On May 30th, 1921, a young black man stepped into an elevator in the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nineteen year-old Dick Rowland was on his way to the top floor to use the "Coloreds Only" bathroom. It's believed--as he got on the elevator--he stumbled and fell against the operator, a 17 year old white woman named Sarah Page. The young woman screamed and a clerk working in a first floor haberdashery claimed he saw Rowland running out of the building and that Page had been assaulted.
Tulsa was a tinderbox. The economy was slumping, the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise, and recent oil discoveries on Osage lands were making the wrong people rich. The Osage were buying and building mansions and being chauffered by white men in large touring cars. In the Greenwood section of Tulsa, black folks were making money, opening businesses, building theaters and hospitals, and black professionals were pouring in. Greenwood became known as "The Black Wall Street."
Dick Rowland was arrested by the Tulsa police, who quickly determined he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sarah Page refused to press charges. However, the police placed Rowland in protective custody because a lynch mob had formed and demanded he be turned over to them. Lynchings weren't uncommon in Oklahoma; since statehood in 1907, 26 black men had been lynched.
In Greenwood, word of Rowland's plight spread and men gathered, determined Rowland would not be lynched. Many of the men were veterans of fighting in France, were armed and knew how to fight. Fifty to sixty men with rifles and shotguns drove to the Tulsa County Courthouse where Rowland was being held. When they arrived, they formed a skirmish line and declared they were there to assist the sheriff and his men defend the courthouse against the mob which had grown to more than 1,000.
The sight of armed black men enraged the white mob, many of whom armed themselves and set about attacking the blacks at the courthouse and marching toward Greenwood. By early morning of June 1st, 1921, Greenwood was in flames and the Greenwood massacre was fully underway. Before June 2nd dawned, Greenwood had been bombed from private aircraft and burned by rioters on foot. Initial estimates placed the dead at 36 blacks and 10 whites. Later estimates placed the number of blacks killed at 200. Today, it's accepted that the black death toll likely exceeded 300. By some estimates it was the worst race riot in American history.
And then, it fell out of history.
Hiding a Crime
Hiding the massacre was one of the most effective jobs of dropping something down the memory hole as happened in our history.
My father was born in Tulsa 18 months after Greenwood was destroyed and its residents massacred. He grew up in Tulsa for his first 18 years, returning in 1952 with a young family and lived there another eight years. If he knew about the massacre, it was very incomplete and sketchy knowledge. And, he never mentioned it.
I grew up in Tulsa for my first eight years, attended early elementary grades and listened to my grandmother and great-aunts recount tales of their early years in Tulsa from 1919 on; they never hinted at the massacre
It was likely a combination of things. The mood in the country wasn't favorable to reporting the massacre. As a whole the United States, coming out of WWI, the Big Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, was famously seeking a "return to Normalcy." The leading Tulsa newspaper of the time deliberately suppressed reporting, to the extent of destroying issues that addressed the event. And, for white Tulsa, since the massacre happened to black people it wasn't worth much mention anyway. Moreover, the Klan had grown powerful in Tulsa and Oklahoma politics. Lifting the curtain on something like the Greenwood massacre was a dangerous proposition through the rest of the decade.
As well, the full import of the massacre may have been lost in the clutter of other horrific acts of the time. There was a concerted effort to rob wealthy Osage families of their oil wealth that included pre-meditated murder of possibly hundreds of innocents, with state, local, and federal authorities turning their backs on the crimes.
Indeed, it's hard to escape the idea that 1920's Tulsa was run as a criminal enterprise. Greenwood was one of the wealthier neighborhoods in the state (if not the country). It was full of professionals and business people and Tulsa as a whole was flush with oil money. Real estate values were high and there must have been a lot of Greenwood cash in local banks. What happened to it all? The money stolen from Osage tribal members through murder and various scams ran to millions. Of course, one of the first rules of a criminal enterprise is you don't talk about it. With a compliant newspaper and courts and an absence of anything like social media, it's easy for a story or stories like this to disappear.
The Greenwood massacre was kept alive in the memories of surviving victims and their families. Tulsa lawyer and Greenwood resident, Buck Franklin, wrote a searing account of the events. His son who was six at the time, John Hope Franklin, became one of the leading African-American historians of our time and kept the memory alive. Over the last twenty years the city of Tulsa has begun dealing with the legacy and is now supporting efforts to locate and exhume mass graves of victims. Books and documentaries have been developed since 2000. With added attention from a recent episode of HBO's Watchmen series, the massacre is entering the country's consciousness and Greenwood's ghosts may yet get their acknowledgement.
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