lesson 7.2.8 i read i who killed black wall street? purpose killed black
TRANSCRIPT
LESSON 7.2.8 I READ I Who Killed Black Wall Street?
PURPOSE The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 serves as Americans of Tulsa in 1921. The fact that today
a major example of the ways in which white it's rarely discussed and remembered outside
communities resented and prevented of Tulsa's black community is a tragedy for the
prosperity in African American communities. rest of us to consider.
Professor Henry Louis Gates. Jr. provides
you with an in depth look at the race riot, ATTACHMENT-------its causes, and its effects. The complete • Who Killed Black Wall Street?
story is one of great tragedy for the African
PROCESS Find the attached article on the Tulsa Riot of 1921
by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. As always,
you should read actively, underlining important
names, places, events, and/or passages as you
go. After finishing the reading, write a brief one
page reflection on what you found to be the most
essential parts of the piece. Your short write up
should include a reflection on how this helps
you answer the first of the essential questions of
this lesson.
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READ ING I Who Killed Black Wallstreet? , - Henry Louis Gates Jr.
'Nab Negro' In a city of 100,000 people, high on oil. "The Drexel
Building was the only place downtown where we
were allowed to use the restroom," Robert Fairchild
Sr. recal led, according to the Tulsa Reparations
Coalition. That was why 19-year-old Dick Rowland
was there. His boss at the white shoeshine parlor
on Main Street had arranged for black employees
like Dick Rowland to use the "colored restroom"
on the top floor of the Drexel. "I shined shoes with
Dick Rowland," Fairchild said. "He was an orphan
and had quit school to take care of himself."
he wondered why it had never "occurred to the
citizens of Tu lsa that any sane person attempting
criminally to assault a woman would have picked
any place in the world rather than an open elevator
in a publ ic building with scores of people within
ca lling distance." But it was too late for cooler heads.
or even facts, to prevail. "The story of the alleged
assault was published Tuesday afternoon [a day
after the incident] by the Tulsa Tribune, one of
the two local newspapers," White added, and its
headline and text were vicious.
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator," the page-
On Monday, May 30, 1921, Rowland entered the one story ran. In it, the Tribune claimed Rowland
Drexel Building and took a chance violating one of had gone by the nickname "Diamond Dick" and that
the unwritten rules of Jim Crow: He rode an elevator he'd "attacked [Page], scratching her hands and
with a white girl - alone. Really, what choice did face and tearing her clothes." More menacing, the
he have? Seventeen-year-old Sarah Page was the paper let the people of Tulsa know exactly
Drexel Building's elevator operator. No one knows
how the two greeted each other, or if they'd met
before. except that minutes later, someone did hear
a scream - a woman's scream. Rowland ran .
Perhaps he should've waited for a crowd to get
onto the lift with him, because in the aftermath
Page claimed Rowland had assaulted her. Not true,
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP,
was quick to clarify in a piece he wrote for The
Nation magazine June 29, 1921: "It was found
afterwards that the boy had stepped by accident
on her foot." To White, it was obvious - and so
where Dick Rowland was after being "charged with
attempting to assault the 17-year-old white
elevator girl ... He will be tried in municipal court
this afternoon on a state charge."
No wonder one black T ulsan remembered the
headline differently: "To Lynch a Negro Tonight,"
as an op-ed in the Tulsa Tribune was titled.
Accusations about black men raping white women
had long been used to justify lynching, an idea
called the "old thread-bare lie" by activist Ida B.
Well -Barnett in her 1892 book, Southern Horror:
Lynch Law in all Its Phases. The same lie received ►
llttp//wv,,rw t/Jeroor. com/who-killed-black-wall-street -7 790897586
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a higher profile in 1915 with the release of D.W.
Griffith 's silent film The Birth of a Nation, which
featured white actors in blackface attacking white
women. On Memorial Day 1921, Dick Rowland had
stepped into more than just an elevator, and more
than one scream would follow.
The First Shot Blacks made up 12 percent of Tulsa's population.
Most resided north of the city in Greenwood,
sometimes called the "Negro Wall Street of
America" because of the number of prominent
citizens (including at least three millionaires,
according to Walter White) who had seen their
fortunes rise as a result of the oil boom. Unwelcome
downtown, except when working, Greenwood
blacks had established their own newspapers,
theaters, cafes, stores and professional offices.
Those in Tulsa who paid attention to the news were
well-aware that a white man had been lynched
out of the county jail a year earlier, the same year
that in Oklahoma City, young African-American
male Claude Chandler had been hanged from a tree
after being dragged out of jail on charges of killing
a police officer. Greenwood blacks feared Rowland
would be next, and so they gathered at the black
owned Tulsa Star to figure out what to do.
