Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  The headquarters and printing press for A. J. Smitherman’s Tulsa Star newspaper were located in Greenwood. Simon Berry, described by historian Eddie Faye Gates as “colorful, flamboyant,” and “a smooth talker,” owned a transportation company that ferried Greenwood residents across town in Ford Model T cars and buses, and eventually chartered airplanes for the wealthy oil executives in the area. It has been said that Berry’s company was a model for the city’s modern-day Tulsa Transit service.

  Beauty parlors and barbershops have long been a staple of the Black community, and Greenwood was no exception. Mabel Little owned Little Rose Beauty Salon, located in Deep Greenwood, which she established in 1915 after years of working as a motel housekeeper. She’d learned everything she knew about cutting and styling hair from her aunt, and later earned a certification from the beauty course of Madam C. J. Walker, “the first Black woman millionaire in America.” Customers would visit Little’s beauty shop to get their hair washed, straightened, or fashioned into the popular styles of the time. Thursday nights were particularly busy for Little; known as “Maid’s Night Out,” this was when the young domestic workers would leave the white neighborhoods and head to Greenwood for a night out on the town.

  John and Loula Williams, who’d moved to Oklahoma from Mississippi in the early 1900s, owned an auto repair shop, as well as the three-story Williams Building on the northwest corner of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street. They lived on the second floor of the building and rented the top floor to doctors, lawyers, and dentists for office space. The first floor housed a confectionery, which sold candy and ice cream, had a fancy soda fountain, and seated almost fifty people. The couple also opened the first Black movie theater in the city of Tulsa: spearheaded by Loula, the Williams Dreamland Theatre opened in 1914 on Greenwood Avenue. Its showings included a roster of silent films, as well as live musical shows and revues, which were a mix of singing, dancing, monologues, and skits. With seating for 750 people, it was Tulsa’s second-largest movie theater, after the white-owned Dixie Theater across the street, which seated a thousand. The Williamses were also the first Black family in Tulsa to own an automobile, a sign of prestige at the time.

  When Loula and John’s son, Bill, had asked his father why they’d moved to Oklahoma, John responded, “Well, I came out to the promised land.” Indeed, Greenwood was beginning to resemble neighborhoods in big cities like Chicago and New York, with its doctors and attorneys, theaters and restaurants, booming real estate market, and millionaires in the making.

  Thursday nights and Sundays after church were the busiest times in Deep Greenwood. The Black Tulsans who lived in white neighborhoods because of their jobs happily traveled to Greenwood on their days off, whether to see a movie, visit friends and family, attend church, or patronize one of the many businesses in the commercial district. The housing conditions of those who did live in Greenwood varied; while plenty of Black Tulsans owned nice homes along Detroit Avenue and other streets in the district—some were said to have accrued more than $100,000 in assets—others were confined to flimsy homes and shacks on the side streets off Greenwood Avenue.

  Despite this discrepancy, it cannot be overstated how unique Greenwood was among Black communities nationwide. While Black people were still being disenfranchised in the Southern states from which many Greenwood residents had migrated, Greenwood was absolutely thriving. The community’s focus on businesses that were Black-owned, Black-operated, and patronized primarily by Black people meant that each dollar spent in Greenwood would circulate throughout the businesses and people there around thirty times; the wealth stayed in the community and continued to grow it.

  But Black Wall Street, as it would come to be called, wasn’t just about for-profit businesses and institutions. Greenwood was also home to several churches; the district contained more churches than the white community did, on a per capita basis. In addition to Sunday church services, Black Tulsans attended Bible study or meetings of national religious societies throughout the week, and Black teenagers joined youth groups. The list of more than a dozen Black churches included several denominations, such as Bethel Seventh Day Adventist, Brown’s Chapel, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, First Baptist, and Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church. First organized in 1909, Mount Zion Baptist Church began construction on a new building in 1916, a project that cost $92,000. The beautiful new building on Elgin Avenue was completed five years later and dedicated on April 4, 1921, just two months before Greenwood residents would clash with the white mob in front of the Tulsa courthouse.

  With its own hospital in the neighborhood, Greenwood employed fifteen Black doctors. Dr. A. C. Jackson, a venerable physician and surgeon, was undoubtedly the most prominent one. Jackson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in February 1879, to a formerly enslaved couple. After his father, Civil War veteran Townsend Jackson, was threatened by a white lynch mob for visiting a white tobacco store, the family left town. They moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1889, shortly after it was established. The Jacksons were a welcome addition to Guthrie, and Townsend was appointed town jailer and elected as justice of the peace. A.C. did well in school and was accepted to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, a historically Black institution. After graduating, he returned to Guthrie and married a woman named Julia. However, the new Jim Crow laws in Oklahoma had changed the racial atmosphere of Guthrie, so the whole family moved to Tulsa in 1912, their sights set on the upwardly mobile Greenwood District.

