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Prologue

The massacre

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is something most Oklahoma citizens would rather forget.

The horror of the holocaust that left Tulsa’s affluent black district burned to the ground is revealed only in the tattered letters, faded postcards, and grainy photos left behind by those who witnessed it. Now, a century later, the lurid details are coming to light—as they did at the first light of dawn for Eldoris McCondichie on the morning of June 1, 1921.

“Get up! Get up!” Eldoris’ mother’s scream pierced the early morning air. “The white people are killing the colored folks!” Surely it was a bad dream. She was only nine.17

It was still dark when the family began to stir. Outside they could hear explosions, tramping footsteps, and the rattle of a wagon bumping down the street with a machine gun mounted on the back. Black men, women, and children were running. Some were heading for the railroad tracks, hoping for safety on the other side, only to be shot dead between the rails.

The Frisco railroad tracks, known as “The Line,” was the demarcation down Tulsa’s Greenwood district that separated the marginalized black families on the north side from their affluent white counterparts on the south side. The black families were desperately trying to reach the south side to escape a hail of gunfire, torches, and turpentine bombs heaved from small airplanes buzzing overhead like viperous insects.18

Eldoris barely had time to throw on a dress and grab her shoes and socks before her father yanked her out the front door.

The family watched speechless, struck mute, almost paralyzed by the otherworldly spectacle unfolding around them. A cloud of smoke became more intense. A Greenwood man ran across the alley and was cut down by a shotgun blast. Black people by the hundreds were running down the railroad tracks, running and running, desperately trying to escape the horrors of the riot. Women and children were running, some women still in their nightgowns holding their crying children’s hands and dragging them along.19

Others in Greenwood were awakening to the horrific scene unfolding around them. Dr. Andrew Jackson, a successful young black doctor, stepped out of his office door to see roofs of buildings, churches, schools, a hospital, exploding in flames. Flaming turpentine balls were falling on the steps in front of him.

The holocaust began on May 31, 1921. Those who survived would never forget its intensity. But Dr. Jackson never got a chance to remember. Bullets tore into him before he could make it to his home on nearby Standpipe Hill, a landmark in the Greenwood district that had been taken over by an angry mob of vengeful whites..

John Oliphant, a prominent white 73-year-old retired judge, had built a fancy home near the top of Standpipe Hill several years before other black families began to build equally fancy homes. Dr. Jackson was his doctor and a trusted friend. Oliphant woke up that morning to see soldiers from the National Guard and veterans in khaki uniforms lined up along the crest of Sandpipe Hill just south of his home. They fired east toward the black gunmen holed up in the belfry of Mount Zion Baptist Church and inside a nearby high school. 20

“We’re going to make the destruction complete,” one of the men bragged.

Dr. Jackson picked up his bag and rounded the corner of his house, nodding to Oliphant who lived just a few doors down. Seven or eight men with rifles were milling about, some dressed in khaki uniforms, some in civilian clothes.

“Here am I,” Jackson said to them. “Take me.”

Two of the boys raised their rifles.

“Don’t shoot him!” Oliphant yelled. “That’s Dr. Jackson.”

But one of the boys didn’t listen. He fired two shots into Jackson’s chest. When the doctor fell, the second boy stood above him and fired another shot into Jackson’s leg. 21

As the white marauders moved north on June 1, they put a torch to more than 1,115 black homes, five hotels, 31 restaurants, 24 grocery stores, the black hospital, the public library, and a dozen churches, including the community’s most magnificent new edifice, Mount Zion Baptist Church dedicated only two months earlier. The smell of death floated through the streets like a summer fog.

By June 2, 1921, 6,000 Greenwood residents were in custody, having been moved from detainment in McNulty Park and the Convention Hall into pig and cow barns at the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. This gave white gangs the time that they needed to destroy Greenwood, to loot, pillage, and burn. White women and children began to appear among the looters of black homes about the time the National Guard appeared.

