Death in a Promised Land (7 page)

In its initial coverage of the incident, the
Democrat
stated: “Violence is feared if the guilty pair is taken in charge. Officers are preparing to evade such violence.” Yet, although the crime was frontpage news, the reporting of the white Tulsa press—the
World,
the
Times,
and the
Democrat
—was mild in comparison to the tone of the IWW coverage two years earlier.
⁴⁵

In the days that followed, three black men were arrested in the case and—after employees of the Oklahoma Ironworks had quit work to attend the funeral of their slain co-worker—rumors began to spread in Greenwood that there might be an attempt to lynch the three black defendants. Near midnight on the day after Leonard’s funeral, a party of about fifteen armed blacks drove down to the city jail to investigate the situation firsthand. Their leader asked to see if the defendants were safe. “In the meantime,” the Tulsa
Times
later reported, “the report of race riot had spread through the streets,” and, all told, eventually some two hundred black Tulsans had gathered outside of the jail. After temporarily disarming a spokesman for the group, Sergeant Rice of the police department allowed this person to enter the jail and, “see for himself that none of their race had suffered anything, and the men went away, declaring they were satisfied.”
⁴⁶

Tulsa’s Black Veterans of World War I. Photograph from the Tulsa
Star,
November 23, 1918.

The next morning, several blacks went downtown to see if they could get any or all of the prisoners released, but were informed that the sheriff would have formal charges lodged against the prisoners before nightfall. That day the
Democrat
reported that “excitement following the visit of the negro crowd at the police station Thursday night subsided to some extent Friday morning, although much talk of trouble with the colored element was heard.”
⁴⁷

Actually, the reverse happened—black police officers had trouble with whites. On Saturday night, March 22, a mass meeting was held in Greenwood to discuss ways of suppressing the lawlessness that had been prevalent in the area. On their way from that meeting, shortly before midnight, three black policemen—Barney Cleaver, James Cherry, and Stanley Webb—were held up and fired upon by two white gunmen as they drove past the Oklahoma Ironworks. Aided by two night watchmen at the plant, the three police officers returned the fire, wounding two white men, who were later captured and ultimately accused of being part of a local crime ring.
⁴⁸
After this week of turmoil, the time of extralegal peril for the three black defendants arrested in connection with the Leonard affair had passed. There was no lynching.

The Tulsa police force,
ca
. 1918–1920. Note the two black officers at left.

Courtesy of the Tulsa Police Department

In the aftermath of the incident. Reverend J. H. Abernathy, the black pastor of the First Baptist Church in Greenwood, criticized those black Tulsans who had gone down to the jail on Thursday evening. “I have inquired carefully for the names of the ringleaders from people I know to be reliable,” Abernathy stated, “and I have been unable to learn of one of them. The wage earning colored people of Tulsa had little if anything to do with that affair.” He described the unknown blacks who visited the jail as “floaters who have drifted in here,” and he suggested that “it would be a good thing if we could have a law to compel such people to get out or get to work.” Abernathy concluded with this remark: “I don’t think that the white citizens of Tulsa would be guilty of the crime this mob was afraid would be committed.”
⁴⁹

V

Unlike the IWW prisoners, the three men held in conjunction with the Leonard case were not subjected to the high-pitched abuse of a sensationalistic press nor, to our knowledge, to any extralegal violence. Yet, like the 1917 affair, the events of 1919 revealed much about the nature of law enforcement in Tulsa during the World War I era. Perhaps most importantly, it revealed that there were serious doubts in the black community as to whether the local white law enforcement establishment could be relied upon to protect prisoners, and that there were black Tulsans who were prepared to help protect incarcerated blacks if it was felt that they were in danger of being lynched. The Leonard incident did not, however, close the book on the matter of lynchings and extralegal violence in the “Magic City.”

