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| The White mob was held at bay for a while by Black veterans along the Frisco Railroad Tracks in Tulsa as part their neighborhood behind them was already in flames. Not long after this photo, the defenders were overwhelmed. |
Otis
G. Clark did not quite make it. One of last known survivors and an eyewitness
old enough to remember the two days of horror known as the Tulsa Race Riots died on May 21 in Seattle. He was reputed to be 109 years old.
That would have made
him 18 years old when violence broke out in Oklahoma’s oil boom town on May 31, 1921. A lifelong resident of the Greenwood neighborhood, the thriving
center of a flourishing African-American
community, the young man spent a night of terror dodging rampaging white
mobs and then witnessed his family home being burned to the ground, along with
almost all of the neighborhood.
Clark made it to the
railroad yards with others and hopped a northbound freight to safety and a new
life. It was in interesting life,
too. After drifting around taking all
sort of jobs, he ended in California where he became Joan Crawford’s butler. Then
he turned to preaching and was advertised as The World’s Oldest Evangelist.
Like many traumatized
survivors, Clark seldom spoke of his ordeal until a resurgent Black community in Tulsa began
demanding that the city face its dark past in the 1970’s. Since then he often shared his story and his
powerful eyewitness testimony helped bring the story to new light.
He told Tim Madigan, author of The
Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, “We
had two theaters, two pool halls, hotels, and cafes, and stuff. We had an
amazing little city.”
Greenwood was a
bustling place. In addition to the
amenities mentioned by Clark there were two newspapers, several churches, a
branch library, and a thriving business strip.
Residents of the neighborhood worked in Tulsa business and homes.
In the early days when Oklahoma Territory had been carved out
of the Indian Territory once
promised in perpetuity to tribes relocated there from all over the United States, there had been the kind
of easy going informal meritocracy of the frontier. Black cowboys worked the ranches. Black homesteaders busted the tough prairie
soil. Blacks adopted and assimilated in
the Cherokee and other tribes mixed
freely. Black whores serviced white
customers and visa-versa. Blacks came as
construction laborers and oil field roughnecks.
But in post World War I America racial attitudes
were polarizing and deteriorating rapidly.
The Federal government had
long since abandoned Reconstruction in
the states of the old Confederacy
and had ceased to enforce the Fourteenth
Amendment which promised equal justice before the law and had abandon
enforcement of Civil Rights laws. Jim
Crow reigned across the South and was spreading to border and western
states.
Racial tensions had
heightened during and after World War
I. Labor shortages had empowered
blacks to leave sharecropping and head to big cities for good paying industrial
jobs. The planters and local oligarchs
resented the loss of their semi-chattel.
White workers in northern cities worried that their wages were being
undercut. Horrible race riots had broken
out in Chicago in 1919 where white
gangs rampaged through Black neighborhoods.
Blacks, on the other
hand were feeling more empowered than they had in years. Many placed high hopes that the record of
Black troops in the war, and their service on the home front would earn them
respect and greater freedom. Many of
their leaders had promised them that would be the case.
Returning veterans,
toughened by war, were less likely to meekly submit to indignities. Incidents flared across the country. There was also the beginning of a movement
against the lynch law that was spreading across the South and mostly targeting
blacks.
About the same time D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
opened across the country to ecstatic reviews.
It glorified the defense of outraged southern womanhood from “arrogant
and ignorant” Reconstruction Black politicians and their carpet bagger and scallywag allies
by the and heroically presented Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat with Southern roots screened the movie at the White House and endorsed it. Wilson also systematically dismantled the
last little Federal civil rights enforcement and re-introduced segregation in Federal facilities
nation-wide.
A new version of the
Klan, started as a sham by hustlers looking to peddle sheets, crosses, and
memorabilia spread like wildfire across the nation. It often took deepest roots outside of the
old Confederacy.
By 1921 Tulsa, whose
population had swelled to over 100,000 in the oil boom including many new White
residents from Texas, Louisiana,
Arkansas, and southern Missouri,
was a tinder box ready to explode.
It didn’t take much.
On May 30 Dick Rowland, a Black shoe shiner got
on a downtown elevator and in the process evidently stepped on the foot of the
operator, a White woman named Sarah Page. She let out a yelp of pain or a scream. By afternoon rumors were racing through the
city that Rowland had attacked her. He
was arrested and taken to jail.
The next day the city’s
afternoon newspaper, the Tulsa Tribune not only reported on
Rowland’s arrest, but positively claimed that he had attempted to rape
Page. Going further, an editorial titled
To
Lynch a Negro Tonight. It has
widely been regarded as a signal for a lynch mob.
That might not be too
unexpected of a newspaper that identified itself as Democratic in a town with a big Southern White population. But the Tribune
was owned and edited by Richard
Lloyd Jones, a self-described liberal
crusader. Jones was the son of the
legendary progressive leader of the Western
Unitarian Conference and the Unity movement,
Jenkin Lloyd Jones and an
experienced journalist and former editor of Collier’s and Cosmopolitan
magazines and of the Wisconsin
State Journal in Madison.