Twenty-five or so black men, including veterans
of World War I (which had just ended three
years before), took the ride to Tulsa's downtown,
where, encountering a growing white mob, they
formed a line and marched, with arms, up the
courthouse steps to offer the white police force
help in protecting Rowland. The police refused their
offer, just as they had whites' demands to release
Rowland to the ir brand of ask-no-questions justice.
On the roof, police riflemen stood at the ready.
Below, "cries of let us have the nigger' cou ld be
heard echoing off the walls" (quoted from Scott
Ellsworth 's, "The Tulsa Race Riot," included in Tulsa
Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission
to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 ).
Even though the black visitors returned to their cars,
whites in the mob were enraged by their audacity
and rushed home to get their guns. Others made an
unsuccessful attempt to supply themselves with
ammunition from the National Guard Armory. By
9:30 p.m., there were 2,000 whites crowding the
courthouse, from "curiosity seekers" to "would-be
lynchers," according to Ellsworth.
Back in Greenwood, black Tulsans canceled regular
activities, while another round of men, this time
about 75, decided it was time to head down to the
courthouse. With their guns at the ready, they
wanted to make one thing clear: There was not
going to be any lynching in Tulsa that night.
"Then it happened," Scott Ellsworth writes. "As the
black men were leaving the courthouse for the
second time, a white man approached a tall African
American World War I veteran who was carrying
an army-issue revolver. 'Nigger,' the white man said,
'What are you doing with that pistol?' Tm going to
use it if I need to,' replied the black veteran. 'No, you
give it to me.' like hell I will.' The white man tried
to take the gun away from the veteran, and a shot ►
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rang out. America's worst race riot had begun ." in the projector's glow, he was shot in the head.
Dick Rowland was now almost incidental - in fact, Sti ll another was shot on West Four th and knifed
he was abou t to be in one of the safest places to the po int where a whi te doctor, seeing him
in the city: jail. "writhing," rea lized "it was an impossible situation
to control, that I could be of no help," reports
The Riot Ellsworth. In the Nation, Walter White tried to
It would be impossible, in this limited space, convey the terror that swept north to Greenwood
to recount every horror inflicted on black Tulsans into the next morning, June 1:
through the long night - their businesses,
their properties. their civic and cu ltural centers,
their lives. For those seeking to know more,
I strongly encourage you to read the findings
of the government-sponsored 1921 Tulsa Race
Riot Commission. released in a 188 page-report
in February 2001 . Other indispensable books
include Scott Ellsworth 's Death in a Promised Land:
The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and Alfred Brophy's
Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of
1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconcil iation.
There would be no reconciliation the night of May
31 in Tulsa. After the courthouse gunfight, a dozen
black and white men were dead or wounded.
Outnumbered (it wasn 't even close). the blacks
who'd driven down from Greenwood retreated
through the streets while scores of whites were
mt1e /white} mob, now numbering more than 10,000,
made a mass attack on Little Africa. Machine-guns
were brought into use; eight aeroplanes were
employed to spy on the movements of the Negroes
and according to some were used in bombing the
colored section. All that was lacking to make the
scene a replica of modem 'Christian' warfare was
poison gas. The colored men and women fought
gamely in defense of their homes, but the odds
were too great. According to the statements of
onlookers, men in uniform, either home guards or
ex-service men or both, carried cans of oil into Little
Africa, and, after looting the homes, set fire to them.
One incident White recounted involved a black
doctor, A.C. Jackson:
deputized on the spot by the Tulsa Police Department, Dr. Jackson was worth $100,000; had been described
which now perceived the event as "a Negro uprising." by the Mayo brothers 'the most able Negro surgeon
Even one white who was turned away, a bricklayer in America;· was respected by white and colored
named Laurel Buck, was told, "Get a gun, and get people alike, and was in every sense a good citizen.
busy and try to get a nigger," according to Ellsworth. A mob attacked Dr. Jackson's home. He fought in
A black Tulsan was gunned down running out of
an alley near Younkman's drugstore. Another was
chased into a white movie theater, where, spotted
defense of it, his wife and children and himself An
officer of the home guards who knew Dr. Jackson
came up at that time and assured him that if he
would surrender he would be protected. Th is Dr. ►
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Jackson did. The officer sent him under guard to
Convention Hall, where colored people were being
placed for protection. En route to the hall, disarmed,
Dr. Jackson was shot and killed in cold blood. The
officer who had assured Dr. Jackson of protection
stated to me, 'Dr. Jackson was an able, clean-cut
man. He did only what any red-blooded man would
have done under similar circumstances in
defending his home. Dr. Jackson was murdered
by white ruffians.'
