V
When Governor James B. A. Robertson visited Tulsa on June 2, 1921, he ordered that a grand jury be impaneled to make a thorough investigation of the riot. District Judge W. Valjean Biddison was named the presiding jurist, and State Attorney General S. P. Freeling—assisted by Kathryn Van Leuven—was to officiate in the investigations. Robertson, who said that he was “determined that the cause of this riot shall be ascertained and that the responsibility for the same fixed and the guilty parties brought to justice,” instructed Freeling to go to Tulsa at once to preserve and gather evidence for the grand jury. Furthermore, the governor told the attorney general, “If, in your opinion the facts warrant, the peace officers who are charged with the duty of maintaining order should be removed from office.”48
The jurors for the grand jury were selected by June 9. Four days later, it published a call in the newspapers for all to come and testify who so desired. In its twelve-day session, the grand jury initiated some twenty-seven cases, which indicted over eighty-five persons.49 On June 25, it handed down its final report. Although the report condemned the “exaggerated and untrue reports of the press, purporting to give the facts, both as to the cause and to the result of the riot,” in it the grand jury—like virtually every other group of white Tulsans —clearly blamed black Tulsans for the riot:
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, for the purpose of protecting one Dick Rowland then and now in the custody of the sheriff of Tulsa county for an alleged assault upon a young white woman. We have not been able to find any evidence either from white or colored citizens that any organized attempt was made or planned to take from the sheriff’s custody any prisoner; the crowd assembed about the courthouse being purely spectators and curiosity seekers resulting from rumors circulated about the city. There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms. The assembly was quiet until the arrival of the armed negroes, which precipitated and was the direct cause of the entire affair.
Although the grand jury reiterated its claim that the “presence of the armed negroes” was the direct cause of the riot, they further claimed that “there existed indirect causes more vital to the public interest than the direct cause.” Among them, the report asserted, “were agitation among the negroes of social equality, and the laxity of law enforcement on the part of the officers of the city and county.”50
The report claimed that “certain propaganda and more or less agitation had been going on among the colored population for some time,” and that this had resulted “in the accumulation of firearms among the people and the storage of quantities of ammunition, all of which was accumulative in the minds of the negro which led them as a people to believe in equal rights, social equality and their ability to demand the same.” The grand jury further stated, “We are glad to exonerate the great majority of the colored people who neither had knowledge of nor part in... the accumulation of arms and ammunition,” but added that they had sought to “ascertain the names of the particular parties who took part and the indictments returned show our findings.”51
Many of the recommendations which the grand jury presented to the public concerned what they felt to be the gross laxity of law enforcement in Tulsa County, with “laws being openly violated in many ways, by and with the consent, if not even the assistance, of the officers.” In one recommendation along these lines, a plea was made for stricter law enforcement, while in another, the grand jury asked for further racial segregation:
We find that police protection with negro policemen as officers has been insufficient; that violations of the law have been condoned and while raids have been made and also some arrests, the same offense by the same offender was repeated almost immediately. We therefore recommend that “colored town” be policed by white officers, that indiscriminate mingling of white and colored people in dance halls and other places of amusement be positively prohibited and every law rigidly enforced in the end that a proper relationship may be maintained between the two races, and that every safeguard that may be had for the positive protection of life and property everywhere.52
On the one hand, the report stated, “We believe, however, that law violations have not been contained to the colored district, but that the ‘choc’ joints and ‘houses of prostitution’ are more or less common in the city of Tulsa as well as in the county.” Nevertheless, the grand jury was anxious that the exact opposite impression be given to outsiders.
It is the observation of the public as well as members of the grand jury that the appearance of traffic policemen at street crossings dressed in “short sleeves” with a gun on his “hip” tends to give impression to the ouside world of a spirit of lawlessness which does not exist. It is the conviction of the grand jury that if the safety of the public demands a traffic policeman to carry a gun on his hip, courtesy to the public should also require that any policeman wearing a gun should in every case be required to wear a coat to the end that no false impression be given to the general public or to the outside world.
