The American Red Cross was called in for relief efforts, and after seeing all the wounded survivors and overall destruction in Greenwood, Red Cross representative Maurice Willows pleaded with headquarters to classify the incident as a natural disaster. Designating it as such allowed the Red Cross to act quickly, sending relief workers and building a temporary school and hospital in Tulsa. According to the organization’s records, 183 Black people received surgery for their wounds immediately after the massacre, and 70 percent of those patients had to remain in the hospital for further care. Within the first week of the tragedy, doctors performed 163 additional surgeries, 82 of them considered “major” procedures. Eleven of the twenty doctors who worked on patients were Black. The National Guard armory on Sixth Street, where the white mob had tried to steal guns and ammunition before the riot began, was used as a clinic for wounded Black Tulsans, as the Black hospital had been burned to the ground. Some Black survivors in critical condition were even transferred to white hospitals, which was nearly unheard of in segregated Oklahoma.
Eventually, Willows and his team would help ensure the many Black Tulsans who’d been left homeless had temporary shelter, though for some people, that meant they were forced to stay at the fairgrounds camp, which was home to around five thousand people at one time, about half the Black population in Tulsa in 1921. The Red Cross raised $100,000 in funding to help the victims, and the NAACP and Universal Negro Improvement Association sent money for relief and legal efforts, too. The Colored Citizens Relief Committee, the East End Welfare Board, the Salvation Army, several churches, and some individuals also donated time and money to help the survivors of the massacre.
Still, while many Black Tulsans were freed from the internment centers within a matter of hours, others had to live there for weeks or several months, even during winter. It all depended on who they knew, and, crucially, if they were employed by white people. The rule was that if a white person came down to vouch for a Black person, they would be released and forced to wear a “green card” to show that their release had been approved. If they didn’t possess or wear the card, they could be arrested.
Educator J. W. Hughes would later say, “Mr. Oberholtzer, city superintendent of public schools, came and called for all colored teachers, and we were taken to the old city high school, where I met my wife again. All the lady teachers were taken to the homes of the city principals and cared for nicely. We were allowed to stay in the old high school all night. . . . Miss Kimble of the domestic science department of the white high school gave us our breakfast.”
The green ID card Black Tulsans were forced to carry after the massacre
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish said, “Every Negro was accorded the same treatment, regardless of his education or other advantages. A Negro was a Negro on that day.” This was clear in not only the murder of such prominent figures as Dr. A. C. Jackson, but in how well-known and respected Black survivors fared afterward. Assistant county physician Dr. R. T. Bridgewater went to work helping victims and patients during the day, but he had to return to the camps at night since his Greenwood home had been destroyed in the fires. Black architect and contractor J. C. Latimer was also forced to stay at the camps. Though he was self-employed—a sign of success, especially in those days—that meant he didn’t have a white person to vouch for him. He was released only after he persuaded a white man to pretend to know him, saying he was his brother-in-law so he could be set free.
Although they had shelter, the people in internment camps often came down with diseases. According to the Red Cross, there were at least eight cases of premature childbirth that ended in death, and of the pregnant women treated by Red Cross doctors, “practically all have presented complications due to the riot.” Some people in the camps suffered from malnutrition, possibly because they had to pay for their own food; if they didn’t have money, they had to work for their meals. And in some cases, they were put to work cleaning up their very own neighborhood that had been destroyed by white rioters. They were also forced to confront the damage that had been done; per the Red Cross report, more than 1,250 homes had been burned, and 215 more that were spared torching had still been looted. The property damage of both the homes and businesses was estimated at just under $2 million, which totals nearly $30 million today. Still, some sources believe the damage was vastly underestimated and would currently account for anywhere from $50 million to $200 million. That damage included many businesses that had become the cornerstone of the Greenwood District. Mabel Little had lost her beauty shop. The Tulsa Star offices were gone. The brand-new Mount Zion Baptist Church building had been torched, as had the Black public library. H. L. Byars’s tailor shop was gone, and so was Elliott & Hooker’s Clothing Emporium. The white mob had even burned down the Williams family’s Dreamland Theatre.