  Dr. A. C. Jackson

  Dr. Jackson set up his medical practice on the corner of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, quickly gaining a clientele that respected him. In fact, he was so revered that white patients entrusted him with their medical care, too, despite Tulsa’s segregated hospitals. He established a second practice in nearby Claremore, Oklahoma, in 1916, and two years later, he was in talks with the Tulsa mayor about opening a Black hospital on the corner of Boston Avenue and Archer Street. Dr. Jackson eventually became president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association, and William and Charles Mayo, who founded the nationally revered Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, called him “the most able Negro surgeon in America.”

  Greenwood was also home to well-respected attorneys. Buck Colbert “B. C.” Franklin had moved to Tulsa in 1921 from the all-Black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma, where he’d worn many hats, including the town’s justice of the peace, the postmaster, the only attorney, and a leading entrepreneur. However, as his son John Hope Franklin later explained, “there was not a decent living in all those activities,” which brought Franklin to the oil town of Tulsa with the goal of more profitable and plentiful legal work. He set up a practice there and would later become one of the massacre’s most significant figures just months after arriving in Tulsa.

  The residents of Greenwood placed great emphasis on education: Booker T. Washington High School was a top-tier institution that prepared students for enrollment at elite, predominantly white schools such as Columbia University and Oberlin College, and prestigious HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) like Howard University and Spelman College. Educators were so valued that they earned some of the highest salaries in Greenwood. In fact, famous educator and author Booker T. Washington is responsible for naming the district “Negro Wall Street.”

  Despite Greenwood’s exceptional growth throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, its success did not go unresented by white Tulsans—or, ultimately, unchallenged.

  Black people had created Greenwood out of necessity; owning, operating, and supporting Black businesses was their only path to living the full, unbothered lives that white people were allowed to live while not violating the strict Jim Crow laws that ruled the state. Though not all Black Tulsans resided there—domestic workers performing jobs as housekeepers, drivers, cooks, and butlers often lived in Tulsa’s white communities, staying in the servants’ quarters of their white employers—by the beginning of 1921, Greenwood had attracted more than ten thousand Black residents, who wer
e homeowners, business owners, and loyal patrons of the community’s businesses.

  White Tulsans were well aware of what was going on across the railroad tracks—and many of them didn’t like it. They felt Black Americans hadn’t earned their right to such wealth and success, or to simply be left alone. Jealous of what the Black community had built on their own, some white people referred to Greenwood as “Little Africa.” Because of segregation laws and personal choices, many white Tulsans never socialized or interacted with Black Tulsans. They attended all-white churches, worked with all white people, and sent their children to all-white schools. This general ignorance of the lives and personalities of their Black neighbors left substantial room for spreading bigoted rumors and racial stereotypes.

  With more people drawn to the growing city, crime had been on the rise in Tulsa over the years. In late April 1921, a federal agent went undercover for five days and subsequently wrote the “Federal Vice Report on Vice Conditions in Tulsa,” which criticized the city’s gambling, illegal drug use, auto theft, bootlegging of alcohol during Prohibition, burglary, gun violence, and sex work. Vehicle theft was so widespread, apparently, that “a number of companies have canceled all policies on cars in Tulsa.” Murder was also a problem; in addition to the Roy Belton lynching, 1920 saw the killing of two on-duty Tulsa police officers. The federal agent’s report determined: “Vice conditions in this city are extremely bad.”

  The high crime rate, combined with racial ignorance, vigilante justice, and a growing intolerance for Black Americans around the country, led to a tension that simmered over the city and was poised to boil over by late May 1921. But jealousy and resentment cannot be overlooked as significant motivators that would lead to the Tulsa Race Massacre that year.

  An article published in a 1907 edition of national magazine The Independent noted that “the Negro of Indian Territory is also a landowner. The ex-slaves of the Five Tribes are protected in their holdings as are the Indians. . . . In both divisions of the state, there are probably a larger percentage of Negroes who own their own homes and are in comfortable circumstances than elsewhere in the United States.” This was just a year after O. W. Gurley had purchased the land that would become the foundation of Tulsa’s Greenwood District. White Tulsans were likely unprepared for the great success their Black neighbors across the Frisco train tracks would achieve, and once they saw the gains Black Tulsans had made, they were determined to put a stop to it.

  Michelle Place, executive director of the Tulsa Historical Society, told History.com, “I think the word jealousy is certainly appropriate during this time. If you have particularly poor whites who are looking at this prosperous community who have large homes, fine furniture, crystals, china, linens, etc., the reaction is ‘they don’t deserve that.’”

  The phrase “jealousy is the root of all evil” has perhaps never been truer than in the case of white Americans who have viewed successful Black Americans as a threat. And the depths of that evil would soon be exposed in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  I was seven years old when the riot broke out. Some of the riot survivors my age remember a lot about the riot. But I just can’t remember much about it. I guess it was so horrible that my mind has just blotted it out.