The report of the grand jury concluded with a plea to the public to take an active interest in “selecting and electing men and women of ability and character who desire to make Tulsa fit for the home of the most respectable, home loving and law abiding citizens in America.”53
State Attorney General Freeling was not at all pleased with this report. According to Harlow’s Weekly, an Oklahoma magazine, “he refused to have anything to do with this report and in open court after conducting the preceedings of the grand jury he expressed his dissatisfaction at the result of its investigation.” Little action was taken by the state, however.54
The twenty-seven cases that the grand jury initiated too ended for the most part in inaction. The charges filed were for riot in seven of these cases, for grand larceny in twelve, and for arson in two. The other six each involved a different charge, including assault with attempt to kill, pointing a pistol at another person, and the case involving Dick Rowland and Sarah Page, with Rowland being charged with attempt to rape. Perhaps the most important of these cases was the first one initiated by the grand jury, that of the State of Oklahoma v. Will Robinson, et al. In this case, some fifty-seven persons, apparently all of them black, were charged with rioting. Those charged included A. J. Smitherman, editor of the Tulsa Star, and J. K. Smitherman, a deputy sheriff.55
Court records reveal that twenty of these cases were definitely dismissed, at least eighteen of them by the motion of the county attorney. A motion to dismiss the Robinson case was filed on November 22, 1922, and it too was apparently dismissed. Five of the remaining six seem never to have gotten off the ground because the bench warrants which were issued for them were never served. The final case was also probably dismissed, or simply allowed to die.56
Police Chief Gustafson was suspended from office by Judge Biddi-son and was later found guilty on two counts—“failure to take proper precautions for the protection of life and property during the riot and conspiracy to free automobile thieves and collect rewards.” One black Tulsan may have been sentenced to thirty days in the county jail for allegedly carrying a concealed weapon, but no white Tulsans were ever sent to prison for the killing, burning, and looting of the race riot of 1921.57
There was one other detail. Sarah Page refused to prosecute and Dick Rowland was exonerated.58
Chapter 5
The Segregation
of Memory
It is part of our nature as human beings—whether as individuals, groups, or societies—that we create “pasts” with which we can live. If the reality of our history poses questions about our lives of today which are too painful or ominous to ponder, then we will mold our past into a less threatening chronicle, or repress it entirely. If anything, our “historic memory” is as malleable as our personal one. Thus the way in which the Tulsa race riot is remembered speaks to us as much about the Tulsa and Americ
a of today as it does about the events of 1921. The historical context of the riot and the scope of its effects must therefore be considered alongside the direct investigation of events and responses.
I
What is to be made of the madness that was the Tulsa riot of 1921? The forces which helped to create it were many. Some of them affected the entire nation; others affected only Oklahoma; some were peculiar to Tulsa.
The various racial ideologies which were being popularized nationally helped to breed situations in which large-scale racial violence could incubate. By the time of the riot, Tulsa had become a bastion of Ku Klux Klan strength in the Southwest. The mythical “reconstruction” of black Tulsa by politically and socially influential white Tulsans, be they members of the hooded order or not, revealed a total disregard for the rights of black citizens.1
Concomitantly, the actions of those black Tulsans who defended their homes, businesses, fellow citizens, and families were tangible examples of the doctrine of a steadfast self-defense which many black Americans were advocating. Such a doctrine had long been a part of black history, but the contradictions raised by the black experience in the First World War, coupled with the acute rise of white violence, increased its importance during the immediate postwar years. Indeed, O. W. Gurley, an affluent black Tulsan who suffered heavy losses due to the riot, laid much of the blame for the violence on the group of blacks who went down to the courthouse. The leader of this group, Gurley stated, was a tall man “who came back from France with exaggerated ideas of equality.”2 The Tulsa riot, along with the other race riots of the postwar period, was in one sense a physical realization of some of the major black and white racial ideologies of the era.
The political currents flowing through Oklahoma during this period were also important. The decline of a major political organization in the state, the Oklahoma Socialist party, which was at least rhetorically supportive of black rights, and the rapid rise of another, the Ku Klux Klan, which was clearly anti-black, was not without significance. But neither political development explains why the riot happened. Rather, they were indicative of a more basic ideological shift within the state and region. Dallas and Shreveport, for example, were other centers of Klan strength in the Southwest, yet neither of them experienced racial violence on the scale of Tulsa during this period. The nationwide recession of 1921, which severely affected Tulsa, may have also played a role in increasing social tension, but economic woes do not by themselves create racial violence, as the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s revealed.3
Tulsa’s vice conditions and the nature of its local law enforcement were highly relevant. Five weeks before the riot, in April, 1921, a federal agent visited Tulsa undercover to investigate crime conditions in the city. In his report, he stated:
Summary of conditions: Vice conditions in this city are very bad. Gambling, bootlegging and prostitution are very much in evidence. At the leading hotels and rooming houses the bell hops and porters are pimping for women, and also selling booze. Regarding violations of the law these prostitutes and pimps solicit without any fear of the police, as they will invariably remind you that you are safe in these houses.4
The abundance of crime in Tulsa, coupled with the extremely selective nature of the city’s law enforcement, helped to create a situation where the role of the police in the actual policing of the city was ill-defined.5