But for many, property loss was only part of their pain. The city issued thirty-seven death certificates for the massacre—twenty-five Black men and twelve white men, all dead from gunshot wounds or burning. Nine of the Black victims had been burned so badly they could not be identified, and a stillborn Black baby was found during the shooting and fires. But those statistics are thought to be extremely conservative; several historians’ estimates average that as many as three hundred died, the majority of the victims Black. Many more were wounded.
A postcard depicting a Black man standing in the ruins of his home on June 1, 1921
One reason the death toll is so largely disputed is the fact that many survivor accounts recall witnessing the disposal of bodies of murder victims that were never counted. Black community activist Opal Long Dargan, who was five years old in 1921, remembered “some bodies had been unceremoniously dumped into the Arkansas River.” Others, like white Tulsan Ross T. Warner, saw bodies carted away on trucks or flatbed railroad cars; Black Tulsan Henry C. Whitlow, who would go on to become principal of Booker T. Washington High School, claimed to have seen more than two dozen bodies driven away. And some people reported other Black victims were incinerated at Newblock Park, which was also home to Tulsa’s landfill at the time.
Some city officials later claimed that “all those who were killed were given decent burials,” but for years, Black and white Tulsans alike have maintained that the city has a substantial number of mass graves holding massacre victims. A mass grave is a grave containing two or more human corpses, typically buried without a proper funeral service, coffins, or tombstones. They have been used to bury bodies during wars, famines, natural disasters, and in the midst of epidemics and pandemics to control the spread of diseases. Mass graves were used for victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed about fifty million people worldwide. And the Nazi Party notoriously buried the bodies of millions of Jewish people in European mass graves during the Holocaust, twenty years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, in the 1940s.
Tulsans didn’t have to wait long to find out who would be blamed for the massacre—and the news was likely unsurprising to the residents of Greenwood. A grand jury had been assembled, which was presided over by District Judge Valjean Biddison, and officiated by State Attorney General S. P. Freeling with assistance from Kathryn Van Leuven, Oklahoma’s first female prosecuting attorney. In a June 25 report, the grand jury stated: “We find that the recent race riot was the direct result of an effort on the part of a certain group of colored men who appeared at the courthouse on the night of May 31, 1921. . . . There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms. The assembly was quiet until the arrival of armed Negroes, which precipitated and was the direct cause of the entire affair.”
In other words, the grand jury blamed the men trying to stop the promised violence instead of the ones who had gathered to lynch Dick Rowland, murdered with abandon when they didn’t get their way, and left a destroyed community in their wake.
The grand jury also indicted nearly ninety people, primarily Black men, including Greenwood cofounder, businessman, and hotel owner J. B. Stradford. Stradford fled Tulsa after the indict
ment, only to be arrested in Independence, Kansas, two days later. Oklahoma newspaper the Okmulgee Times wasted no time in accusing him of inciting the violence, writing: “If Governor Allen of Kansas wants to help the authorities fix the blame for the rioting at Tulsa last week” he would “not refuse to” send Stradford back to Oklahoma. “Stradford, a generally undesirable citizen, can probably tell as much as anyone about the real cause of the trouble in Tulsa.” J. B. Stradford’s son, an attorney from Chicago, helped his father get his freedom from the Kansas authorities, and Stradford never returned to Tulsa. He settled down in Chicago, where he once again worked as a successful attorney and businessman.
