Chapter 8 | Section 2
Background to the Tulsa Race Massacre
During and immediately after World War I race riots took place across the United States. More than half a dozen cities experienced race riots in the summer of 1919 as a result of racial tensions.
Several factors led to these racial tensions across the country and in Oklahoma. African American men served with distinction in World War I, but they fought in segregated units under white command and some even served under French command (which no other American soldiers were permitted to do).
Black veterans hoped their sacrifices would be rewarded when they returned home. Instead, their bravery and service often triggered resentment and hate among whites. After all, if Black men could serve their countries with distinction, would that not contradict the racist assumption that whites were superior to African Americans? In fact, many whites were uncomfortable with Black success in general because it challenged this belief in white superiority. Certainly not all whites felt this way, but it is important to keep this widespread prejudice in mind as we examine increasing racial tensions following the war.
World War I soldier, circa 1914–19. More than 350,000 Black soldiers served in the war, but they often faced discrimination when they returned home.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Ku Klux Klan drum corps, circa 1921–22, in Oklahoma City. During the 1920s, some citizens viewed the KKK as a social or civics organization. The KKK participated in activities such as the drum corps. Their main purpose, however, was to instill fear and inflict violence.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In Oklahoma, the number of All-Black towns continued to decrease, and segregation now prevailed in Oklahoma cities. Racial tension simmered just beneath the surface across Oklahoma, especially as KKK membership skyrocketed in the state. The KKK of the 1920s presented themselves as the great protectors of women and children. At first, some saw the KKK as an organization that helped ordinary citizens, and others saw them as well-meaning vigilantes who sometimes acted outside of the law to make sure that justice was served.
A night gathering of the Ku Klux Klan, Okmulgee, July 4, 1924. The KKK grew in popularity in the first half of the decade, even as it came under attack by Governor Jack Walton. While some viewed the organization in a positive light, the KKK was actually a terrorist organization that engaged in violence.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In truth, they were domestic terrorists, which increasing numbers of Oklahomans came to understand when Governor Walton launched his campaign against them and exposed their horrific crimes. It is true there were instances when the KKK confronted wife-beaters or protected young women from unwanted male advances. It is also true that the KKK frequently terrorized people, destroyed property, and engaged in lynching and other forms of murder.
Thousands of Chinese immigrants came to the American West in the 1800s and worked on railroad construction until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. By the 1890s, a small number of Chinese people moved to Oklahoma Territory and created an underground community in downtown Oklahoma City, where they lived and worked for the next several decades.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The Chinese Underground in Oklahoma City was discovered in 1969 during extensive renovations in the downtown area. It likely housed over one hundred Chinese people in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Chinese immigrants living in this part of the city tried to stay under the radar. They continued their traditional cultural and religious practices as best as they could. Many men worked in restaurants and other places during the day. At night, they ran businesses for the Chinese community. These businesses were housed in basements connected by underground passages where some also lived.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Oklahoma’s comfort with the KKK in the early 1920s was hardly unique. Numerous other states, especially in the Midwest, had large KKK membership. The history of settlement in Oklahoma and the complex nature of law enforcement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made Oklahoma especially vulnerable to vigilante violence, though. One incident of vigilante violence in the state occurred in 1917, when several dozen members of the “Knights of Liberty” ambushed a police caravan containing prisoners. The prisoners were seventeen men convicted of being involved with or sympathetic to the bombing of an oil executive’s home. The Knights of Liberty beat the prisoners before tarring and feathering them. Jail time alone was apparently not enough punishment in their eyes.
Lynching was also not uncommon in Oklahoma, and it often happened without even a pretense of the police trying to stop it. One especially horrific incident, which occurred in Tulsa in 1920, stands out. Roy Belton was a white man who confessed to killing a white cab driver. He later withdrew his confession, but a lynch mob formed outside the courthouse where he was being held and demanded he be turned over to them. The mob succeeded in taking charge of Belton and proceeded to drive him to the location where the cab driver had been murdered. The police followed but did not intervene to stop the lynching of Belton that then happened as over a thousand Tulsans stood watching. Some reports said that the only intervention provided by the police was their direction of traffic when the lynching was over. One noteworthy aspect of this story is that it involved the lynching of a white man. While racial tensions were a growing problem in Tulsa, it is important to remember that not all vigilante violence was race-related or carried out against African Americans. These examples show that Tulsans, and many Oklahomans for that matter, had a degree of comfort with mob violence in general as punishment for crimes, both real and imagined. At the same time, lynchings of Black people happened more frequently than lynchings of white people, and they were part of a campaign of terror against all Black people that worked in combination with legal segregation.
