Store, Frank and Julia Payne’s tailor shop, and the offices of P. A. Chappelle, attorney-at-law, will all be engulfed in flame. The scene is so dramatic that a passerby with a camera takes a snapshot from across the street. In time the heat will grow so intense that nearby electric power lines also catch fire, their glass insulators shattering on the streets below.
Four blocks to the east, gunfire echoes along the sidewalks and storefronts on Greenwood Avenue. When it subsides, the white crowd from the railroad freight depot pours into the African American commercial 31district, breaking into stores and offices, hotels and apartment buildings, theaters and restaurants. Smashing windows and kicking in doors, they bust open cash registers and lockboxes, rifle through desk and dresser drawers, and paw through closets and counter displays, stealing whatever catches their eyes. By the armload they haul away clothes and household goods, millinery and medical supplies, tools and office equipment. Watches disappear into pockets, as do necklaces and fountain pens. One enterprising group manages to crack open a safe. Others search the handful of automobiles still parked along the avenue. When they are finished, out come the matches and the cigarette lighters. As the white looters walk away, you can hear the glass crunching beneath their bootheels.
Despite the odds, Greenwood valiantly fights back.
While hundreds of African Americans are now streaming out of the city, others stand firm. Shootouts erupt across the street from Booker T. Washington High School, at the brickyard, along Lansing Avenue, and at Pine Street near Peoria. At Mount Zion Baptist Church, a furious firefight erupts as neighbors and parishioners hold back the white mob. But the all-white local National Guardsmen then turn their machine gun on the newly built house of worship, raking the walls with heavy fire and shattering the stained-glass rose window. “Pieces of brick started falling, then whole bricks began tumbling from the narrow slits in the cupola,” an eyewitness will later write. “Within five or six minutes the openings were large jagged holes.” The church is soon a raging inferno, as Bibles and pulpit, choir robes and Communion cups, wooden pews and hymnals go up in thick clouds of smoke. At taxpayer expense, a house of God has been demolished. Only the destruction does not end there. “The men stopped firing the machine gun and almost immediately the houses on the outer rim of the area that had been protected by 32the snipers,” the eyewitness will add, “became victims of the arsonists.” A similar fate awaits Vernon AME, Paradise Baptist, Metropolitan Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, and the Church of God in Christ.
Later that morning, a white woman will come upon First Baptist, on Jackson Avenue. It is still untouched.
“Yonder is a nigger church,” she’ll say to another rioter. “Why ain’t they burning it?”
“It’s in a white district.”
Only that does not matter. In the end, it too will be torched.
In the sky above the city, becoming more audible over the chaos on the streets below, comes the mechanical drone of airplanes. Single-engine aircraft, usually with open cockpits, they are both private and commercial models, most constructed with canvas sheeting stretched over wooden frames. Some seat only the pilot, others the pilot and one passenger. They can be seen and heard over Greenwood from nearly the start of the invasion. When Maria Morales Gutierrez, a recent immigrant from Mexico, sees an airplane bearing down on two young African American children who are walking alone in the street, she runs out, scoops the youngsters into her arms, and carries them inside her home. “Aeroplanes also began to fly over very low,” a teacher will recall. “What they were doing I cannot say.”
Other observers will be far more certain. “More than a dozen aeroplanes went up and began to drop turpentine balls upon the Negro residences,” one witness will later tell a reporter. “I saw aeroplanes, as they flew very low,” another will report. “To my surprise, as they passed over the business district they left the entire block a mass of flame.” Mabel Little, who ran a café with her husband on East Cameron Street, will later write that “airplanes dropped incendiary bombs to enhance 33the burning of Mt. Zion Baptist Church and business buildings.” W. I. Brown, a porter on a Katy Railroad train that will arrive in Tulsa that day, will tell a reporter for an Oklahoma City newspaper, “Two airplanes were doing most of the work. They would every few seconds drop something and every time they did there was a loud explosion and the sky would be filled with flying debris.” Others will report that the planes “showered load after load of leadened missiles upon them.”
Meanwhile, on ground level, the fight is far from finished. And as whites begin pouring into the Black residential areas, a deadly pattern emerges.
First, any African Americans who are still inside their homes are ordered out into the street, where they are led away, at gunpoint, to collection points around town. “Women were being chased from their homes,” one eyewitness will later tell a journalist, “with clothes in their hands, and volleys of shots fired at them as they were fleeing; some with babies in their arms.” According to an account that will be published ten days later in the Chicago Defender, a group of whites “went to the home of an old couple and the old man, 80 years old, was paralyzed and sat in a chair and they told him to march and he told them he was crippled, but he’d go if someone would take him, and they told his wife (old, too) to go, but she didn’t want to leave him, and he told her to go on anyway. As she left one of the damn dogs shot the old man.”
Second comes the looting. “After they had the homes vacated,” one eyewitness will later remember, “one bunch of whites would come in and loot. Even women with shopping bags would come in, open drawers, take every kind of finery from clothing to silverware and jewelry. Men were carrying out the furniture, cursing as they did so, saying ‘These d——Negroes have better than lots of white people.’” Nearby, 34on a hillside, throngs of whites gather to observe. “Women, men and children, even babies, watching and taking snapshots of the proceedings of the mob.” In another neighborhood, an African American man named J. P. Hughs hides in a barrel in a small grove of peach trees near his home and watches what happens. “We had two large trunks which they took into the street and burst open, took what they wanted,” he will recall. On the wealthier blocks, whites begin to use trucks to haul away sideboards, chests of drawers, iceboxes, pianos, and Victrolas.
Finally, when the looting is done, the homes are set on fire. Block after block, street after street, from Archer to north of Pine, the city’s African American district is meticulously destroyed. Tar paper shacks, shanties, and grim rented rooms go up in smoke alongside the residences of merchants, physicians, and hotel owners. “Then the horde of white ruffians went down on Detroit, looting and burning those beautiful homes of everything valuable and then burned them, even breaking the phones from the walls,” one resident will later remember. “The machine guns just shattered the walls of the homes. The fire department came out and protected the White homes on the west side of Detroit Street while on the east side of the street men with torches and women with shopping bags continued their looting and burning of Negro homes, while aeroplanes flew over head, some very low.”
Up in smoke go the Dreamland and the Dixie theaters, the restaurants and the grocery stores, the dress shops and the doctors’ offices, the Stradford and Gurley Hotels, the photography studio and the barber-shops and beauty parlors, the apartment buildings and the newspaper offices, the butcher shops and the cleaners. Booker T. Washington School escapes the rioters’ torches, but Frissell Memorial Hospital does not. And at 429 E. Archer, the two-story wood frame building that houses the Colored Library Branch proves to be too tempting a target for the white mob. On the streets of Tulsa, they are now burning books.35
• • •
There are simply too many whites.
