Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
commit acts of excessive force against inmates whenever and wherever they chose without meaningful consequences. Oklahoma state prison officials refused to testify at the hearing.14 15
“We send people to prison and we punish them for what they’ve done,” said Pottawatomie/Lincoln County District Attorney Richard Smothermon, who prosecuted the case against Mabel Bassett. “But that should not include being victimized, raped, abused by other people behind bars or prison guards.” 16
Women are the fastest-growing correctional population in the country. And beyond the headlines, beyond the statistics, beyond the prevalent notion that these women are where they belong, the result isn’t pretty.
You don’t know what it’s like until you creep up to the edge of the swamp and peer into its fetid core.
*
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