Tulsa race riot
The Tulsa race riot was rioting involving blacks and whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, on 31 May – 1 June 1921. The whites had some support from the police and the National Guard. The blacks were outgunned and outnumbered and suffered the largest casualties. Numbers killed and wounded are unclear, with the highest stating hundreds killed. Around 25-40% of those killed, according to official count, are said to be whites. A black district of the city, the Greenwood or "Black Wall Street" district, was invaded and extensively damaged, to a large degree by fire.
Contents
Claimed massacre
Politically correct sources try give the impression of it being a massacre of unarmed blacks, preferring the name the Tulsa race massacre, ignoring that also blacks were armed, included WWI veterans, and that many whites were killed and wounded. Considering that hundreds or thousands are stated to have been involved in the fighting by the 2001 state commission report, it may possibly be referred to as a "battle". Unarmed persons generally tried to flee the fighting.
It may be referred to as the "single worst incident of racial violence in American history", ignoring, for example, that the lower estimates of numbers killed are lower than the estimated numbers killed during the Rodney King riots.
Background
Tulsa was also a deeply troubled town. Crime rates were extremely high, and the city had been plagued by vigilantism, including the August 1920 lynching of a white teenager accused of murder. Newspaper reports confirmed that the Tulsa police had done little to protect the lynching victim, who had been taken from his jail cell at the county courthouse.[1] According to the Tulsa Race Riot Commission’s 2001 report, the Tribune’s crime coverage shifted its primary focus to Black criminality 10 days prior to the start of the massacre. The Commission wrote:
- “In a lengthy, front-page article concerning the on-going investigation of the police department, not only did racial issues suddenly come to the foreground, but more importantly, they did so in a manner that featured the highly explosive subject of relations between black men and white women. Commenting on the city’s rampant prostitution industry, a former judge flatly told the investigators that black men were at the root of the problem. ‘We’ve got to get to the hotels,’ he said, ‘We’ve got to kick out the Negro pimps if we want to stop this vice.’”
Riot
On Memorial Day, 30 May 1921, the young, white Tulsa, Oklahoma elevator operator Sarah "Sarie" Elizabeth Page, née Beaver (1899–1967), a young wife, had a confrontation with a young black shoeshiner named Dick "Diamond Dick" Roland who assaulted her. When the elevator doors reopened, Dick Rowland ran, and a clerk in Renberg’s called police headed by chief John Gustafson. Rowland, 19, had recently dropped out of Booker T. Washington High School. Three hours after the Tulsa Tribune hit the street with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” hundreds of white men gathered at the Tulsa courthouse, where Rowland was being held.
The next day, the Tulsa Tribune reported an attempted rape. Tulsa lawyer B.C. Franklin, the father of the legendary historian John Hope Franklin, recalled hearing high-pitch sound of a newsboy yelling — “A Negro assaults a white girl.” And according to witnesses and survivors of the massacre, the Tribune also published an editorial with the headline “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”[1] Fearing/wanting a lynching, armed black and white mobs, including WWI veterans, several times went to the courthouse, and finally starting rioting against one another, after a black veteran fired a shot, starting the riot.[1] Soon, the police deputized white men, providing them with weapons and ammunition.
Officially, thirty-nine people were reported killed in the riot, of whom ten were white. Other sources claim as many as 300, were killed, 10,000 were left homeless and 35 square blocks of Greenwood were destroyed. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard. Charles Franklin Barrett, the Oklahoma National Guard adjutant general whose troops were called into Tulsa during the rampage, concluded the riot was caused by “an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl and a yellow journal.”
Media
The Tulsa World reported that Tulsa Mayor T.D. Evans said that the negreos were to blame for the riot, which he described as “inevitable.” He argued that it was good that the destruction of Greenwood happened:
- “Let the blame for this negro uprising lie right where it belongs - on those armed negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it and any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong and should be told so in no uncertain language. ... It is the judgment of many wise heads in Tulsa, based upon observation of a number of years, that this uprising was inevitable. If that be true and this judgment had to come upon us, then I say it was good generalship to let the destruction come to that section where the trouble was hatched up, put in motion and where it had its inception.”
Meanwhile, Tulsa World identified “bad niggers” as the perpetrators in its June 4th editorial “Bad Niggers”:
- “There are those of the colored race who boast of being “bad niggers.” These it was, seizing the merest semblance of an excuse, who armed themselves and invading the business district of the city defiantly sought to take the law into their hands. If possible harmony between the races is to be restored in Tulsa these ‘bad niggers’ must be controlled by their own kind. The innocent, hard-working colored element of Tulsa faces both a danger and an unescapable duty if the work of those who seek to restore and tranquilize is to accomplish anything. They must co-operate fully and with vast enthusiasm with the officers of the city and county in ridding the community of worthless, boasting, criminal ‘bad nigger.’”
In the same editorial, the paper also called on black Tulsans to protect themselves against “worthless Negroes”:
- “The time is here for the colored citizens of the city, who work for their living and render a substantial service to the community, to band themselves together for their own protection against this element of non-working, worthless negroes.”
From The San Diego Union, Thursday, June 2, 1921:
- 100 DEAD IN TULSA RACE RIOTS
- $1,500,000 PROPERTY LOSS; FOLLOWING HOURS OF DISORDER TROOPS MAINTAIN PEACE
- Police Inspector Ventures Opinion Than Number of Killed Will Reach 175; 5000 Blacks Herded in Fair Grounds; Hundreds of Homeless Flee; One of Hottest Engagements at Church; More Than 25 Fires Started.[2]
From THE NEW YORK TIMES, June 2, 1921 (Headline):
- 85 WHITES AND NEGROES DIE IN TULSA RIOTS AS 3,000 ARMED MEN BATTLE IN STREETS; 30 BLOCKS BURNED, MILITARY RULES CITY
Grand Jury
In mid-June 1921, the grand jury indicted Dick Roland for assault and attempted rape. On 27 September 1921, after efforts by Roland’s lawyers to set him free failed two weeks earlier, Sarah was summoned to appear at a 28 September 1921 docket call. The court’s appearance docket notes that the “prosecutrix” failed to appear and that the case against Roland was dismissed.
Claimed conspiracy by land speculators
Less politically correct parts of the report include that some members of the commission stated that the riot was due to a conspiracy of land speculators, presumably interested in Black-owned land thought to contain oil, and who may have had an interest in burning down the property on this land. Politically correct sources state nothing on this.
Remains
Most historians agree that Rowland fled Tulsa. Several reports say that white Tulsa Sheriff Willard McCullough hustled Rowland out of town and to Kansas City to protect him, although he may have secretly returned to Tulsa in the fall of 1921. One fact many historians agree upon is Dick Rowland was not his original name. “He was born Jimmy Jones,” stated Marc Carlson, director of special collections at the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library, in 2021. His sister later stated, he moved to Oregon, where he found work in shipyards along the coast.
Sarah was divorced from Raymond "Ray" M. Page and married in September 1921 in Claremore Fred E. Voorhies. Voorhies was thirty-seven and had served in an engineering company with the U. S. Army. Fred and Sarah Voorhies remained together for the rest of their lives. By 1924, they had moved to California. Fred died in 1956, Sarah in 1967. Sarah’s grave maker is graced with the words “beloved mother.”