Although white Tulsa Tribune editor Richard Lloyd Jones clearly helped instigate the race massacre with his incendiary article about Dick Rowland and his alleged editorial, Tulsa Star editor A. J. Smitherman would ultimately end up paying the price, both in his career and personal life. Not only was the Black journalist’s entire newspaper office, printing press, and home destroyed in the massacre, but he was thrown in jail for charges related to rioting—organizing armed Black men to defend Dick Rowland and the residents of Greenwood—and indicted by a Tulsa grand jury. Smitherman eventually posted bail and fled Tulsa with his wife and kids. They started new lives halfway across the country, first in Massachusetts, then in Buffalo, New York, where Smitherman founded another newspaper. He ran the Buffalo Star (later renamed the Empire Star) from 1932 until his death in 1961; the paper folded soon thereafter. Smitherman never did face prosecution for the alleged crime of inciting a riot.
Not only were Black people blamed for the massacre, but they were also punished for crimes they didn’t commit. Black Tulsans were barred from buying or even possessing guns for several weeks afterward. They were also not allowed to visit servants’ quarters in white neighborhoods, except for “those employed regularly on the premises.”
Conversely, no white people were ever imprisoned for the murders and property destruction over the eighteen hours they terrorized Greenwood. One person was held accountable for his actions that day, however: The negligent police chief John Gustafson, who abandoned the courthouse as the mob steadily assembled the evening of May 31, was found guilty of “dereliction of duty” and fired from his job. According to the Tulsa World, Judge Oliphant, the man who witnessed the murder of A. C. Jackson, testified that one of the men who’d confronted the doctor was a Tulsa police officer—who was either currently serving or had previously been on the force—named Brown, but that he couldn’t identify who had shot his neighbor. None of the men were charged for Dr. Jackson’s murder.
Although Black Tulsans had witnessed friends and family members being murdered or dragged away, never to be seen again, and lost their homes, businesses, and valuables, they were resilient. Many of them tried to rebuild soon after the dust settled, but their efforts were thwarted by the Tulsa City Commission, which passed a new fire code that stated all property in the Greenwood District must be rebuilt with fireproof materials. This amended code meant most Black Tulsans looking to rebuild couldn’t afford the required materials and amounted to a clear attempt to prohibit the reconstruction of Greenwood. At the same time, a group of white businessmen tried to force Greenwood residents to rebuild farther to the northeast end of the city so that it could use the cleared district to build warehouses. They ultimately failed, as they couldn’t raise money for their plan, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court later overturned the new fire code, declaring it illegal, which allowed Greenwood residents to rebuild in earnest.
And rebuild they did—though it would never be the same Greenwood. Several of the influential community members, like Stradford, Smitherman, and O. W. Gurley, who left Tulsa for Los Angeles, would never return. Others would settle down in towns outside of Tulsa, too traumatized by what had occurred to start all over in what had once been a city of promise. And the Black Tulsans who did want to stay and rebuild were being sabotaged at every turn; insurance companies denied the majority of the property claims because the massacre was categorized as a “riot,” a circumstance that was automatically excluded from most insurance policies. The only business owner to receive compensation for their losses was a white pawnshop owner, who was reimbursed for the nearly $4,000 in guns and ammunition that were stolen by the white mob.
The Williams Dreamland Theatre, located at 129 N. Greenwood Avenue, after being destroyed by the white mob
Another white property owner filed a lawsuit against the Tulsa police force for its part in the massacre, but despite the witnesses he provided who recounted they’d seen police officers destroying the Greenwood District, the lawsuit was dismissed. Some people also claimed that the massacre had been planned by city authorities and the white community long before May 30, and that the incident between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page was just an excuse—or was even staged—for white people to destroy the Greenwood District. This has not been confirmed, though there is no denying tensions were running high between the white and Black communities well before Dick Rowland set foot in that elevator.
Speaking of Rowland—what happened to him and Page, whose interaction fueled the flames?