That same year Jones was
instrumental in founding All Souls
Unitarian Church in the city.
Despite all of this, he evidently quickly adopted the predominant racial
attitudes of the White population.
Copies of that issue of the Tribune have mysteriously vanished
from the paper’s own archives and from the files of local libraries. They exact wording of the editorial has been
lost. But enough witnesses later
remembered it so that there can be no doubt that it was, indeed, published.
If Jones, or members of his staff, wanted to signal a lynch mob, they
succeeded. A mob began to form outside
the Tulsa County Courthouse at 7:30
and continued to grow in numbers and ferocity through the evening. It demanded that Rowland be handed over for “summary
justice.” Authorities, who had been criticized
for handing over a white youth to a lynch mob eight month earlier, refused.
When word reached the Greenwood neighborhood a group of about 20
veterans armed themselves and proceeded to the courthouse to offer themselves
as deputies to defend the jail. Their
offer was flatly refused. The men
returned to the neighborhood.
The angry mob tried to break into the National Guard Armory to obtain more arms, but was turned back by
Guardsmen. Reports of this filtered back
to Greenwood in a garbled manner and believing that it was the Courthouse being
stormed, a second, larger group of armed volunteers responded to the courthouse
after 10 P.M. They were again turned
down.
As the group attempted to leave, scuffles broke out between them and
the mob. A shot was fired, by whom and
at whom it is not known. A full blown
riot erupted.
The enraged White mob fanned out over the city seeking black targets. Black Veterans held a line for a while along
the railroad tracks. Meanwhile a Black
man was killed in a downtown movie theater, the first known fatality. Any Blacks found on the streets were
attacked. Men in automobiles sprayed
gunfire into Black businesses and homes.
Around midnight fires were set in the Greenwood business district which
rapidly spread as the Fire Department refused
to respond. By morning most of the
neighborhood lay in ashes.
But the worst was not yet over.
Leaders planned an all out systematic military style assault on the
community at dawn as dazed survivors of the fires roamed the streets. The National Guard was mobilized, but rather
than being sent to protect Greenwood, it was dispatched to screen upscale White
neighborhoods from non-existing attacks.
The mob struck at dawn as planned, unopposed by authority. Black defenders were out gunned and quickly
over-run. Untouched areas were put to
the torch. Blacks moving were shot on
sight. A well known local surgeon Dr. A.
C. Jackson tried to surrender, but was summarily
executed on the spot. The mobs spared neither
women nor children when found. There
were reports of gang rapes. And the mob
was heavily armed. At least one machine
gun was used and there were reports of firebombs being hand dropped from a bi-plane.
When out of town
Guardsmen finally arrived at 9:30 in the morning, it was virtually all
over. The entire neighborhood was
smoldering wreckage. More than one
thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of riot
deaths range from fifty to three hundred, virtually all Black, with hundreds
injured.
The city was place
under Marshall Law. Many Greenwood residents, like Clark
fled. Other determined to stay, erecting
shanties and living in tents for more than a year.
Official investigations
resulted in not a single charge being brought against a White man for the
violence. An all-White Grand Jury officially blamed Blacks for
the violence and determined that all actions by Whites were acts of “self-defense.”
Ironically Rowland, the
supposed attacker of a White woman, was found not-guilty on all counts. But the damage was done.
The events of 1921 were
for years expunged from Tulsa’s official memory. A conspiracy of silence and fear settled over
the city that lasted for decades.
As historians began
dredging up the sordid past in the 1980’s pressure began to mount for some kind
of official acknowledgment of what had happened. Finally in 1997 a special State Legislative Commission was formed
to investigate the “incident” and report back with recommendations for
action. The Commission’s report, issued
in 2001, put the blame squarely where it belonged and castigated local and
state authorities at the time not only for ignoring the crisis, but for
actively abetting attacks on the Black community. The report called for reparations to be paid to survivors for losses, similar to the
reparations granted survivors of a similar riot against the Black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. The legislature let the report languish
without action.
The Unitarian Universalist Church of All
Souls, recognizing the historic complicity of one of its leading founders,
joined with the Unitarian Universalist
Church of the Restoration, College
Hill Presbyterian Church, and Metropolitan
Community Church United to attempt to raise at least symbolic
reparations. The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) contributed $20,000. Combined with local donations $28,000 was
made available to the rapidly dwindling numbers of survivors. In addition the UUA gave a $5000 grant to the
churches operating together as the Tulsa
Metropolitan Ministry for continued anti-racism
work.
Today All Souls is the
largest congregation under one roof in the UUA with over 1,500 members. It is noted for its social justice activism. African American Pentecostal Bishop Carlton Pearson his followers after espousing universal salvation and losing his mega
church ministry and were invited by Rev.
Marlin Lavanhar and the congregation to bring their New Dimensions ministry to All Souls.
The congregation is now
considering a move back to the center of Tulsa, planning to occupy a whole city
block with a new church and outreach facilities.
As for the Tulsa Tribune, it remained in the hands
of four generations of the Jones family until it ceased publication in 1992.