First, the armed whites broke into the black homes
and businesses, forcing the occupants out into
the street, where they were led away at gunpoint
to one of a growing number of internment centers.
Anyone who resisted was shot. Moreover, African
American men in homes where firearms were
discovered met the same fate. Next, the whites
looted the homes and businesses, pocketing small
items, and hauling away larger items either on
foot or by car or truck. Finally, the white rioters
then set the homes and other buildings on fire,
Reading these passages, it's impossible not to recall using torches and oil-soaked rags. House by house,
President Obama's remarks about Trayvon Martin: block by block, the wall of flame crept northward,
It "could've been me" - it could have been us. Really, engulfing the city's black neighborhood.
it could've been anyone during the Tulsa Race Riot,
because at one point, according to Ellsworth, "[a]t
least one white man in an automobile was killed
by a group of whites, who had mistaken him to be
black." In the fog of a riot, as in war, no one is safe
from being profiled.
It continued when the Tulsa police and National
Guard troops arrived in Greenwood on the morning
of June 1 and imposed martial law. Still convinced
blacks were to blame for the riot, the troops focused
their efforts on detaining Greenwood's residents
instead of shielding them from the terror. Estimates
are that close to 4,000 to 6,000 Greenwood
residents (almost half the population) were arrested
and relocated to holding centers throughout the
city, leaving their homes and businesses even more
vulnerable to attack.
The "deadly pattern" was set, Scott Ellsworth
writes:
The Aftermath The last shots in the Tulsa Race Riot were fired
sometime after noon on Tuesday, June 1. In the
aftermath, there were 26 African Americans and 10
whites reported dead, but many who'd lived through
it found the official count dubiously low. Eighty
years later, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission report
determined that some 1,256 homes were burned
in Greenwood, and while an exact count of those
killed could not be established, even the best
evidence pointed to between 75 and 300 killed, with
a ratio of three or four blacks to every one white,
but really it's hard to be precise when so many of
the black victims were buried without dignity -
or even in a pine box. Then there are the families
that fled . Aaron Myers, in his entry on Tulsa in
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and
African American Experience (a reference book
I co-edited with Kwame Anthony Appiah). puts that
number at more than 700 - 700 families displaced
by what followed from an elevator ride gone bad. ►
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So many more questions remained - most of all ,
why?
Visiting Tulsa in the immediate aftermath, Walter
White pointed to three general causes: poor
and working-class whites' resentment of blacks
prospering in Tulsa's oil economy; blacks'
determination to "emancipat[e] themselves from
the old system"; and "rotten political conditions,"
where "in a county of approximately 100,000
population, six out of every one hundred citizens
were under indictment for some sort of crime, with
little likelihood of trial in any of them."
Whites in Tulsa had their own narrative. At least
one, Amy Comstock, in her piece for Survey in
July 1921, agreed that general lawlessness was
a problem in Tulsa, but she located it in Greenwood:
"It was in the sordid and neglected 'Niggertown'
that the crooks found their best hiding place .. .
There, for months past, the bad 'niggers,' the silk
shirted parasites of society, had been collecting
guns and munitions. Tulsa was living on a Vesuvius
that was ready to vomit fire at any time."
The truth was the United States during and after
World War I was suffering an epidemic, not
of influenza, but of race riots. Among the most
notorious were the East St. Louis Riot of 1917
and the Red Summer Riots of 1919 in Chicago,
which, over four days, claimed the lives of two
dozen blacks with hundreds more injured. Scholars,
including Cameron McWhirter, author of Red
Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening
of Black America, have offered many theories about
the causes of these race riots : conflicts over jobs,
whites' fury at the number of black families moving
into their cities, blacks' willingness to push back
against the excesses of Jim Crow and the visible
public presence of black World War I veterans
in uniform.
Justice Shortly after the Tulsa Riot, a grand jury was
convened to examine the incident. Its findings were
summed up in a headline published in the Tulsa
World: "Grand Jury Blames Negroes for Inciting
Race Rioting; Whites Clearly Exonerated," according
to Brophy. Outside the courthouse, blacks knew
different. One, B.F. Johnson, later had this to say,
according to the Tulsa Reparations Coalition: "There
seemed [to] be on the part [of] many white people a
sort of joy in having unrestrained priveleges [sic] in
shooting the negroes ... [W]hat these boys and men
did was because they had hell in their harts [sic]."