  —Johnnie L. Grayson Brown,

  Tulsa Race Massacre survivor

  5

  Extra! Extra! Read All About It!, or the Promise of a Lynching

  Before logging into social media was part of our daily routine, or the internet and television even existed, newspapers were the primary way people kept up-to-date on the state of the world.

  Almost as soon as European colonizers created settlements in what is now the United States, Americans have relied on newspapers for information on political matters and wars, advertisements, editorials, comics, and local, national, and international affairs. The first American newspaper, Boston-based Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, was founded in 1690 and intended to be a monthly; it lasted only one issue before the Massachusetts governor shut it down. This was legal at the time, as the free press wasn’t established until 1791, with the First Amendment. The nation’s first official newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, debuted in 1704. It was published as a weekly until 1776, and printed news from London, along with obituaries, politics, and advertisements to purchase enslaved Africans.

  These initial publications were unequivocally aimed at a white readership. The newspapers not only ran ads to purchase enslaved people as early as their founding, but they didn’t report news or concerns that were useful or of interest to the Black community. In fact, it was quite the opposite; many of them routinely denigrated African Americans, publishing false stories to further support disenfranchisement of the Black race. Black Americans wouldn’t see a newspaper that addressed their own community and concerns until the next century, in 1827.

  Freedom’s Journal, the very first Black-owned and -operated newspaper, launched in March of that year. Founded in New York City the same year the state abolished slavery, the paper was distributed as a four-page weekly by its senior and junior editors, Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm. Notably, just the year before, Jamaican native Russwurm had become the third Black college graduate ever in the United States. Cornish, who founded the first Black Presbyterian church in New York, and was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, would go on to be called “the most important Black journalist before Frederick Douglass.” The paper covered news from regional, national, and international perspectives with the mission of improving life for the more than quarter of a million freed Black people in the North.

  The first issue included a note underscoring the paper’s purpose to give its readership a voice that had been denied to them since the founding of the country: “Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly . . .”

  While Freedom’s Journal primarily covered issues relevant to Black Americans—it argued in support of the Black vote and condemned slavery—it also published articles about African countries, such as Sierra Leone, and those in the diaspora, like Haiti. Among all this news, readers could also find biographies of well-known Black people; announcements for births, deaths, and weddings; and listings for jobs and housing. Freedom’s Journal soon became so popular that circulation expanded from New York to ten more states; Washington, DC; Canada; Haiti; and Europe. Six months after the paper published its first issue, Cornish resigned and Russwurm became the lone editor. Upon Cornish’s departure, the paper began to embrace the American Colonization Society, a primarily white organization that favored sending freed Black Americans to the African country of Liberia. Readers didn’t appreciate the shift, and the paper lasted only two years in total, publishing its final issue in March 1829. After Russwurm moved to Liberia, where he remained until his death in 1851, Cornish tried to resurrect Freedom’s Journal under a new name, but it was unsuccessful.

  Freedom’s Journal’s life was short, but it paved the way for hundreds of other Black-owned and -operated newspapers, some of which still exist today. By the time the American Civil War began in 1861, more than forty of them had been launched in the United States.

  * * *

  The American Colonization Society

  In December 1816, Reverend Robert Finley of the Presbyterian Church founded the American Colonization Society (ACS). The intention was to help freed Black people reach their full potential and spread the beliefs of Christianity—in Africa. In Finley’s view, Black Americans would lead better lives in “the land of their fathers,” despite the fact that many of them had been born in the United States and never visited an African country. He also believed that sending Black people there would eventually help abolish slavery.

  Though it seems on the surface that Finley was looking out for the well-being of Black people, he founded the ACS because of racist beliefs. He and his fellow members, who were mostly white, were more concerned about the lives of white American
s, and felt that free Black people were “unfavorable to [white America’s] industry and morals.” Finley felt it was more preferable to send an entire race to another continent rather than provide aid to poor Black people or accept interracial marriage.

  The ACS—whose members included a nephew of George Washington, as well as Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem that became the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner”—formed an African colony in 1822, which became the country of Liberia in 1847. While most Black people opposed the idea of moving to a country they didn’t know, the ACS helped send more than twelve thousand free Black Americans to Liberia by the late 1860s, with funding from local, state, and even the federal government.

  Interest in the program declined after the American Civil War, when Black people were emancipated, and the ACS stopped its emigration program, instead focusing on education and spreading Christianity throughout Liberia. The organization disbanded in 1964.

  * * *

  One of Tulsa’s first weekly newspapers was the Indian Republican, founded in 1893 and descended from the Indian Chief, which was first published in 1884 when the area was just a tent city. But businesspeople didn’t like the reporting of the Indian Republican—they felt the writing style was too sensational. The newspaper engaged in a type of reporting known as “yellow journalism,” which manipulated storytelling—and sometimes the truth—to gain more readers. Today, we see this in blogs and on websites centered around questionable gossip or extreme political views that fail to present all the facts.