Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  When World War I ended in 1918, millions of soldiers returned to the United States, and many white veterans were angry and resentful to find Black Americans were now working the jobs they’d left behind. White people were also concerned that Black veterans, who’d been treated as valued members of their country while fighting in the war, would become “uppity” and start demanding the sort of rights and respect they’d been fighting for abroad.

  They were also scared of the guns.

  Black gun ownership in the United States already had a long, complicated history by the end of the First World War. Black Civil War veterans who fought for the Union army were allowed to take their rifles home with them when they were discharged; even Black people who hadn’t fought in the war could purchase firearms in the North. They used these weapons to defend themselves against infringement on their lives and rights; as one Louisiana freedman said, “As one of the disenfranchised race, I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’” And the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866 allowed formerly enslaved people “to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, [and] personal security . . . including the constitutional right to bear arms.” All of this made white people nervous.

  Remember the Black codes, the collection of laws that preceded Jim Crow in the post–Civil War period? They were often used to prevent Black people from owning guns in states such as Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. One Florida law stated that any Black person found with a “bowie knife, dirk, sword, firearms, or ammunition of any kind” could be publicly whipped as punishment. And when Black Civil War veterans returned to their homes in the South, some were met at the train station by public officials, who demanded they turn over their guns. The veterans’ punishment if they didn’t comply? They could be beaten or shot by law enforcement.

  Unsurprisingly, government and law enforcement agents weren’t the only ones who attempted to enforce these racist policies. The KKK and other groups of vigilantes took it upon themselves to ride through Black communities and snatch up any guns they found. White mob attacks on Black people in Memphis in 1866, as well as multiple attacks and two murders in Kentucky in 1868, were blamed on Black gun ownership and the mere presence of Black veterans, respectively. Throughout the late 1800s, Black soldiers from Montana to Georgia were terrorized, shot, and lynched, sometimes while wearing their uniforms. And as the white people who perpetrated these crimes faced no consequences, the violence continued into the next century.

  In August 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi cautioned his Senate colleagues about Black soldiers returning from World War I: “Impress the Negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the nation flying triumphantly in the air—it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

  Not only did white people believe that Black veterans would start an unwelcome trend by demanding equal treatment once they were back home, they feared specifically that they would use their guns to rebel against the injustices faced each day in the United States. Further, white Americans were still hung up on the idea of protecting white women from Black men, and when they heard about Black soldiers’ dalliances with French women overseas, they believed these same men would now feel entitled to sexual relationships with white women in the South. And in 1919, as race riots surged across the country, Black World War I veterans were particular targets for attacks and lynchings, including in Dadeville, Alabama; Waxahachie, Texas; Tyler Station, Kentucky; Pace, Florida; Franklinton, North Carolina; Bogalusa, Louisiana; and various parts of Arkansas and Mississippi.

  In April of that year, twenty-four-year-old veteran Daniel Mack of Sylvester, Georgia, accidentally brushed against a white man, which sparked a confrontation; Mack was arrested.

  “I fought for you in France to make the world safe for democracy,” Mack said during his court hearing. “I don’t think you treated me right in putting me in jail and keeping me there, because I’ve got as much right as anybody else to walk on the sidewalk.”

  The judge responded, “This is a white man’s country and you don’t want to forget it.” He then sentenced Mack to thirty days working on a chain gang, wherein groups of prisoners were shackled together and forced to perform hard manual labor, such as ditchdigging, construction, and farming.

  Mack had served only a few days of his sentence when a small group of armed white men stormed the jail and kidnapped him, beat and stripped him naked, and left him on the edge of town to die. Miraculously, Mack survived the vicious attack and was later able to leave the South—but he was one of the lucky few. Despite the NAACP’s protests in several of these situations, the white mobs were never investigated, and no one was ever taken to trial for their crimes.

  Black veterans could even be punished by the military if they dared to speak up about the injustice they encountered. Sergeant Henry Johnson, a Harlem Hellfighter who was one of the first Americans to receive France’s Croix de Guerre avec Palme, the highest award for valor given by the French, spoke out against racism and violence toward Black veterans in 1919. Afterward, he was discharged from the army; they withheld his disability pay, although one of his feet was badly injured, and he received no pension. He died impoverished ten years later, at the age of thirty-two.

  In May 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote an article entitled “Returning Soldiers” for the NAACP’s The Crisis. In the piece, he criticized the United States for sending men to fight for democracy overseas that wasn’t being practiced at home, writing: “Today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land . . . It lynches . . . It disfranchises its own citizens . . . It encourages ignorance . . . It steals from us . . . It insults us.”

  About half a million Black Southerners had migrated to Northern cities by the summer of 1919, and racial tensions were running high. Statistics from the Archives at Tuskegee Institute show racial violence was growing rapidly: lynchings of Black Americans increased from sixty in 1918 to seventy-six just a year later, in 1919. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, at least thirteen veterans were lynched after the Great War.