This situation was further exacerbated by the city’s “vigilante” tradition. The incident involving the seventeen IWW members revealed much more to the community than the rabid hysteria of the wartime Tulsa World or Judge Evans’ total disregard for legal justice. It also showed the city that even when a guilty verdict was brought in against accused persons, the Tulsa police force could not be depended upon to protect them. This fact, joined with the rising number of lynchings of blacks in Oklahoma, pointed to the involvement of the city police force in a more generalized civic ethos of anti-black, anti-radical militance. If the incident involving the alleged assailants of O. W. Leonard in 1919 temporarily calmed black fears, the lynching of Roy Belton in 1920 merely reconfirmed them: no accused blacks were safe in the hands of the white law enforcement officials in Tulsa. The black distrust of white police only increased when white officers began to invade black Tulsa and harass its citizens. Only the mode of white aggression was new. The style had long been a part of the local custom.6
The incident between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page, whatever the actual circumstances may have been, was important, but the affair needs to be placed in perspective. It seems highly probable that almost any other alleged “serious crime” involving a black “assailant” and a white “victim” could have played the catalytic role that the Rowland-Page incident did. The Leonard affair revealed that some black Tulsans were very concerned over the relatively “mild” newspaper coverage of such an alleged crime. The incident also made it clear that black Tulsans were prepared to act forthrightly to ensure that accused members of their race were guaranteed a courtroom trial. And if Roy Belton had been black, he probably would have been lynched sooner. But the incident in the Drexel building had an important interracial sexual dynamic, and the white taboo regarding black men and white women was probably particularly strong in this area where there were a significant number more males than females. During this period the state was shifting from a primarily immigrant population to a temporarily more stable one, but still in the older age groups the disproportion between the sexes was as high as three to two.7
With all these related but subsidiary dynamics placed into perspective, it is clear that the single most important precipitating ingredient in the Tulsa race riot was the manner in which the Tulsa Tribune “covered” the Rowland-Page incident. Indeed, the newspaper’s specific coverage, and not what actually transpired in the Drexel building, is the incident. Whether or not a complete copy of the May 31, 1921, issue of the Tribune may surface again, there is a fair amount of evidence as to what it did contain, and its role in the creation of the race riot was noted by both blacks and whites, including the white adjutant general of Oklahoma.8 The Tribune, through its May 31 issue, was the single most important force in the creation of the lynch mob outside of the courthouse; anything Dick Rowland might have done was secondary. In many ways the role of the Tribune is directly comparable to that of the World in the 1917 incident involving that attack on the seventeen IWW members.
Yet, though the Tribune clearly helped mobilize the lynch mob and thus directly contributed to the race riot, the Tulsa Police Department and the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office were also important factors. The law enforcement authorities knew the purpose of the white crowd outside of the courthouse. If these authorities had taken steps to prevent the crowd from forming, or if they had dispersed it once it had formed, the riot might have been averted. Here, Chief Gustafson was particularly at fault as it appears that Sheriff McCullough was attempting to make an honest effort to defend Rowland with his small force of men. Similarly, the predominantly white police force must also share heavily in the blame for the destruction of black Tulsa. Had their efforts, and those of the other law enforcement bodies, including the National Guard, been geared toward disarming and dispersing the white rioters, rather than disarming and interning blacks, much of the black district might have been saved. The mass deputizing of whites from the lynch mob by the police only encouraged the devastation.
The attempted intervention of those armed black Tulsans who went down to the courthouse was another ingredient in the riot, but to claim that they “caused” the race riot, as many have, is absurd. It is part of the nature of racism that hatred directed against an individual can very easily be translated into hatred against that person’s entire race. The Tribune’s coverage of the Rowland-Page incident had helped to facilitate this shift with its headline: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”9 But it was at the courthouse where the “immediate” hatred of the whites shifted from being aimed solely at Dick Rowland to all blacks in general, a
nd the actions of those blacks who attempted to intervene were instrumental in initiating this transformation. This shift was further aggravated by the courthouse battle which slowly wound its way to black Tulsa. When it reached the black neighborhoods, the conflict was no longer a white lynch mob against Rowland—and a black attempt to prevent it—but simply a case of white against black.
The social, political, and racial conditions in Tulsa in the spring of 1921 were clearly those which would allow large-scale racial violence, and the action or inaction of certain parts of the community on May 31 and June 1 “complemented” the underlying conditions and brought on the violence and destruction.
II
Aside from the deaths, the human suffering, and the destruction, the riot had other effects. For one thing, it appears that there was never another attempt at lynching a black person in Tulsa County. Beatings and floggings, however, continued. In May of 1922 black Deputy Sheriff John K. Smitherman had one of his ears cut off by a group of masked whites. Less than a year and a half later, in August, 1923, a white Tulsan—a Jew—by the name of Nathan Hantaman was picked up and questioned by the Tulsa police under suspicion of being a narcotics seller, or so the police claimed. In a situation which bears much in common with the IWW case in 1917, Hantaman was later released, and, according to one historian, “by apparent prearrangement, snatched up from the street by the Klan” in front of a theater on Greenwood Avenue. He was then taken outside of town, “stripped, whipped, and his genitals beaten to a pulp.” The incident itself became the catalyst for Oklahoma Governor John C. Walton’s “war” on the Ku Klux Klan which did much to wreck the order both statewide and in Tulsa.10 Nevertheless, the lynchings ceased; at a terrible price, black Tulsans had shown their white brethren that they were not going to let it happen here.
Death in a Promised Land Page 10
