Death in a Promised Land (4 page)

Greenwood Avenue looking north from Archer,
ca
.1918

Courtesy of W. D. Williams

The first two blocks of Greenwood Avenue north of Archer were known as “Deep Greenwood.” It comprised the heart of Tulsa’s black business community, and was known by some before the riot as the “Negro’s Wall Street,” while an organizer for the National Negro Business League visiting black Tulsa in 1913 called it “a regular Monte Carlo.” Two- and three-story brick buildings lined the avenue, housing a variety of commercial establishments, including a dry goods store, two theaters, groceries, confectionaries, restaurants, and billiard halls. A number of black Tulsa’s eleven rooming houses and four hotels were located here. “Deep Greenwood” was also a favorite place for the offices of Tulsa’s unusually large number of black lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. The district would especially come alive on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons and evenings—the traditional “days off” for black domestic workers living in white neighborhoods.
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On some of the side streets adjacent to the famed avenue was the world of poverty that some black Tulsans shared with their racial brethren throughout America. In addition to the shanties and houses made from the wood of packing crates, one would also find black Tulsa’s share of prostitution houses, speakeasies, and “choc” joints. “Choc” is short for Choctaw beer, a thick, milky-colored intoxicant made from Choctaw root, or Indian hemp—unrelated to marijuana—which was quite popular with more than a few black, red, and white Tulsans at the time, as well as in later years.
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Along Detroit Avenue and certain other streets were the neat, sturdy homes of some of those black Tulsans who owned businesses lining Greenwood Avenue, augmented by the houses of the city’s black professional class. Within this elite group, some were rumored to have assets in excess of $100,000.
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Not all black Tulsans lived in the Greenwood district, however. Many lived in “white” neighborhoods where they worked as servants and housekeepers for well-to-do white families. They usually resided in “quarters” located on their employers’ lots, generally above or next to garages, and their visits to Greenwood would primarily be to shop or attend church or school.
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While “Deep Greenwood” was assuredly one of the finest black commercial districts in the entire Southwest, it was scarcely free from white influence and control. Whites owned a large portion of the land in the district. Furthermore, black Tulsa’s service-oriented businesses were geared toward catering a wage-earning population. Few of them employed more than a handful of people. Economically, black Tulsa was dependent upon the wages paid to black workers by white employers. Despite its visible solidity of brick, Greenwood rested upon an uncertain economic foundation reflecting ominous social and racial realities.
²²

Chapter 2

Race Relations and
Local Violence

I

Whereas Tulsa’s growth in the early twentieth century was virtually unmatched by any other American city, Tulsa’s race riot was far from being the only event of its kind in the nation. Indeed, the happenings in Tulsa in the spring of 1921 are incomprehensible without some familiarity with the currents in American race relations and racial ideologies of that time. Not only must the riot be viewed within that context, but also within that of three crucial events of violence and threatened violence—racial and nonracial—which occurred in Tulsa during the four preceding years.

Beginning in 1917, a series of race riots broke out across America which culminated in the summer of 1919, ushering in what Tulsa-bred historian John Hope Franklin has described as “the greatest period of inter-racial strife the nation ever witnessed.” These riots took place in Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, as well as in the South. Perhaps their clearest common denominator was the invasion of black neighborhoods by whites. The race riot in Tulsa was the last one in this “series”: it has not until the Harlem riot of 1935 and the Detroit incident of 1943 that racial violence on the scale of the 1919-era riots was repeated.
¹

We can get some idea of the racial climate from the fact that in the year of the Tulsa riot fifty-nine blacks were lynched in southern or “border” states. The alleged causes for these lynchings ranged from murder to making “improper remarks to [a] white woman,” to being
a relative
of someone who was lynched. Although the number of lynchings per year in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century decreased from those reached in the 1890s, the degree of barbarity in these lynchings had generally increased. The burning of live victims was not uncommon in twentieth-century southern “lynchings,” a fact which made the United States one of the few nations in the world at that time where human beings were burned at the stake.
²
During the very weeks that saw black Tulsa torn apart, a lynching in Moultrie, Georgia, was described in vivid detail by a correspondent of the Washington
Eagle:

Immediately a cracker by the name of Ken Murphy gave the Confederate yell:
‘Whoo-whoo
—let’s get the nigger.’ Simultaneously five hundred poor pecks rushed on the armed sheriffs, who made no resistance whatever. They tore the Negro’s clothing off before he was placed in a waiting automobile. This was done in broad daylight. The Negro was unsexed and made to eat a portion of his anatomy which had been cut away. Another portion was sent by parcel post to Governor Dorsey, whom the people of this section hate bitterly.

The Negro was taken to a grove, where each one of more than five hundred people, in Ku Klux ceremonial, had placed a pine nut around a stump, making a pyramid to the height of ten feet. The Negro was chained to a stump and asked if he had anything to say. Castrated and in indescribable torture, the Negro asked for a cigarette, lit it and blew the smoke in the face of his tormentors.