  July Fourth of 1919 was supposed to be a time of celebration; after all, the war was over, the Allies had won, and the soldiers were home. However, as the United States was celebrating the anniversary of its independence from Great Britain, more racial violence would erupt in the nation’s capital just weeks later.

  On July 19, a nineteen-year-old white woman had been walking home from her job at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing when, she claimed, she was accosted by two Black men. According to the woman, they tried to steal her umbrella and she fended them off until she was saved by a group of white men. Washington, DC, police brought in a Black man named Charles Ralls for questioning, and released him afterward. However, the woman’s husband, a naval aviation corps employee, decided on his own that Ralls was guilty. He assembled a mob of more than one hundred servicemen and walked to Bloodfield, a poor Black neighborhood. There, they assaulted Ralls, his wife, and their neighbors. But that wasn’t enough for them. Over the next four days, the mob viciously attacked any Black people they could find, concentrating their attacks in the predominantly Black communities of LeDroit Park (by the historically Black institution Howard University), the Seventh Street corridor, and the U Street district.

  About a week later, on the South Side of Chicago, Black teenager Eugene Williams was relaxing on a raft in Lake Michigan when he accidentally floated over to the “white side” of the unofficially segregated Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. In response, a white man began pelting him with stones. He struck the seventeen-year-old, who fell into the lake and drowned. Th
ough many Black beachgoers pointed out the man responsible for Williams’s death, Chicago police refused to arrest him. Angry with the injustice, crowds began to gather; one Black person shot a gun into the crowd of police and was instantly killed. The race riot that ensued lasted a week, leaving thirty-eight people dead: twenty-three Black, fifteen white. Hundreds more were injured. Once again, fire was employed as a weapon by the white mobs. About a thousand Black people’s homes were burned to the ground.

  George Haynes, a Black statistician who worked with the US Department of Labor, recorded nearly forty race riots for the year 1919, highlighting the brutally racist violence in such cities as Omaha, Nebraska, and Charleston, South Carolina. But the deadliest riot that year occurred in Elaine, Arkansas.

  After slavery was abolished, and landowners in the South could no longer depend on the free labor of enslaved Black people, they had to figure out how to continue producing and harvesting crops. Many of them hired freed Black people as part of a practice called sharecropping, in which the Black laborers worked the land in exchange for a portion of the crops. Sometimes the landowner provided the sharecroppers with housing, along with tools and seed to work the land. However, the workers often had to buy food and other supplies on credit, and many sharecroppers were exploited by the landowners, forced into accepting unfair payments and disproportionate shares of the harvest.

  By 1919, sharecropping was still common in Southern states, and that year, Black sharecroppers in Elaine (pronounced by locals with emphasis on the first syllable) wanted to be paid more for their crops. On September 30, they gathered at a church in Hoop Spur, also located in Phillips County, just three miles away, for a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Labor unions weren’t exactly popular with employers, as they used their collective leverage to demand fair treatment and wages for their members. The Progressive Farmers knew that as a Black union, they’d be considered even more of a threat to the white landowners, so they assigned men with guns to stand guard at the meeting.

  At eleven o’clock that evening, a group of white men approached the church and fired shots into the group gathered there. The guards returned the shots, which ended up killing one of the white men and wounding the county’s deputy sheriff, also white. Word spread to other towns about the shootout, along with the false accusation that Black people were planning an uprising against white people in Phillips County.

  The Arkansas governor called in hundreds of troops from Camp Pike, near Little Rock, to “round up” the “heavily armed” Black people. They arrived on October 2, and, along with a white mob of local residents, estimated to be as large as one thousand, they murdered at least two hundred Black men, women, and children (the number is likely higher and has never been confirmed). The death toll included four brothers—a World War I veteran and his siblings—who’d been on a hunting trip and were forced from a train and shot dead. Yet again, homes were burned and destroyed.

  On October 7, the troops were withdrawn and many Black people were jailed for allegedly planning the “insurrection”; on October 31, 122 of them were indicted for a variety of charges, including murder. A dozen men, known as the Elaine Twelve, were convicted of murder and sentenced to death by the all-white jury.

  The NAACP soon began fighting the sentence, a fight that would last five long years. After several retrials, appeals, and an appearance before the US Supreme Court, the Elaine Twelve were released. The last of the twelve men was set free on January 14, 1925.

  Although the nearly forty race riots of 1919 occurred in different pockets of the country and involved different people, one thing unites them all: fear. The white people who disenfranchised their Black neighbors, who oppressed and persecuted Black World War I veterans, who accused Black men and women of crimes and formed mobs to enact violent revenge, were afraid. Afraid of change, afraid of loss, and, perhaps most of all, afraid of equality.

  It was this same fear that soon spread to Tulsa, Oklahoma, planting the seeds for the Greenwood massacre.

  The day is just beginning. Sweet-throated birds warble their songs of joy in the treetops, fanned by the refreshing zephyr, and the dew sparkles upon the grass like countless little diamonds. . . . An unbroken stream of pedestrians—male and female—passes down Greenwood Avenue. It is made up of laborers, some empty-handed and others with dinner pails, on their way to work. They hurry along as if they are late. A few of the more pretentious ones pass in their own cars, or in jitneys, or upon buses. Then comes a lull—a lull before the storm.

