Death in a Promised Land (5 page)

Swearing in new Klansmen in Oklahoma. Tulsa was one of the state’s strongest Klan centers.

Courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library

In the latter months of 1921, “masked bands” whipped at least thirteen persons in Tulsa County. County officials eschewed making inquiries into these beatings on the grounds that the victims “probably got what they deserved and that formal investigations would only bring criticism to the investigators.” Such an official stance, of course, amounted to an “open invitation” to the Klan for further extralegal acts of violence. As might be expected in such an environment, the influence of the Klan became notably pronounced. As one authority has written, “In Tulsa County the Klan could not lose.” In the November 1922 elections, for example, both the Republican and Democratiç candidates for county attorney and sheriff were Klansmen.
¹¹

Recruiting for World War I, downtown Tulsa.

Courtesy of the Tulsa County Historical Society.

II

How did black Tulsans—and black Americans in general—cope with this increasingly oppressive racial climate? How were they to respond to yet another period of heightened white violence? Many concurred with one black veteran from Chicago who, in describing his postwar outlook, stated: “I ain’t looking for trouble, but if it comes my way I ain’t dodging.”
¹²

Participation in the First World War had indeed helped to clarify black thinking on the subject of white militancy. The fact that black soldiers had fought and died in France only added to black America’s indignation toward the sharp postwar wave of white violence. During the war, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had urged in
Crisis:
“Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” A year later, however, in September of 1919,
Crisis
stated: “To-day we raise the terrible weapon of Self-Defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”
Crisis
did, though, advise its readers to “tread here in solemn caution” and not to “seek reform by violence.”
¹³
In a similar vein, Marcus Garvey chaired a convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which resolved in 1920 that “the Negro should adopt every means to protect himself against barbarous practices inflicted upon him because of his color.”
¹⁴

This concept of self-defense was voiced in a number of other black periodicals and by numerous other black leaders. Some were quite militant. The
Wisconsin Weekly Blade
stated that one “cannot be too radical in a righteous cause.” Black socialist leader A. Philip Randolph, noting that Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence recognized the law of self-defense, concluded that blacks should employ armed force against white assailants, and black journalist John Edward Bruce resolved that “equality is not obtained by gift but by struggle.”
¹⁵

At times, black spokesmen combined religious references with desperate visions of apocalypse. In October, 1919,
Challenge Magazine
of New York editorialized:

America hates, lynches, enslaves us not because we are black, but because we are weak. A strong, united Negro race will not be mistreated any more than a strong united Japanese race. It is always strength over weakness, might over right.

But with education comes thought, with thought comes action; with action comes freedom.

Read! Read! Read! Then when the mob comes, whether with torch or with gun, let us stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.
¹⁶

Black religious leaders, it should be added, were far from quiescent on these issues. For example, when a number of black Methodist bishops were asked to condemn the use of violence in 1919, many of them “answered that self-restraint and patience should be practised, but that if white assailants would not desist, Negroes should use arms if necessary to protect themselves and their homes.”
¹⁷

Black Tulsans were not unaffected by these intellectual currents which swept across black America during this period. Both W. E. B Du Bois and Chief Alfred Sam—a black leader who advocated a return of American blacks to Africa—spoke in Tulsa before the race riot. There had been interest in forming an NAACP chapter in Tulsa at least as early as 1917, and black organizations in the city prior to the riot included a local chapter of the militant African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). With branches scattered throughout the United States and the Caribbean, the ABB proposed that “Blacks organize into trade unions, build cooperatively owned businesses, and create paramilitary units to safeguard the community.” And black Tulsa, it should be added, had its share of World War I veterans, some of whom had fought in France.
¹⁸

Similarly, extant issues of Tulsa’s black press reveal a concern with the problems confronting black Americans nationwide—including that of black responses to white violence. Although differences of opinion existed, one editorial in the Tulsa
Star
in 1920 spoke for a large segment of the city’s black community on that problem. In the editorial, entitled “Misguided Oklahoma Patriots,” the newspaper was critical of an armed group of Oklahoma City blacks who had gathered after a black had been lynched by whites. Although the
Star
stated that it was the paper’s aim “to seek honorable and peaceful ways of settling the differences which unavoidably now and then crop up between the races,” the newspaper added that “it is quite evident that the proper time to afford protection to any prisoner is BEFORE and during the time he is being lynched.”
¹⁹
Thus, clearly, there were black Tulsans who were not “looking for trouble,” but were not about to “dodge” should it come their way.

III

And there was no dearth of “trouble” in Tulsa during the years immediately preceding the race riot. In particular, three incidents warrant our attention, for each of them previewed elements which were to be at work in the spring of 1921. They occurred in 1917, 1919, and 1920, and although only one of them involved racial violence
per se,
collectively they form a vital section of the necessary backdrop against which the events of the riot must be seen.

