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| Looting and violence in Minneapolis was started by window smashing whites, not Anti-Fascists as they pretended to be but white supremacists organized to ignite the Boogaloo--race war.. |
Donald Trump likes
some very fine people—Proud Boys, White
Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and Klansmen
who are now more or less promoting open
race war in America. The Resident might settle for a civil war with racist overtone if it will save
him from electoral defeat this November and likely criminal charges
to follow. Many of his followers like the tune just fine. Now comes news that the white instigators of violence,
looting, and arson in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, Seattle, and other cities during angry but peaceful protests following George
Floyd’s murder were organized white
nationalists including the Proud Boys. They even have a term for it—the Boogaloo. Maybe it’s time to remind ourselves just exactly what race war looks like.
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 to 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 Oklahoma. 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 was posted here on this date in 2012 starts off with a last survivor.
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| Otis C. Clark, a last survivor of the Tulsa Race Riot 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 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.”
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| 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 American 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.
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| 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 was 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.
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| Whoever labeled this picture now in the collection of the Tulsa
Historical Society was not ashamed to boast about the intent of the riot. |
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
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.
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The National Guard marches Blacks detained to a Bull Pen at a local
sports stadium.
|
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.
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| The Tusa Race Riot memorial |
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.