Page disappeared on June 1, and no one has been able to trace her whereabouts since 1921. And though it was the arrest of Dick Rowland that started it all, by June 1 he was all but forgotten as Greenwood was looted and burned. According to the Tulsa World, the prosecuting attorneys dismissed all charges against Rowland, “purportedly at the written request of Page.” After spending the night in the courthouse jail, Rowland also left town, never to be seen again. Rumors abounded, including that Page and Rowland were in fact romantically linked and had met up in Kansas City before parting ways. However, there is no proof that happened, nor is there any documentation that Rowland died in the Pacific Northwest, one common line of speculation.
The Tulsa Race Massacre seemed to be over as quickly as it had begun, with Black Tulsans left to fend for themselves as they attempted to rebuild after such tragedy. With the judicial system and public officials unwilling to take responsibility for the violence, murder, and destruction of property that had ravaged Black Wall Street, the residents of Greenwood had no choice but to look forward for hope and healing. But as they planned for their future, white Tulsans and Oklahomans alike wouldn’t give them the dignity of openly mourning all that had been lost. Many white people who had lived through the Tulsa Race Massacre wanted nothing more than to bury the past.
Until Tulsa does right by Greenwood, this district will forever be a crime scene.
—Reverend Dr. Robert Turner,
Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma
7
The Legacy of Greenwood
While many Tulsans at the time would have preferred that the whole incident be immediately forgotten, it wasn’t—at least not at first. Dozens of newspapers around the country reported on the massacre: The New York Times ran a front-page story, and the appalling event even made international news, with a headline in the Times of London. In the United States, citizens from as far as Philadelphia and as near as Kansas were condemning Tulsa for what had taken place, calling the massacre a “horror” and a “disgrace.”
Oklahomans were split on the national reaction to the event. Some white Tulsans seemed proud of what had happened. They bragged about their involvement and passed around postcards that displayed graphic photos of massacre victims, similar to the postcards and photographs that were distributed around the United States after lynchings of Black Americans. More than seventeen hundred members of the revamped Ku Klux Klan continued to terrorize Black Tulsans over the course of the following year. In April 1922, they paraded through downtown Tulsa—under an airplane that was flying an electrically lit cross. While it was never determined if the KKK was officially involved in the massacre, a number of Klan members were elected to Tulsa city and county office in 1922.
Some Black Tulsans did not want the event to be forgotten, for very different reasons. Mary Elizabeth Jones
Parrish, a Black educator and journalist who survived the massacre with her daughter, Florence Mary, wrote about the massacre for the Oklahoma Interracial Commission, a group focused on preventing lynchings. Parrish recorded the event from her own memories, and transcribed interviews with witnesses, as well as testimonies of other survivors. Along with photographs detailing the damage that had been done, Parrish published her account in her 1922 book, Events of the Tulsa Disaster—the first to be published about the massacre.
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish
However, it would be a long time before anything else recounting the event would be printed. Many people, including most public officials, didn’t appreciate the widespread national criticism of their state. Oklahoma had been a state for only fourteen years at that time. It was still trying to establish itself in the United States, and a shameful event like the Greenwood massacre would only make people think that Tulsa was an unruly, violent, racist place to live. Political leaders and business owners didn’t want the story of the massacre hanging over them.
Thus began a concerted effort to erase it from Oklahoma’s history.
A prime example can be found in the archives of the Tulsa Tribune. While the paper had been so eager to report on Dick Rowland’s alleged “assault,” the subject of the ensuing massacre was conspicuously absent from future issues commemorating past events. In the 1930s, the paper published an editorial series called “Fifteen Years Ago” that shone a spotlight on events in Tulsa’s past from the same day. The June 1936 issue, however, mentioned nothing about the massacre; instead, it highlighted parties from June 1921, news about people who had graduated from Tulsa high schools that year, and the goings-on of Tulsa residents, such as who was entertaining out-of-town visitors and who had gone on trips themselves. While one could assume that the Tribune believed it was too soon to rehash the massacre, ten years later, in June 1946, the newspaper once again ignored the subject in its “Twenty-Five Years Ago” feature.
Black Birds in the Sky Page 12
