American History Tellers - Tulsa Race Massacre - The Promised Land | 1

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

Between 1838 and 1890, thousands of African Americans moved to Oklahoma, brought there as Cherokee slaves or drawn there by the promise of free land. Black pioneers established towns where African Americans could govern themselves and thrive in community together, and in time, Oklahoma became known as “The Promised Land” of freedom, dignity, and economic self-sufficiency. Out of this movement, the wealthiest African American community in the nation was born. By 1921, the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood had become such a hotspot of entrepreneurship that it became famous as “Negro Wall Street.”But the Greenwood community lived uneasily in the racist, corrupt, lawless oil boomtown of Tulsa. On a hot May day in 1921, a young shoeshine boy would step into an elevator with a teenage white girl and accidentally spark the worst incident of racial violence in America -- a massacre that would be kept secret for decades.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's 4 p.m. on May 30th, 1921. Your glasses slide down your nose as sweat drips off your forehead. Imagine it's 4 p.m. on May 30th, 1921. Your glasses slide down your nose as sweat drips off your forehead. The rain that drenched the Memorial Day parade goers didn't break the heat. It's still in the 90s. And for the last few hours, you've been unpacking heavy boxes of clothing,

working alongside Charlie, your fellow clerk at Renberg's Clothing on Main Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thanks, Mrs. Logan. We'll call you when your new dress comes in. Charlie's been a fixture at Renberg's for years, but your job is new. You had to take it when the work slowed down in the accounting office. You're good with numbers and you love that job, but when the oil boom slowed, it hurt all the businesses that supported it. They didn't need you anymore, and with so many white men unemployed, it took weeks to find a new job. Renberg's doesn't pay nearly as well as your old job, but you sure as heck need it with three kids and another one on the way. As Charlie ushers a customer out the door, you pause to wipe a salty drip off your face. As usual, Charlie glares at you. What? You can't take it? I knew you wouldn't last at this job.

Harder than it seems, huh? Charlie's a beefy, muscular guy, and he acts like he owns the place. You sigh and start hauling the box to the front of the store. Nah, it's fine. Just hot is all. I thought it would be busier today. Always like this on Memorial Day. Most of the other businesses are closed. But get a move on, will ya?

You tense up. You know he's about to insult you again, just as he's done every day. But then you both notice a thin teenager, the shoeshine boy, walking by Renberg's plate glass window. He turns and heads into your building. You think nothing of it, as the only restrooms in town for colored folks are upstairs. But Charlie spits on the floor. There's that colored boy again. I don't know why Renberg allows this. Nobody else down here has to put up with them. Your hackles rise. You're a vet. You met some colored boys in the war, and they were fine, upstanding, just wanted to fight for the country like you.

You turn away. A few minutes pass uneasily. But then a scream splits the air. You freeze. Came from the lobby. Charlie turns. Stay here and mind the store. I'll go see what happens. He sprints into the lobby.

The shoeshine boy runs past you and bolts out the front door, looking petrified. He sprints down the street. In the lobby, Charlie's talking with a small blonde elevator operator who seems to be crying. You can't hear them, but Charlie is gesticulating angrily, pointing toward the street. He tries to console her and strides back to the store, shoving you aside. I thought I told you to stay inside. What's wrong? What happened? Charlie ignores you. He grabs the phone off the counter and dials.

Patty, connect me to the police, right away. Chief, hey, it's Charlie. I'm at Renberg's. That colored shoeshine boy, he just assaulted Sarah Page in our elevator. You're startled. How could that be? You barely had time to unpack one box in the time the shoeshine boy passed by. You open your mouth to say so, but Charlie shushes you.

He's listening to the voice on the other end of the phone. That's right. You've got to get in. Now you really are sweating, but not from the heat of the day. If a black man so much as looks at a white woman around here, he could be lynched. The city's already been on edge lately. You shudder to think of what could come. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking.

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Visit audible.ca to sign up. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In this show, we'll take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday citizens as history was being made, and we'll show you how the events of the times affected them, their families, and affects you now.