The first episode began at about four o’clock in the morning on October 29, 1917, when the home of J. Edgar Pew, a wealthy oil man, was bombed in Tulsa. Although Pew, his wife, and son escaped unharmed, the blast did considerable damage to the house, demolishing the front porch and blowing the front wall of the house inward. Pew was vice-president of the Carter Oil Company, a major subsidiary of Standard Oil.
²⁰
Four hours later, an oil worker named W. J. Powers was arrested at the Frisco train station, but was not charged with the bombing, pending an investigation. Later that day, the chief of police, E. L. Lucas, offered the opinion that the attack on the Pew home “is the first in a series of depredidations [
sic
] in a gigantic plot to destroy the property of the oil companies and the residences of the leaders in the oil business in the Mid Continent field.”
²¹

In the same spirit, the Tulsa
World
—one of the city’s three major white newspapers at the time—claimed to have evidence from “unimpeachable sources” to implicate the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in a story which carried the headline, “
I.W.W. PLOT BREAKS PREMATURELY IN BLOWING UP OF PEW RESIDENCE.
” The newspaper claimed that members of the IWW had been sent to Tulsa from all over the country, and that the “danger cannot be exaggerated.” As for Powers, the
World
reported that he was “caught trying to leave town,” and that his “excited haste” in denying IWW membership “confirmed the belief of the detectives that he is a member.” Furthermore, the newspaper claimed: “The
World
is one of the institutions marked for destruction. Four letters have been received in the past four weeks from I.W.W’s and in each one reference is made to the ‘certain downfall of capitalist newspapers.’ The
World
is ready for them.”
²²

The authorities investigating the case claimed to have but few clues, and felt that the bomb plot may have originated in Muskogee.
²³
While the story briefly died in the city’s other newspapers, the
World
continued its attack on the IWW. In an October 31 editorial entitled “Patience Has an End,” the newspaper endorsed vigilante solutions, likening political radicals to horse thieves and recommending similar treatment: “Why should any discrimination be made between a horse thief and one of these cowardly vandals.” Elsewhere in the same issue, the
World
—no longer claiming to have any evidence linking the IWW to the Pew bombing—was even more explicit in its final solution to the IWW.

Right here is a good place to disagree with the statement, frequently expressed by Oklahoma editors, that the I.W.W.’s and other pro-Hun individuals should “leave the country.” As a matter of fact, there is no place for them to go. The only relief is a wholesale application of concentration camps. Or, what is hemp worth now, the long foot?
²⁴

Such extravagant anxiety on the part of the
World
was traceable, in part, to the continuing presence of political radicalism in Oklahoma, a phenomenon evident in the Populist uprising in the 1890s and superseded by a strong socialist presence in the state in the first decades of the twentieth century, of which the Industrial Workers of the World was a part. That the IWW was not pro-German, but was rather against the war, did not seem to concern the
World
in its journalistic campaign against them.
²⁵
Yet, there was an even more important reason for the newspaper’s vehemence against the organization. It had to do with the fact that the Tulsa IWW office, which had been set up at the New Fox Building on Brady Street in January, 1917, was a local of the IWW-affiliated Oil Field Workers’ Union (OFWU), and the union had reportedly organized some three hundred oil workers in the Tulsa area under the IWW banner. The prospect of the Mid-Continent oil field’s being completely organized by the OFWU was more than a prowar, pro-oil-company newspaper such as the
World
was willing to tolerate.
²⁶

A week after the Pew bombing, the Tulsa police raided the IWW hall on Brady Street, finding the men inside “seated about the place, playing cards and reading.” The local secretary was receiving dues from some members “and placing stamps in their membership books.” When the secretary informed the police—who had immediately begun to search the hall—that the men were paying rent for the hall and asked to see a search warrant, the head of the police raiding party “replied he did not give a damn if we were paying rent for four places [as] they would search them whenever they felt like it.” The men inside offered no resistance and, though no incriminating evidence was found, the eleven men present were arrested and placed under the highest bond Oklahoma law permitted. One prisoner was a local printer and another worked as a plumber for the Monarch Plumbing Company. Neither of these two men could possibly have been guilty of vagrancy, which was the charge lodged.
²⁷

The
World
declared that with the raid, “War on the I.W.W. was declared by the city of Tulsa last night.” This was indeed the case, if the newspaper was referring to Tulsa’s municipal government. The union men were political prisoners in a city where many looked with disdain at the current oil workers’ strike in Texas and Louisiana, a strike which some alleged to have been influenced by the IWW.
²⁸
Police Captain Wilkerson, who led the raid, stated: “Regardless of the outcome of the cases, we are going to arrest every man who is found loitering about the I.W.W. headquarters. If they get out of jail and go back there we will arrest them again, and again and again. Tulsa is not big enough to hold any traitors during our government’s crisis, and the sooner these fellows get out of town the better for them.”
²⁹
Wilkerson’s words proved to be true. The next evening, police detectives raided the IWW hall once again, and arrested the one man who was there, who soon joined the other eleven in the city jail. (One of the twelve had provided for bail, but his bondsman backed out, leaving him incarcerated.)
³⁰