Tulsa police officials variously described the “hi-jacking” and murder of Homer Nida, a twenty-five-year-old white taxi driver, as “the arch murder plot of this city,” and “the most cold-blooded act ever committed in the Southwest.” At about 9:30
P.M
. on Saturday night, August 21, 1920, Nida was employed by two white men and one white woman in front of the Hotel Tulsa to drive them to a dance in Red Fork. En route to the destination, while driving along the Tulsa-Sapulpa highway, Nida became suspicious of his passengers, and he pulled into a gas station where he secreted away some money which he was carrying. Back on the highway, just before they reached Red Fork, Nida was clubbed on the head by one of the men with a revolver.
⁵⁰
He was then pulled into the back seat of his large Hudson cab, while one of his abductors took the wheel. The party passed through Red Fork, and Nida pleaded for his life, telling the party to take his car and his money, but to spare him. But near the Texas Company’s tank farm just outside of Sapulpa, Nida was shot in the stomach and thrown from the car, which sped off down the highway.
⁵¹

A few minutes later, Nida was discovered by a Red Fork garage owner who, with the help of another man, rushed the wounded taxi driver to a Tulsa hospital. While conscious, Nida told the police at the hospital what had happened, and that he could identify the party who had robbed and shot him. He insisted that the woman had no real part in the crime.
⁵²

The crime and events related to it were made front-page news in the city’s two white dailies, the
World
and the
Tribune
. It was also carried by the Tulsa
Star,
which was then the city’s black weekly. Other local crimes, including the near fatal stabbing of a truck driver, were relegated to the back pages of the
World
and the
Tribune,
but the papers kept the city posted almost daily on the Nida affair, generally on the front page. The truck driver, one Walter Allen, was stabbed the week before Nida was shot, yet this event received relatively little press play, regardless of the striking parallels that Allen and Nida languished in hospital beds simultaneously and that neither was expected to survive. Indeed, with a wealth of local crimes to choose from, the
World
and the
Tribune
devoted a disproportionate amount of attention to the Nida affair.
⁵³

On Sunday, the day after Nida was shot, an eighteen-year-old white former telephone company worker named Roy Belton secured a ride from Tulsa to Nowata, a town about fifty miles away. In the car, one of the passengers read aloud the
Tribune’s
account of the crime. Belton remarked that he knew who the woman was in Nida’s cab, as he had heard her plan the hijacking earlier. The passengers in the car then became suspicious of Belton, and upon reaching Nowata, they informed the local authorities there, who arrested him and had him taken back to Tulsa.
⁵⁴

In Tulsa, Belton was taken to Nida’s hospital room, where Nida identified Belton as the man who had shot him. Belton, however, denied that he had any knowledge of the crime, and insisted that he had spent Saturday evening with Marie Harmon, a white woman in her twenties. Harmon was arrested by the police, and on Monday she confessed that she had been in Nida’s cab with Belton, and a man named George Moore. She claimed that Belton had shot Nida, but that she had known nothing about the plans for the crime.
⁵⁵

On Tuesday, Belton confessed. He claimed, however, that the shooting of Nida was unintentional, that the revolver had been damaged when he struck the taxi driver with it, and that it accidentally discharged while he was trying to repair it. Belton, too, stated that Harmon had known nothing about the plans for the crime, but that Raymond Sharp, a seventeen-year-old grocery store employee, did. Sharp was later picked up by the police as an accessory, and he confessed his knowledge of the affair. George Moore, the other man in the cab, was nowhere to be found.
⁵⁶

It was reported by the
World
that Belton, “realizing the seriousness of his predicament and bitterly resentful of the manner in which the public had taken the event of Saturday night, asked assurance that violence would not follow his statement.” Belton, however, was far from being the only one aware of this possibility. By Thrusday night, August 26, Sheriff Woolley had heard rumors that the courthouse—where Belton, Harmon, and Sharp were interned in the county jail—might be mobbed in the event that Homer Nida died. Consequently, Woolley posted two extra armed guards to protect the three prisoners, who were held on the top floor of the building.
⁵⁷