What happened that day in Tulsa has never been conclusively proven. What is known is that on Monday, May 30th, 1921, a 19-year-old shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland was alone with a 17-year-old white girl named Sarah Page in the Drexel Building elevator. He touched her arm. Whether because he tripped getting into the elevator or because they were actually sweet on one another, no one knows for sure. She screamed.

In the next few hours, the white clerk's story that Roland had raped Sarah Page would race through the city like wildfire and change the face of Tulsa forever. Because of the clerk's one phone call to the police chief, one of the wealthiest black communities in the country would be completely destroyed within the next 48 hours. Some 300 people would be murdered. More than 1,200 homes and 200 businesses would be burned to the ground. Afterwards, the community would be resurrected by its Black residents despite overwhelming setbacks and the threatening presence of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. But a conspiracy of silence would surround what is now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre for decades.

And despite its shocking nature, it remains little known today, even within Oklahoma. This is Episode 1, The Promised Land. In the early 1800s, as the white population grew in the South, so too did violent conflicts between the white residents and the Native American tribes. Out of self-preservation, some tribes began to assimilate. The Cherokees in particular adopted white ways. They built log cabin homes, began large-scale farming, and some took on African American slaves. But assimilation did not appease the whites. Envious of the Native Americans' rich land, they wanted it for themselves to grow cotton. And when, in 1828, white Georgians learned that there was gold in the Appalachian Mountains on Cherokee property, they moved to claim it.

They had an ally in Andrew Jackson, the country's seventh president. Jackson, a slave owner and land speculator, had a reputation as a merciless military officer who had led American soldiers in massacring thousands of Native Americans, including women and children. The Cherokees had dubbed him Sharp Knife. Jackson took office in 1829 with one big goal in mind. Move the Native peoples west of the Mississippi by force if necessary. To justify taking millions of acres of their ancestral lands, Jackson offered a swap.

Move west, he said, and we'll give you land in the Indian Territory, a region that comprised most of present-day Oklahoma. Jackson dreamed of humming cities of millions of white settlers populating the hills and valleys of the South, creating successful industry and wealth. In 1830, he wrote and signed the Indian Removal Act, legalizing his plans to force the Native tribes to leave the South. In his second speech to Congress, Jackson employed a popular theme, that whites shouldn't have to face the prospect of violence living side by side with any people of color. He told them Indian removal puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the general and state governments on account of the Indians. It

will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. Some members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, what were then called the Five Civilized Tribes, moved peacefully. But thousands refused, and some even waged war to protect their land. But finally, in 1838, white troops rounded up resistant Native Americans and held them in deplorable conditions in internment camps. In the winter, already hungry and sick, the tribes were forced to begin moving west. Many walked barefoot in the snow for hundreds of miles, leaving bloody footprints behind them. The march would become known as the Trail of Tears. On that journey were some 15,000 Cherokees and their enslaved African-American families,

as well as free black people who had been adopted or married into the tribes and were now full Native citizens. But about 4,000 people, especially the elderly and children, died of disease, starvation, or drowning as they crossed the country. Many of the survivors ended their journeys in Indian Territory, what would later become the state of Oklahoma. Two decades later, Congress passed the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, written by Senator Henry Dawes,

that broke up Native land and allotted parcels to individual Native Americans. The act was intended to end communal ownership of Native land and enforce an individualistic approach to private property. It was another in a long string of decisions designed to upend tribal tradition and open millions of acres of Native-owned land to white settlement. But the law had one unintended positive consequence. Tribal members who were former slaves also received allotments. After slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865,

those who had been enslaved by Native Americans would become free members of their tribes, giving African Americans in the West one of their earliest opportunities to own land. Some of these black-owned settlements became the seeds of new communities in Oklahoma. Leaders of these towns urged freed slaves from all over the nation to come and join them. Over time, they would grow into something remarkable for 19th century America, all-black towns. So-called freedmen's towns would spring up in other regions as well, but Oklahoma would become known as their epicenter. And they would only grow. When Reconstruction effectively

ended in 1877 and federal troops left the South, angry and resentful white Southerners turned their venom on former slaves. By the late 1870s, simply existing in the South was frightening for many, if not most, African Americans. Lynchings, often public events attended by picnicking crowds, became commonplace. Freed men with means looked for opportunities to flee moving north and west. At the same time, African American landowners in the Oklahoma territories were singing its praises to folks back home. Some called it the promised land, where black residents could live in safety and govern themselves, a place where, like free people everywhere, they could take charge of their own destinies. In 1878, some 40,000 southern freedmen and their