The Tulsa Race Massacre
Greenwood in 1921 before the Tulsa Race Massacre. During this time the Greenwood District or “Black Wall Street” was a prosperous community that attracted visitors and praise from across the country. The intersection at Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, one block north of the Frisco railroad tracks, was the border between Black Tulsa and white Tulsa.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old African American bootblack (shoe shiner) did what for him was a very ordinary thing. He took the elevator to the fourth floor of the Drexel Building in Tulsa so that he could use the bathroom. It was one of the few bathrooms in the white part of Tulsa that African Americans were allowed to use. Seventeen-year-old Sarah Page was the white elevator operator working that day. We do not know what happened on the elevator (one story said he stepped on her foot) or even how well the two knew each other, but what we do know is that Page screamed when they stepped off the elevator, and Rowland ran. A clothing store clerk who worked in the building heard Page scream, saw Rowland run away, and assumed he had attacked her. The store clerk called the police to say that a Black man had assaulted a white girl on the elevator, and then repeated that story over and over again to anyone who would listen. Sarah Page had no plans to press charges. She made no complaint. But the next day, Dick Rowland was arrested by the police and taken to the county courthouse and placed in a jail cell.
Meanwhile, stories and rumors spread rapidly, one more sensational than the next. As talk grew about a white woman being raped by a Black man, so too did calls for an extralegal form of justice (that is, a form not regulated by the law), not unheard of in Tulsa. Local whites began discussing a lynching. That evening, a large number of white men surrounded the courthouse and demanded that Dick Rowland be turned over to them. Sheriff Willard McCullough refused and told them to go home. The white crowd grew larger. Then several carloads of armed African American men, many of whom were veterans, showed up and offered to help the sheriff protect Rowland. McCullough declined their offer and told them to go home. They left, but the white crowd grew to over two thousand.
News reached the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa that the courthouse had been overrun by the lynch mob. Upon hearing this news, around seventy-five armed Black men headed back to the courthouse. News of the courthouse being overrun turned out to be false, but it was too late. The sight of a large number of armed Black men, some wearing their military uniforms, inflamed the white men who surrounded the courthouse. The whites greatly outnumbered the Blacks. A struggle broke out when a white man demanded that a Black man give him his gun. Shots rang out. More followed. The massacre was now underway. Through the night on May 31, violent clashes took place. African Americans were gunned down in the streets. An older African American couple were praying in their home when rioters broke in and executed them as they were kneeling in prayer in their bedroom. Inhumane behavior fueled by rage was on full display. It is impossible to know how many people died that night, but one thing is certain. More would die the next day.
Many of the white rioters were deputized and armed so they could “assist” local police. Others broke into the nearby armory and helped themselves to more guns and ammunition, including machine guns. Many of the African American men who were present when the initial shooting started tried to make their way back to Greenwood in north Tulsa to protect their families, homes, and businesses.
Greenwood in 1921 after the Tulsa Race Massacre. A white mob destroyed over thirty blocks of this bustling community. Surviving Black Tulsans remained resilient, however, and over the next years, they rebuilt the community and many of their homes and businesses.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
A number of Black families fled in the dead of the night, afraid of what might come next. Then things seemed to settle down by around 2:00 a.m. on June 1. For a few brief hours it appeared that the violent attack had subsided. Dick Rowland was safe. The defense of the jail had been successful. The sounds of gunfire diminished. Black Tulsans remained watchful and uneasy, but the quiet before daybreak may have raised their hopes that the worst was over. The worst was not over, though. Sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., survivors said they heard some sort of whistle. And then all hell broke loose.
The Coordinated Attack on Black Tulsa
What may have started as a race riot became a full-blown massacre. White rioters actually used the quiet hours before dawn to organize and recruit more whites to launch an all-out assault on Greenwood. The thriving community known as Black Wall Street would be destroyed within a few hours.
Black Tulsa as it was at the time of the massacre. The area included 1,149 homes and 191 businesses.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
White men went door to door recruiting for the assault, saying that Blacks would attack them if they were not stopped first. Repeatedly, they referenced the alleged rape of Sarah Page, saying “What would you do if it were your daughter or sister?” They emphasized the danger that Blacks posed to the white community, and they used fear and intimidation to grow their numbers into the thousands. They did not just recruit men to engage in violence and destruction, though. They recruited women too. Several eyewitness accounts describe scenarios where once a house or business was believed to have been cleared of its Black occupants, white women with shopping bags moved through the building helping themselves to whatever they could carry. Once their shopping bags were full and they were safely out of harm’s way, the homes and businesses were torched.
