Death in a Promised Land (17 page)

Mary E. Jones Parrish, writing about the East End Welfare Board, succinctly stated that “it was through the inspiration supplied by this committee, working in harmony with the Red Cross, that Greenwood has been rebuilt today.” Yet, except in that the East End Welfare Board may have been the recipient of donations from the NAACP and others, this group probably lacked any real funds of its own, and its role in the rebuilding must be placed in perspective. Rather, the Board appears largely to have been an important agent in the organization of black responses to local white “relief” policies, and in the direction of legitimate relief efforts. The Red Cross, however, had a larger treasury to draw from and it expended some funds for the rebuilding of black Tulsa. When the organization terminated its relief work in the city at a program given on Christmas Eve, 1921, it had expended over $100,000. The Red Cross had employed an average of fifteen carpenters during the preceding three months “to help widows, the ill and the physically handicapped” to rebuild. In addition, the organization had purchased and furnished some building supplies—part of which had been donated by some lumber and hardware dealers—which included “some three-hundred and seventy-thousand square feet of lumber, over sixteen thousand feet of screen wire and thousands of dollars worth of other materials.”
⁴⁶

While Tulsa’s white leaders assured the rest of the nation that the city would rebuild the destroyed black district, locally they charted a directly opposite course. Something approaching one thousand black Tulsans were forced to spend the winter of 1921–1922 living in tents.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce

Yet, as important as these donations were, the role of the Red Cross, too, must be viewed in perspective. Property losses in black Tulsa due to the riot ran into the millions of dollars. While many black Tulsans were aided in some form by the Red Cross, many others were not. The primary problem which all black Tulsans faced who had lost their homes and their businesses in the riot was where to secure the capital to rebuild. Tulsa historian Henry Whitlow has suggested that some “began to rebuild with private funds and many borrowed money out of town and out of state.” It was ironically fortunate that “Deep Greenwood” did not include a bank in the spring of 1921, for it, too, would have surely been destroyed by the white rioters. Some black Tulsans had money in white banks downtown, which they used to rebuild. Who rebuilt black Tulsa? In the end, black Tulsans themselves, with some help from outside sources, must be credited with the reconstruction of their community—at interest. And in a spirit reminiscent of the American frontier, at times they combined their labor in the rebuilding of each other’s homes.
⁴⁷

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.”
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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.
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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.
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There was one other detail. Sarah Page refused to prosecute and Dick Rowland was exonerated.
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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 America 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.