The pyre was lit and a hundred men and women, old and young, grandmothers among them, joined hands and danced while the Negro burned. A big dance was held in a barn nearby that evening in celebration of the burning, many people coming by automobile from nearby cities to the gala event.
³

Black Americans were losing ground during this era in other ways, too. Many black postal employees lost their jobs during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, and the number of black police declined. In the organized labor movement, once in 1917 and twice in 1921, resolutions to denounce racial discrimination in union locals were defeated in conventions of the American Federation of Labor. And hotels and restaurants in northern cities like Boston and Chicago which had previously served blacks had begun to bar them.
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These national trends were mirrored by similar developments in Oklahoma, but their effects in the young state were even more disastrous because of the unique history of race relations in the territory. The character of Native American slavery had been debated back and forth, and although even the mildest form of slavery is a far cry from freedom, one “Creek Negro” is recorded as stating: “I was eating out of the same pot with the Indians... while they were still licking the master’s boots in Texas.” Beginning in the 1880s, there had been an attempt to make Oklahoma into an all-black state—a dream of Edwin P. McCabe, former state auditor of Kansas, and by those southern blacks who formed “Oklahoma Clubs” during the land rush era—and in 1890, a black had been elected to the territorial legislature.
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During the next three decades, a virtual war was waged as to whether Oklahoma would conform to the national pattern of race relations, and most of the results of this conflict proved to be particularly catastrophic to black Oklahomans—to those for whom Oklahoma was their native land, as well as to those who had risked so much to come and try to make it into a Canaan for themselves and their children.
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Beginning in the 1890s, the territorial government passed its first Jim Crow laws. Although certain similar measures were defeated in the twentieth century, others were added, and Oklahoma was later to have the distinction of being the first state to segregate its telephone booths. Oklahoma’s greatest racist distinction in Jim Crow legislation, however, concerned the franchise. Up until 1910, black Oklahomans legally had the right to vote, and it appears that many of them exercised that right. But that year—which also saw the last black to sit in the Oklahoma State Legislature until 1964—the in-famous “Grandfather Clause” was adopted by the legislature, and it effectively disfranchised the state’s black population. Although it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1915, a new method, that of setting “an extremely brief registration period for voters not already eligible,” was adopted to check black suffrage. In Tulsa, and other places, blacks did however continue to vote.
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The first two decades of the twentieth century brought an increase in racial violence to Oklahoma and by 1911 the nature of lynchings in the state began to change: thereafter, more blacks were lynched per year than whites. And although fewer blacks were lynched in the state from 1917 to 1919 than in the preceding three years, the war was by no means a definite improver of the status of blacks in the state. For one thing, the death blow which the war years dealt to the Oklahoma Socialist party, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and other radical groups in the state was not without significance to black Oklahomans as a group. The IWW had been founded as an interracial body, and its national office rhetorically supported black rights. The Oklahoma Socialist party “fought consistently for full enfranchisement of Negroes,” it has been claimed, and there were black party members. The Socialist party in Tulsa had never been as strong as it was elsewhere in the state, and after 1918, Socialist slates of candidates for city offices were no longer being fielded by the party local.
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Nationwide, the resurgence of aggressive white supremacy was accompanied by a racist literature so ubiquitous that one historian concluded that the “chief difficulty in studying racist attitudes towards Negroes during the early twentieth century is the existence of mountains of readily available materials.” One such book was Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race,
which another historian has called the central intellectual inspiration of the white racism of the 1920s. Totally ignorant of black history, Grant stated that “negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within.” A similar work referred to black Americans as “ten million malignant cancers [which] gnaw the vitals of our body politic.”
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The most widespread organizational means for the expression of white racist and nativist thought was the so-called “second” or “revived” Ku Klux Klan. Organized in 1915, it was particularly active in the 1920s. Klansmen were found throughout the nation, from Maine to Oregon and from Florida to California. Blacks, however, were not the only victims of Klan terrorism and intimidation; Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and those whom the hooded order felt to be guilty of moral turpitude (for alleged “crimes” such as adultery or bootlegging) were also victimized. The Klan was very strong in the Southwest, and particularly in Tulsa, which boasted by the time of the riot a “thriving chapter.” Late in 1921, the Tulsa “Klan No. 2” claimed a membership of 3,200. Moreover, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan were also said to be “thriving” in Tulsa soon after this separate order was founded in June, 1923. Furthermore, Tulsa was to have the distinction of being one of the few places where the “Junior” Ku Klux Klan existed. This order, founded in 1924, was open to white boys from twelve to eighteen years of age.
¹⁰

Klan ceremony, Hobart, Oklahoma.

Courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library