families began an exodus west, moving to Kansas and the Indian Territory. Under the Homestead Act, passed a decade and a half earlier, these refugees, or exodusters as they came to be called, could get free land if they are willing to farm it for at least five years. As a result, more all-black towns began springing up. And then came the land run of 1889. Under pressure from Easterners who wanted land, Congress amended the Homestead Act to allow President Benjamin Harrison to open up an additional two million acres for settlement, land that was Indian territory, set aside for Native Americans and surrounded by tribal nations on all sides.

On Easter Sunday, April 22, 1889, 50,000 hopeful settlers waited on the border of a region called the Unassigned Lands, jostling each other as they waited anxiously for their chance to stake their claims. White men and a few women were at the front. 1,000 African Americans waited at the back. At noon, a U.S. cavalryman fired a shotgun and the frenzied homesteaders rushed forth on mules, horses, in wagons, on foot, and even riding bicycles. The fastest ones, the lucky ones, and the conniving ones managed to pound stakes into the hard ground and claim their 160-acre plots. Some began framing houses that day. Others, who had traveled hundreds of miles to get to the land run, found themselves too far back from the front line. They left with nothing.

Edward P. McCabe was one of the lucky ones. A dapper African-American lawyer with a handlebar mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, McCabe staked a claim. Born in Troy, New York, McCabe had never known slavery. He began his career as a clerk on Wall Street. Then he moved to one of the first important all-Black towns in the country, Nicodemus, Kansas. A superb speaker, he worked his way up to become the Republican state auditor of Kansas, the first black man

to be elected to a state office in the North. Oklahoma, though, represented an even bigger opportunity than Nicodemus. In the Oklahoma Territory, McCabe had political ambitions and aspirations of establishing an African-American utopia. On October 22, 1890, McCabe founded an all-Black town on his land and named it Langston, after an African-American congressman from Virginia. The community of Langston would become McCabe's foothold in his campaign to transform the territory into the first all-Black state in the nation. He imagined an ideal place where African Americans would have dominion over their own lives and communities, where black citizens could vote and run for office, where they would have a chance to grow wealth and live in equality,

free from fear. In Oklahoma, he promised, the Negro can rest from mob law. Here, he can be secure from every ill of the Southern policies. McCabe also had his personal ambitions. He wanted to become the territorial governor of Oklahoma. In 1889, he met with President Benjamin Harrison to press his case for an all-Black state and to urge Harrison to adopt a more progressive stance on voting and civil rights for African Americans. McCabe also founded a newspaper, the Langston City Herald, mostly as a vehicle for his boosterism. And he hired agents to canvas the South and persuade African Americans to move to Oklahoma. These traveling salesmen urged their listeners to start new lives in what McCabe called

the Paradise of Eden and the Garden of the Gods. Imagine it's a hot June night in Mississippi, 1891. You shift on the hard church pew next to your wife. She can barely hold your squirming toddler still against her round belly. She's already six months along with your fourth child. You've both come here tonight to hear the man at the front of the church. Clad in white shirt sleeves and a vest, he strides back and forth, his voice building like he's giving a Sunday sermon. What will you be if you stay in the South? Slaves liable to be killed at any time and never treated right. But if you come to Oklahoma,

you have equal chances with the white man, free and independent. Your wife leans over. He should have been a preacher, I'll say. You laugh, but you feel uneasy. What the man's saying sounds too good to be true. It's a long way to Oklahoma, through dangerous territory. It's almost winter, and you can't afford a wagon and horses. Still, you're tempted. You and your wife don't talk about it, but the lynching of a man last year in Aberdeen terrified you both. An entire neighborhood of white men went after him just for walking into a room where three white women were sitting. It was a stark reminder that you, or any man here tonight, could be next. Langston City is

a Negro city, and we are proud of that fact. Furthermore, the climate is genial. It is a land where you can grow cotton, wheat, and tobacco finer than you have ever raised in the South. It is a land where every staple can be raised with profit. But brother, we've heard the land isn't fit for growing anything. What do you mean we can grow all those crops out there? The recruiter smiles a broad grin. He's heard this objection before and he's ready to meet it. Why do Southern whites always run down Oklahoma and try to keep the Negroes from going there? I don't know, mister. Why?

