Tulsa Race Riot

“Lutheran” is a black church.  More Lutherans worship in Africa on any given Sunday than N. America and Europe combined.  In the mid 90s, we were church youth sponsors and had a joint event with another church in Tulsa which had our same church name.  Their church was overwhelmingly Afro-American. Ours was not.  They took us to see Edna, an elderly woman who had survived the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.  She sat calmly telling about how she was just 12, the gunshots began, and she fled north, eventually hiding in a dog house at a farm.  The family found her the next morning and was kind, protecting her identity when rioters came looting and trying to kill blacks, then helping her find her father.  All in her family were killed but her father.  She eventually became something of a pillar of hope in the Tulsa Greenwood community.  She got a college degree, taught school at the now defunct grade school along Peoria St. in North Tulsa.  Edna began to talk about what a vibrant town there used to be along Greenwood Ave.—2 theatres, 2 newspapers, 13 churches, over 100 small businesses.  I asked why the tremendous animosity developed in whites of that time.  She thought maybe jealousy over successful blacks was a reason. “Many, like me, were mixed race and had aspirations,” she recalled. 

            The May 31 “riot” of 1921 occurred because of a controversial incident in an elevator.  A white girl, Sarah Page, accused a young black man, Dick Rowland of raping her.  He said he stumbled onto the elevator and thence hurt his knee.  The sheriff arrested him and put him in the county jail. The next day Tulsa Tribune printed her story but not his. Two crowds gathered the courthouse that night, one demanding he be lynched, another of mixed races demanding a fair trial.  Oklahoma had a ugly history--38 lynchings, a large KKK, and segregation. Much of the violence centered around Tulsa.  A gunshot rang out and the lynch mob began firing on the others who retreated into the Greenwood area northeast of downtown Detroit Street. The attackers went crazy robbing pawn shops of $43,000 worth of guns and ammo.  Several thousand whites were involved eventually, killing an unknown number of Afro-Americans.  Historians estimate about 300 killed with another 531 seeking medical attention.  It was almost entirely one-sided. All the buildings along Greenwood were burned, 1115 homes burned, over half the 11,000 Afro-Americans left homeless or without businesses.  Survivors camped on a baseball field, in the convention center, and at Golden Gate Park. State Troopers arrived the next day to stop the mobs, but Greenwood was never to return to a healthy community.  White Tulsa had in effect, created a slum.

            But Edna had hopes.  She was mixed race and attended  church with the family who had saved her.  She spoke out fearlessly against the KKK. “Perhaps the most worthless organization ever created.”--Jerry Shaw, Osage leader and fmr. Director of Wichita State University Native American Studies.   So why, in the later 1920s, did Tulsa County have more KKK incidents (74) than the rest of Oklahoma combined?  An OSU historian told me that roughneck Tulseytown (its original name) had too much poverty, gambling, bootleggers, whores and faithless husbands.  It got transferred to blacks and Indians by psychological projection. Since nothing much has been proven sociologically, perhaps this opinion is as good as any.

            The final irony was that Sheriff William McCullough quietly slipped out of Tulsa with Dick Rowland in custody.  Sarah Page refused to witness, and Rowland was exonerated by a grand jury. Some say she and he simply had a lover’s quarrel.