Two-slatted cattle trucks inched by in succession, bodies stacked haphazardly, as if whoever put them there was in a hurry. Black arms and legs bounced through the slats with each bump on the road. A dead woman’s legs dangled from the open tailgate of the front truck. Some of the bodies were naked. There were dead children on the trucks, too. A young black boy lay spread-eagle atop the pile of dead on the second truck, dressed neatly as if he had been getting ready for school when the end came.22 The truck bumped over a pothole and the boy’s head rolled. His face showed abject terror as if he had literally been frightened to death. Beside him was an old man with half his skull blown off. These men who had yesterday been fathers, brothers, and husbands protecting their own, were now rotting in the sun.23

Eyewitnesses saw black bodies laid out on the banks of the Arkansas River, some of the bodies dumped into the river itself. Others saw bodies tossed into a west Tulsa town incinerator or dumped in mass graves from the backs of flatbed trucks, their bodies tumbling like rag dolls into the trench.24

The Stanley-McCune funeral home noted that some of the black bodies were riddled with bullet holes or stabbing wounds. Some had been bludgeoned to death with bricks, bars, or whatever other blunt objects the marauders could get their hands on.

When it was over, Greenwood looked like a war zone. Thirty-five square blocks of the black community lay in ruin.

The day before, Greenwood was the utopia of an aspiring, well-to-do African American community that had defied the odds in 1921 America. Years before, white supremacists in Tulsa had relegated black families to the north side of town, calling it “Little Africa,” to keep them poor.

It wasn’t simple hate that motivated so many to destroy Greenwood. The destruction and murder were driven by jealousy and white supremacy. Greenwood was thriving, alive with doctors, lawyers, teachers, and preachers. Prominent black people in Greenwood achieved a level of economic success and self-determination that had never existed before for black Americans in the United States, then less than 60 years removed from slavery.

Previously a listless city of 18,000 souls, a dead and hopeless outlook ahead, Tulsa became Oklahoma’s most vital boomtown when oil was discovered in 1901. The oil rush created instant wealth for many white people, but also for some of the landowning black people with ties to Native tribes who inherited the land.

After statehood, the first bill proposed by the Oklahoma Legislature was Senate Bill One, which initiated the state to the Jim Crow era and subjected Oklahomans to racial segregation and the black community to oppression.

Segregation forced black people into the north side of the Frisco railroad tracks, and the need for community there created economic opportunity. When the district’s first grocery store opened in 1905 at the corner of Greenwood and Archer Street—Black Wall Street was born.25

But white people in south Tulsa called it “niggertown.” Resentment brewed among white people about the rising wealth and confidence of black Americans, not only in Oklahoma but across the United States. Ku Lux Klan membership, fueled by disgruntled Civil War Confederates still embittered by the freed black slaves, had been growing rapidly in boomtown Tulsa.

By 1921, Greenwood had a high school that taught Latin, chemistry, and physics, a three-story hotel with a chandeliered living room, and a silent movie theater accompanied by a live pianist. Greenwood’s most successful entrepreneurs reinvested in the community, building parks and additional housing. Elegant homes lined its most prominent residential avenues.

This caused a bitter resentment on the part of the lower order of whites, who felt that the colored men, members of an “inferior race,” were exceedingly presumptuous in achieving greater economic prosperity than they who were members of a divine order superior race. 26

But in Tulsa, nothing inflamed white people more than what they saw across the railroad tracks in Greenwood—the sturdy, brown-brick businesses along Greenwood Avenue, the fancy homes, the cars, and the gold pieces flashed around even by shoe shiners. There was a basic lack of respect for black people; their status as second-class citizens in the state was accepted by virtually all white folks as “the natural order of things.” In the hierarchy of dark-skinned sins, “uppityness” was second only to defiling white women.

Which is what started it all on that otherwise placid Memorial Day afternoon in 1921.

On May 30, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black shoe shiner known as “Diamond Dick” was working in a whites-only parlor in the Drexel Building on Main Street in downtown Tulsa. Since there were no restrooms for black people in the facility, an arrangement was made for people of color to use the restroom on the top floor. The elevator operator was Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white woman. No one knows exactly what took place in the elevator. Some say the two had a love affair, while others believe Rowland tripped walking into the elevator. In some way, Rowland touched Sarah. By the time the elevator doors reopened, Page was screaming and Rowland was running for his life.