On that second day of the massacre, machine guns fired from multiple locations, according to reports. And then the airplanes came, dropping some sort of incendiary devices onto a city already on fire. Many eyewitnesses also recalled gunfire coming from low-flying planes. Black people were gunned down in the streets as they tried to run to safety.
The attack on Black Tulsa. The red arrows and images represent the white mob who invaded Black Tulsa. The blue arrows represent the routes Black citizens took to escape the violence. The green arrows represent a gunfire altercation between Black Tulsans and the National Guard.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
By the time state troops from the National Guard arrived mid-morning on June 1, Greenwood was gone. Thirty-five blocks had been reduced to ashes. Total estimates vary, but approximately 1,256 homes were burned to the ground while another 215 homes were looted. There were 191 businesses, a junior high school, a hospital, and at least 13 churches destroyed. Nearly 10,000 African Americans were left homeless. Governor Robertson finally declared martial law at 11:29 a.m. on June 1. More than 6,000 African Americans were placed in internment camps while white men were disarmed and sent home. In order to be released from the camps, African Americans needed a white person to vouch for them.
White civilians with guns, perhaps those deputized by the Tulsa police, escorting a group of Black Tulsans into a building during the Tulsa Race Massacre. Afterward, authorities set up internment camps for the citizens of Black Tulsa, which they could not easily leave in the days following the massacre.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Some whites in Tulsa risked their lives to hide African Americans during the massacre, or they headed to the camps to secure the release of Black employees and acquaintances. Some whites vouched for African Americans they had never met before. The Red Cross provided food and medical care to the survivors and continued to treat those with the most serious injuries for nearly a year after the massacre ended.
A young Florence Mary Parrish at her typewriter, circa 1921. Florence and her mother, Mary, hid under a bed during the Tulsa Race Massacre until they were forced to run for their lives to escape the violence that engulfed the streets. Mary Parrish worked with the Red Cross to help those impacted. During this time, she interviewed many people about their experiences of the event. She drew from these interviews to write the earliest published account of the massacre.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The state troops did what they could to restore peace and protect African Americans from further violence. E. A. Loupe, a plumber in Greenwood, recalled his initial belief that he and his family would be protected by the Home Guard (a local military force), but then told how members of the Home Guard “joined in with the hoodlums in looting the good citizens’ homes.” In contrast, he described the state troops as being “perfect gentlemen” who “treated us like citizens of real America.”
National Guard troops escorting victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Some of the victims recalled that these federal troops treated them much more kindly than local officers and Home Guards.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
By Sunday, June 5, most of the Blacks who had been placed in internment camps throughout the city had been released. But they had nowhere to go, and nowhere to worship. All the churches in Greenwood had been burned to the ground. And so congregations gathered outside around the ashes for Sunday services and then planned how they would rebuild.
In the years following the Tulsa Race Massacre, African Americans throughout Oklahoma focused on building and maintaining thriving economic and cultural spaces in their communities. This image is from the Black Business League banquet in 1922 in Oklahoma City.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The Cover-Up
Even before the few remaining detainees were released from the internment camps, local leaders in Tulsa worked quickly to cover up what had transpired. No one was charged for the murder or for the destruction that took place. Funerals were forbidden for several days. Bodies were buried quickly, with untold numbers likely placed in mass graves that archeologists are still searching for more than one hundred years later. Photographs were confiscated and destroyed, or hidden for decades. The total number of dead, both Black and white, remains unknown to this day, but it is very likely the case that around three hundred people died in the massacre. The event was called a “riot,” and authorities blamed what happened on African Americans. Among other things, this false accusation allowed insurance companies to refuse to pay for damages to Black property.
Some former residents of Greenwood left Tulsa for good. They moved to other cities in Oklahoma or other parts of the country. No one talked about what happened. In some families, the massacre was a quiet secret whispered from one generation to the next as a cautionary tale among African Americans. Other African American survivors never talked about it again. Most white Tulsans did not discuss it openly. Many white Tulsans born a decade or more after the massacre knew nothing about it at all. Or if they did, they caught only faint whispers and stilted conversations among adults that stopped abruptly when they entered the room.
It would not be until the 1980s and 1990s that Oklahomans, along with the rest of the country, began to learn the awful truth of what happened in Tulsa. Educator and historian Eddie Faye Gates documented the experiences of survivors and over three hundred of their descendants in the Eddie Faye Gates Tulsa Race Massacre Collection at Gilcrease Museum. Learning about the massacre became a required part of the curriculum in K–12 public schools. Debates over reparations continued into the twenty-first century. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma took to the floor of the US Senate numerous times on the anniversary of the massacre to remind his fellow senators and the nation of the importance of remembering the massacre and learning the truth about the terrible tragedy.