Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
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.
PART 1
TRIAL BY FIRE
She left to throw a dirty diaper in the trash.
Then everything changed.
1
Unit #716
IT was a joke among maintenance workers in the run-down apartment complex: “Black people frying chicken with grease, they keep burning down these apartments!” The rag-tag maintenance crew at the Section 8 housing project found it a convenient answer for local fire marshals who never bothered to investigate further.
The aging London Square Apartment complex was a misfit in the midst of a