  —B. C. Franklin,

  Tulsa Race Massacre survivor

  May 31, 1921

  Dick Rowland had fled to the home of his mother, Damie, immediately after the elevator incident on May 30. The police didn’t seem to be in a hurry to arrest him, though. They didn’t send out a bulletin to alert the Tulsa Police Department of the incident, nor did they show up at Damie Ford’s boardinghouse that evening. Rowland spent a quiet, anxious night in, waiting for officers who would never come.

  But the next morning, the day after Memorial Day, he must have been convinced he was free and clear, or else he wasn’t afraid to press his luck. He left the boardinghouse and was soon arrested on Greenwood Avenue by a pair of officers. One of them, Henry C. Pack, was Black—one of the few African American men on the Tulsa police force, which employed about seventy-five officers. They took Rowland down to the police station to charge him. It was at this point that people began to talk; the town quickly learned that Rowland was in jail, and what his alleged crime was. He had only been in custody for a few hours when law enforcement began to receive death threats aimed at Rowland. The Tulsa police transferred him to the Tulsa County Courthouse on Sixth Street and Boulder Avenue, where he would remain locked up in a jail cell on the top floor of the building.

  Although he’d been moved to what was supposed to be safer and more secure conditions, Tulsans knew what could very well be in store for Rowland. As newspaper editor A. J. Smitherman had written in the Tulsa Star, “The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on the top of the Court House from mob violence.”

  The white newspapers also got ahold of this information, which quickly set things into motion. The Tulsa World was a morning paper; it hadn’t been able to report on the May 30 incident in the Drexel Building the prior day, and its May 31 issue was printed before Rowland’s arrest that morning. But the story came through at precisely the perfect time for the afternoon paper the Tulsa Tribune to print the news—and an inflammatory front-page headline to go with it:

  NAB NEGRO FOR ATTACKING GIRL IN AN ELEVATOR

  A negro delivery boy who gave his name to the public as “Diamond Dick” but who has been identified as Dick Rowland, was arrested on South Greenwood avenue this morning by Officers Carmichael and Pack, charged with attempting to assault the 17-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel building early yesterday.

  He will be tried in municipal court this afternoon on a state charge.

  The girl said she noticed the negro a few minutes before the attempted assault looking up and down the hallway on the third floor of the Drexel building as if to see if there was anyone in sight but thought nothing of it at the time.

  A few minutes later he entered the elevator she claimed, and attacked her, scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes. Her screams brought a clerk from Renberg’s store to her assistance and the negro fled. He was captured and identified this morning both by the girl and the clerk, police say.

  Tenants of the Drexel building said the girl is an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college.

  Though several people saw that afternoon’s Tribune in its entirety, no complete physical copies of the May 31 afternoon edition exist. However, several witnesses recalled the headline of the editorial, which is said to have stated:

  TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT

  That stark headline and the now missing editorial that followed were certainly e
nough to incite a lynch mob. Word swept quickly throughout both the Black and white sides of Tulsa. The Tribune had barely been out for an hour before the rumblings about an impending lynching grew so loud that police and fire commissioner J. M. Adkison called Sheriff Willard McCullough to tell him what was going on.

  At around six or seven o’clock that evening, white Tulsans attempted to make good on those rumblings, assembling outside the county courthouse; by 7:30 p.m., the horde was about three hundred strong. It was too late for McCullough to discourage the vigilante seekers—they knew Rowland was in a cell on the top floor, and they wanted their way with him. The crowd continued to grow as darkness settled in. They were shouting at Sheriff McCullough: “Let us have the nigger!”

  But McCullough was a different sheriff than the one who’d overseen matters during the Roy Belton lynching the year before. He had only recently become the Tulsa County sheriff, after James Woolley was voted out for his failure to stop Belton’s lynching—and he was adamant that a mob wouldn’t get to the prisoner this time. Once he was informed of the lynching plans, he’d increased security by sending six armed officers to the roof of the courthouse, positioned the rest on the stairs, and disabled the elevator, all of which would essentially prevent any violent mob members who dared to try to break through from making their way to Rowland’s cell.

  The mob was no fan of Sheriff McCullough’s efforts to keep Rowland safe. They booed him as he attempted to calm them down, and three white men soon came forward and commanded him to hand over the prisoner. McCullough refused. Though he knew he and his men were outnumbered, he remained committed to protecting Rowland.

  Over in the Greenwood District, students at Booker T. Washington High School were preparing for the senior prom that evening.

  Bill Williams, whose parents owned a popular soda fountain/candy shop, an auto garage, and the Williams Dreamland Theatre, was one of those students decorating the building on Archer Street where the dance would be held. But soon, Williams and the other students learned there would be no prom. They were told to abandon the decorations and head home. White Tulsans weren’t the only ones who’d seen the Tribune that afternoon and heard talk about a lynching. Rumors were circulating: there was going to be trouble from white people that evening.