Death in a Promised Land (18 page)

The political currents flowing through Oklahoma during this period were also important. The decline of a major political organization in the state, the Oklahoma Socialist party, which was at least rhetorically supportive of black rights, and the rapid rise of another, the Ku Klux Klan, which was clearly anti-black, was not without significance. But neither political development explains why the riot happened. Rather, they were indicative of a more basic ideological shift within the state and region. Dallas and Shreveport, for example, were other centers of Klan strength in the Southwest, yet neither of them experienced racial violence on the scale of Tulsa during this period. The nationwide recession of 1921, which severely affected Tulsa, may have also played a role in increasing social tension, but economic woes do not by themselves create racial violence, as the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s revealed.
³

Tulsa’s vice conditions and the nature of its local law enforcement were highly relevant. Five weeks before the riot, in April, 1921, a federal agent visited Tulsa undercover to investigate crime conditions in the city. In his report, he stated:

Summary of conditions: Vice conditions in this city are very bad. Gambling, bootlegging and prostitution are very much in evidence. At the leading hotels and rooming houses the bell hops and porters are pimping for women, and also selling booze. Regarding violations of the law these prostitutes and pimps solicit without any fear of the police, as they will invariably remind you that you are safe in these houses.
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The abundance of crime in Tulsa, coupled with the extremely selective nature of the city’s law enforcement, helped to create a situation where the role of the police in the actual policing of the city was ill-defined.
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This situation was further exacerbated by the city’s “vigilante” tradition. The incident involving the seventeen IWW members revealed much more to the community than the rabid hysteria of the wartime Tulsa
World
or Judge Evans’ total disregard for legal justice. It also showed the city that even when a guilty verdict was brought in against accused persons, the Tulsa police force could not be depended upon to protect them. This fact, joined with the rising number of lynchings of blacks in Oklahoma, pointed to the involvement of the city police force in a more generalized civic ethos of anti-black, anti-radical militance. If the incident involving the alleged assailants of O. W. Leonard in 1919 temporarily calmed black fears, the lynching of Roy Belton in 1920 merely reconfirmed them: no accused blacks were safe in the hands of the white law enforcement officials in Tulsa. The black distrust of white police only increased when white officers began to invade black Tulsa and harass its citizens. Only the mode of white aggression was new. The style had long been a part of the local custom.
⁶

The incident between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page, whatever the actual circumstances may have been, was important, but the affair needs to be placed in perspective. It seems highly probable that almost any other alleged “serious crime” involving a black “assailant” and a white “victim” could have played the catalytic role that the Rowland-Page incident did. The Leonard affair revealed that some black Tulsans were very concerned over the relatively “mild” newspaper coverage of such an alleged crime. The incident also made it clear that black Tulsans were prepared to act forthrightly to ensure that accused members of their race were guaranteed a courtroom trial. And if Roy Belton had been black, he probably would have been lynched sooner. But the incident in the Drexel building had an important interracial sexual dynamic, and the white taboo regarding black men and white women was probably particularly strong in this area where there were a significant number more males than females. During this period the state was shifting from a primarily immigrant population to a temporarily more stable one, but still in the older age groups the disproportion between the sexes was as high as three to two.
⁷

With all these related but subsidiary dynamics placed into perspective, it is clear that the single most important precipitating ingredient in the Tulsa race riot was the manner in which the Tulsa
Tribune
“covered” the Rowland-Page incident. Indeed, the newspaper’s specific coverage, and not what actually transpired in the Drexel building, is
the
incident. Whether or not a complete copy of the May 31, 1921, issue of the
Tribune
may surface again, there is a fair amount of evidence as to what it did contain, and its role in the creation of the race riot was noted by both blacks and whites, including the white adjutant general of Oklahoma.
⁸
The
Tribune,
through its May 31 issue, was the single most important force in the creation of the lynch mob outside of the courthouse; anything Dick Rowland might have done was secondary. In many ways the role of the
Tribune
is directly comparable to that of the
World
in the 1917 incident involving that attack on the seventeen IWW members.

Yet, though the
Tribune
clearly helped mobilize the lynch mob and thus directly contributed to the race riot, the Tulsa Police Department and the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were also important factors. The law enforcement authorities knew the purpose of the white crowd outside of the courthouse. If these authorities had taken steps to prevent the crowd from forming, or if they had dispersed it once it had formed, the riot might have been averted. Here, Chief Gustafson was particularly at fault as it appears that Sheriff McCullough was attempting to make an honest effort to defend Rowland with his small force of men. Similarly, the predominantly white police force must also share heavily in the blame for the destruction of black Tulsa. Had their efforts, and those of the other law enforcement bodies, including the National Guard, been geared toward disarming and dispersing the white rioters, rather than disarming and interning blacks, much of the black district might have been saved. The mass deputizing of whites from the lynch mob by the police only encouraged the devastation.

The attempted intervention of those armed black Tulsans who went down to the courthouse was another ingredient in the riot, but to claim that they “caused” the race riot, as many have, is absurd. It is part of the nature of racism that hatred directed against an individual can very easily be translated into hatred against that person’s entire race. The
Tribune’s
coverage of the Rowland-Page incident had helped to facilitate this shift with its headline: “Nab
Negro
for Attacking
Girl
in Elevator.”
⁹
But it was at the courthouse where the “immediate” hatred of the whites shifted from being aimed solely at Dick Rowland to all blacks in general, and the actions of those blacks who attempted to intervene were instrumental in initiating this transformation. This shift was further aggravated by the courthouse battle which slowly wound its way to black Tulsa. When it reached the black neighborhoods, the conflict was no longer a white lynch mob against Rowland—and a black attempt to prevent it—but simply a case of white against black.