Whatever was lurking in Sarah Page's heart, in
September 1921, the most consequential elevator
operator in Tulsa history was a no-show against Dick
Rowland in court - and so his case was tossed. In
an amazing turn of events, Rowland had survived the
riot in jail and now was a free man once again. To
this day, his life - and death - remain a mystery,
so, too, his face, as illustrated by an ongoing debate
about whether "that's him" in the 1921 Booker T.
Washington school yearbook. From what I can tell,
Dick Rowland was last known to have relocated
to Kansas City, where, in my fantasy, he was among
the first to see the young Charlie Parker play the
saxophone.
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The Rebuilding Despite initial promises from Tulsa officials to
rebuild Greenwood, blacks who had lost everything
found no redress from the city or the courts. Of
the more than 100 suits filed in the yea,·s after the
riot, only two went to trial , Brophy reports, and
both plaintiffs lost. Those who sought to rebuild
found their progress slowed by a lack of funds
and new zoning ordinances, while even those home
and business-owners who had insurance learned
their policies contained "riot exclusion" clauses.
Because of the slow pace of progress, a thousand
survivors spent the winter of 1921-1922 living
in tents. The hurricane that had displaced them
was hate.
The Long Memory of Tulsa In 1997, the Oklahoma Commission to Study
the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was formed by
a resolution in the Oklahoma State Legislature.
It was tasked with researching the facts
and making recommendations about possible
reparations. Based on the commission's
findings, the legislature did apologize for the
Tulsa Race Riot but stopped short of providing
more than limited funds for the community. As
As compelling as their case was, however,
a U.S. district court judge granted the defendants'
motion to dismiss because the underlying facts
fell outside the statute of limitations.
Ogletree's team pressed on to the 10th Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals. "The lawyers in Brown v. Board
of Education had to fight a lot of battles and
suffer a lot of losses before they could win," he
told the Harvard Crimson in March 2004. "We're
prepared to fight equally long." Unfortunately, a few
months later, justice in Alexander v. Oklahoma
was denied again, despite the plaintiffs' argument
that the clock should have started with the Tulsa
Race Riot Commission's findings in 2001, not with
the whitewashing that had occurred in the 1920s.
The court disagreed, stating that even if vital
information to the case had been concealed in the
riot's immediate aftermath, those seeking redress
could have pursued it after federal civil rights
legislation had been passed in the 1960s or when
Scott Ellison wrote his history of the riot in 1982.
As a result, those like Otis Clark who remembered
living through the riot would not live to see their
day in court.
a result, in 2003, several hundred victims Thankfully, the story doesn't end there.
and descendants of the Tulsa Riot (including 100
year-old Otis Clark) filed a lawsuit against the The Vigil state, the city and the police department. Charles One tangible result of the commission's findings was
Ogletree, my friend and colleague at the Harvard the creation of John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park,
Law School, led the reparations team with what dedicated in 2010 in honor of the greatest African-
contributor Alfred Brophy described as "immense American historian of his generation, a Tulsa native,
humanity," a "rigorous legal mind" and a fierce
determination to pursue "justice on behalf of
those who cannot fight for themselves" (pdf).
a member of the commission and my dear late friend,
whose father, Buck Colbert Franklin, had performed
heroic service as a lawyer in the immediate ►
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aftermath of the riot. Designed to continue "the
American tradition of erecting memorials based
on tragic events by giving voice to the untold story
of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and the important role
African Ameri cans played in building Oklahoma,"
Reconciliation Park served as an important
gathering place for the community on the evening
of July 16, 2013, after it was announced that
a Florida jury had found Trayvon Martin's killer,
George Zimmerman, not guilty.
President Obama had yet to deliver his remarks
from the White House pressroom on the "set of
experiences and a history that doesn't go away," but
already Tulsans were there at Reconciliation Park
to remember the souls of the long - and recently
- departed. In the words of one attendee, Geoff
Woodson, "This is something we should do, anyway.
We still have [Interstate] 244 that divides us. We
still have people that don't want to talk about the
1921 [Tulsa] Race Riot. We need to come together.
It's the only way healing can take place."
My intention, in presenting the Colfax Massacre
and the Tulsa Riot the past two weeks, has been
to aid that healing from a place of truth. None of
us but God will ever know what Trayvon Martin
was thinking in his final moments of struggle, or
what those who were marched out of Colfax to
their slaughter said to their butchers or how Dick
Rowland felt when Sarah Page screamed and he
was alone, but we do have a "set of experiences
and a history" of facts with which to contend, and
while the work ahead will be hard, it is necessary
if we are going to change the way people feel when
someone who "fits a profile" steps on an elevator
and isn't accompanied by the Secret Service.
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