Whoever labeled this picture now in the collection of the Tulsa
Historical Society was not ashamed to boast about the intent of the riot.
Note: The Tulsa
Race Riot of 1921 was one of the ugliest and largest scale atrocities endured
by a Black community in American
history. In a 16 hour long well-orchestrated
rampage by white mobs supported by police and National Guardsmen, The Greenwood District, the wealthiest Black
community in the United States, was burned to the ground and erased. Anywhere from 50 300 were killed—no one will
ever know exactly, and over 800 were injured while two Black hospitals were
burned to the ground. 6,000 residents
were arrested, detained, and essentially deported from the state. Yet within a year an official silence
descended over the city. No mention was
ever made that it happened. For decades
it was a non-event except in the memory of those who survived. This story first posted here on this date in
2012 starts off with a last survivor.
Otis C. Clark, a last survivor lived to finally tell his story.
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,
2012 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 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.”
The business district of the thriving
Black Greenwood neighborhood. Its prosperity and the airs of the
"uppity niggas" who lived there enraged the Southern and Texas
whites who had also flooded into the oil boom city and was the real cause of
the riot.
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 were
adopted and assimilated into the Cherokee
and other tribes. 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 abandoned 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 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 heroically portrayed 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.
The man known as Dick Rowland and whose accidental brush with a
downtown Tulsa female elevator operator was the excuse for the riot was known
as James Jones when he attended Booker T. Washington High School and is the
tall athlete with the team ball in this yearbook photo.
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 has widely been regarded as a signal for a lynch
mob.
Supposedly liberal newspaper publisher and editor Richard Lloyd Jones
was also a prominent leader of the Tulsa Unitarian church. His editorial
is considered by many historians to be the "signal" for a lynch mob
to march on the courthouse. Shown later in life, he remained for decades
a respected Tulsa community leader and today the airport is named for him.
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, un-opposed 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 National Guard marches Blacks detained to a Bull Pen at a local
sports stadium.
The
city was placed under Martial Law. Many Greenwood residents, like Clark
fled. Others 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. After espousing universal salvation and losing his mega church African American Pentecostal
Bishop Carlton Pearson, his followers, and ministry were invited by Rev. Marlin Lavanhar and the congregation
to bring their New Dimensions ministry
to All Souls.
The
congregation is began considering a move back to the center of Tulsa in 2011
and is planning to occupy a whole city block with a new church and outreach
facilities pending sufficient fundraising.
2021, the congregation’s centennial,
is the target for the move.
The base of the central column at the monument at John Hope Franklin
Park by sculptor Ed Dwight, who was the first African-American astronaut
in history. One of three statues created from photos of the riot can be
seen against a memorial wall.
In
2010 the John Hope Franklin
Reconciliation Park, named for the eminent Black historian, was dedicated in Tulsa near the center of long vanished
Greenwood. It features a dramatic memorial plaza and monument.
As
for the Tulsa Tribune, it remained in
the hands of four generations of the Jones family until it ceased publication
in 1992.
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