The social, political, and racial conditions in Tulsa in the spring of 1921 were clearly those which would allow large-scale racial violence, and the action or inaction of certain parts of the community on May 31 and June 1 “complemented” the underlying conditions and brought on the violence and destruction.

II

Aside from the deaths, the human suffering, and the destruction, the riot had other effects. For one thing, it appears that there was never another attempt at lynching a black person in Tulsa County. Beatings and floggings, however, continued. In May of 1922 black Deputy Sheriff John K. Smitherman had one of his ears cut off by a group of masked whites. Less than a year and a half later, in August, 1923, a white Tulsan—a Jew—by the name of Nathan Hantaman was picked up and questioned by the Tulsa police under suspicion of being a narcotics seller, or so the police claimed. In a situation which bears much in common with the IWW case in 1917, Hantaman was later released, and, according to one historian, “by apparent prearrangement, snatched up from the street by the Klan” in front of a theater on Greenwood Avenue. He was then taken outside of town, “stripped, whipped, and his genitals beaten to a pulp.” The incident itself became the catalyst for Oklahoma Governor John C. Walton’s “war” on the Ku Klux Klan which did much to wreck the order both statewide and in Tulsa.
¹⁰
Nevertheless, the lynchings ceased; at a terrible price, black Tulsans had shown their white brethren that they were not going to let it happen here.

For some, the riot was a bearer of lessons. In her
Events of the Tulsa Disaster,
Mary E. Jones Parrish wrote what she felt they were:

The Tulsa disaster has taught great lessons to all of us, has dissipated some of our false creeds, and has revealed to us verities of which we were oblivious. The most significant lesson it has taught me is that the love of race is the deepest feeling rooted in our being and no race can rise higher than its lowest member.

Some of our group who have been blest with educational or financial advantages are oftimes inclined to forget ourselves to the extent that they feel their superiority over those less fortunate, but when a supreme test, like the Tulsa disaster comes, it serves to remind us that we are all of one race; that human fiends, like those who had full sway on June 1st, have no respect of person. Every Negro was accorded the same treatment, regardless of his education or other advantages. A Negro was a Negro on that day and forced to march with his hands up for blocks. What does this teach? It should teach us to “Look Up, Lift Up and Lend a Helping Hand,” and remember that we cannot rise higher than our weakest brother.

“Comfort the feeble minded; support the weak.”

I Thes. 5:14.
¹¹

Although in essence Parrish is calling here for black nationalism, the intimidation that her muted tone reveals alludes to an even greater problem faced by black Tulsans after the riot: how to survive. The actions of the city government, police, and elite business and commercial groups during the summer and winter of 1921 confirmed that this struggle would, if anything, be as hard as before.

Thus, as American blacks have done throughout their history, black Tulsans turned to themselves. For the first decade after the riot, it appears that the local churches, community groups, and simply the local networks of friendship and work place association of black Tulsans were the primary organizational means for coping with the issues of survival. It is true that a branch of the NAACP was formed in black Tulsa one year after the riot, but by 1926 a national officer for the organization wrote that the Tulsa Branch had been “dormant so long, I think it useless to make further inquiries regarding it.” A new branch was not organized until 1930.
¹²

III

Perhaps the most lasting effects of the riot are the twin oral traditions—one set white and the other black—which it has generated in Tulsa decades later. The collective white “memory” of the riot in Tulsa has revealed both realism and fantasy, but in all cases, it has been subdued in one way or another. Those whites who were involved in the riot have been reluctant to discuss it—especially in the presence of a tape recorder—or have minimized their role. Fifty-seven years after the event, several white Tulsans allowed copies of old photographs of early Tulsa to be made, but adamantly refused to permit riot photographs to also be copied. White Tulsans too young to remember the event, or who were born after it, have often been able to spin tall tales about it.

A central feature of the local white oral tradition of the riot involves the cultivated ability which most white Americans have to blame other people for the racism and racial injustice which surrounds them. Primarily, blacks and other nonwhites are blamed, and as we have seen, black Tulsans have been blamed for the riot. But when white Americans are not faulting nonwhites for racial injustice, they blame
other
whites. Northern and western whites easily overlook the poverty—as well as the positive aspects—in their Harlems, Roxburys, and East Palo Altos and claim that only southern whites are racist. Southern ruling elites blame the “red-necks.” And so forth. This ability to fault others has played a role in the mythology of the riot in white Tulsa, where today, among the upper and middle classes, it is said that the white rioters in 1921 were all “poor white trash.” One local history buff even informed the author that the “white” rioters were Mexicans!

Although the specific historical evidence on who the white rioters were is far from great, that which we have is persuasive that no one “class” of whites had a monopoly. Photographs exist showing rioting whites dressed in the clothing of both businessmen and laborers. The official dead and wounded tabulation of the police department for whites included a salesman, a barber, a tool dresser, and the manager of an oil company. Rather, it is likely that the white rioters came from all economic and social classes. Similarly, their victims ran the economic spectrum of black Tulsa, for as Mary E. Jones Parrish stated, “a Negro was a Negro on that day.”
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The local white oral tradition of the riot also includes the events of its immediate aftermath. Indeed, many white Tulsans feel that the humanitarian actions of their forebears after the riot atoned for the involvement of whites in the violence itself. This has even worked its way into the popular historical literature about the riot: in 1976, one white woman wrote that within two days after the violence “white Tulsans had immediately begun a generous relief program.”
¹⁴
The historical evidence, however, points to a vastly different conclusion. If anything, the aftermath of the riot was marked by a concerted attempt by white Tulsa’s social and economic elite to further destroy the city’s black community.