The elevator incident soon became a “full-fledged sexual assault” in the eyes of some whites. A rumor of rape was spread further by a Tulsa Tribune article the next day that claimed that Rowland had tried to tear off Page’s clothes. The news story ran with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” along with an ominous editorial: “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”

Rowland was arrested and locked in the local city jail, where black Tulsa residents feared he might be dragged out and lynched for his alleged crime.

Without pausing to ascertain whether or not the story was true, a mob of embittered whites incited by the Klan were deputized and set forth on a wild rampage. Eventually, their numbers grew to the thousands. Rowland was quickly moved six blocks from the ramshackle city lockup to the country jail on the sixth floor of the courthouse, where the sheriff disabled the elevator fearing that a lynching was about to take place. 27

About 9 o’clock p.m. on May 31st, guards reported that a crowd of white men were gathering near the courthouse and that threats of lynching a negro were being made and negroes in “Little Africa” were arming to prevent it. A small entourage of black men, some of them armed, drove downtown on the evening of May 31 to ensure that Rowland was safe. They found a crowd of hundreds of white men, many of them also armed, outside the courthouse.

Eventually, a black World War I veteran and a white man got into a scuffle over the veteran’s right to wield a weapon. A gunshot rang out, and within minutes Tulsa was at war.

As many as 5,000 armed whites, hundreds of them deputized by the police, descended on Greenwood that night and into the next morning, using a mixture of plundering, coercion, and violence to reassert the racial hierarchy they desired for Tulsa.

The ones who didn’t have weapons soon acquired them. A uniformed police officer shouted, “Get a gun and get a nigger!” And they did.28

For two days beginning on May 31, 1921, the mob set fire to hundreds of black-owned businesses and homes in Greenwood. It is estimated more than 300 black people were killed. More than 10,000 black people were left homeless, and Black Wall Street was left smoldering.

Houses were looted for their valuables, like jewelry, as well as precious memorabilia, like family Bibles. Grand pianos and fine Victorian furnishings were towed or carried out of homes. If the invaders found a home still occupied, they’d sometimes lead residents to a detention center in downtown Tulsa. Other times, they’d murder the occupants.29

Ten Greenwood men firing from the Mount Zion Baptist Church tower never made it out. They died in a hail of gunfire from Standpipe Hill. White men emptied their guns into the bodies of the black men, then kicked the corpses when their guns were empty.

Hell itself could not have been worse.

Survivors talk of how the city was shut down during the riot. The phone systems and the railways were cut, and the Red Cross wasn’t allowed in. Postcards taken during the massacre show burning corpses.

“They tried to kill all the black folks they could see,” a survivor said. “They took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldn’t take.”

There was complicity between the city government, the police, and the mob, and after two nightmarish days in 1921, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history left Black Wall Street burned to the ground.

For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.30

Greenwood aftermath of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

(Courtesy/Special Collecti0ns/McFarlin Library/The University of Tulsa)

The charges against Dick Rowland were eventually dropped. Sarah Page gave a statement to police recanting her assault claim just hours before the shooting started. Rumors said they both moved to Kansas City. In the end, an all-white jury attributed the riot to the black mobs, while noting that law enforcement had failed in preventing the riot.

Tulsans refused to speak of that bloody chapter for decades, keeping it out of history books and personal family histories. Not a single white person was ever charged with a crime. Black people, facing an uncertain path forward in Greenwood, lived in tents on the plots of their former houses. Though the attack initially prompted a wave of outraged articles, it quickly receded from the collective memory.31

Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to machine-gun black families in the streets and bomb them from the air. The violence that destroyed Greenwood and the conditions that led to it are legacies many would rather forget. But Eldoris remembered. Seventy-nine years later, she was one of the few survivors who lived to recount the story.

There’s horror in the history of Greenwood. Nearly a century later, the horror still runs silently through the streets of Tulsa and the halls of the Oklahoma judicial system. The nooses have long since left the trees, but their specters hang like ghosts in the halls of justice.

They’ve stopped lynching blacks in Oklahoma, but they haven’t stopped persecuting them.