Why exactly? Because they want to keep you here and live off your labor. Without you, they have nothing. If too many of you strong, smart, colored folks leave, the white people here won't survive. But what else can you grow out there on the prairie? Ah, so much. You can grow corn as far as the eye can see, sweet potatoes, and orchards full of peaches and apricots. And you can raise hogs and chickens. The white man's not telling you the land is bad because it's barren. He's lying to you.

My God, white people are coming to Oklahoma every day. Around you, heads are nodding. Friends are murmuring to each other, looking excited. You feel it too. Maybe he's right. You look at your wife sitting next to you and see a light in her eyes too. Maybe it's time to become a truly free man, in charge of your own life, fearing no one, to own land of your own. That's virtually unheard of. You be the first in your family. Edward McCabe and his agents succeeded.

By the end of the year, Langston was home to 200 Black residents. Over time, more African Americans home to 200 Black residents. Over time, more African Americans moved to the Oklahoma and Indian territories and built more than 50 all-Black towns and settlements. By the end of the century, African Americans owned a million and a half acres of Oklahoma land. For a time, it seemed like, unlike the East, the West would accept all comers, no matter their color. As one observer noted, in the West, a man was judged by how he sits in the saddle. It seemed that McCabe's dream of a state governed by African Americans might one day come to pass. Except that day by day,

land runs were attracting white settlers in greater numbers, seeking to escape poverty and crowded conditions in the East. And tens of thousands of these were migrating from the South. Many brought with them fearful, virulent beliefs about African Americans. McCabe's political ambitions, along with the influx of proud, self-governing, entrepreneurial blacks to Oklahoma, threatened both white settlers and Native Americans. Conflict over land and over the future identity of Oklahoma was a constant between the three groups.

Racial tensions, never far from the surface, always simmered. McCabe lost his bid to become territorial governor, and eventually black migration slowed. And there was another big change afoot as well. By the turn of the century, many of the small, rural, all-black towns found themselves too far from new railroad arteries and cut off from burgeoning hubs of commerce. It was becoming hard to make a living as a small-time farmer, so with hunger pushing them and industrialization beckoning, white and black settlers began migrating to larger towns and cities. But their desires for freedom and self-governance were no

less. They would take their self-reliance, pride, and belief in the benefits of all Black communities with them. They came to places like Tulsa, a small muddy town on the banks of the Arkansas River, settled by Creek Indians from Alabama only 60 years earlier. In 1898, the city of Tulsa was incorporated. The primitive town was fit more for animals than people. Cattle were driven right down the streets, pigs roamed freely, and there was no sewer system, even on Main Street. Drunk on whiskey, illegal in the Indian territory where Tulsa was founded, cowboys rode through downtown, shooting at lighted windows or firing into the air above churchgoers leaving services. Tulsa also harbored known bank robbers

and other outlaws. Merchants, hearing rumors of impending robberies, barricaded their stores with sugar sacks and barrels and posted snipers on their roofs. So genteel and law-abiding, Tulsa was not. Although it looked and smelled so unpromising, some early white settlers there saw its potential. One was W. Tate Brady, a Missouri shoe salesman who moved to the Creek Nation Indian Territory in 1890. There, Brady opened the first mercantile, a general store that sold goods to cattle ranchers and railroad workers. Quickly, his shop was a success, and at only 20 years old, he set his sights on greater things. On the muddy streets, adventurers like Brady saw a frontier city where savvy businessmen could bring something brand new, something that would create both fortunes and power. And soon, black pioneers would follow

their luck to Tulsa as well. But they would move to the other side of the railroad tracks, apart from the growing white population. Both groups would be self-sufficient. Both would grow thriving communities. And both would become wealthy, some beyond their wildest dreams. But as the wealth grew, so too would lawlessness. The feeling among powerful white businessmen was that if something needed to be built or fixed, or someone needed to be brought to justice, they would have to be the ones to do it. Little Tulsa was on its way to becoming a boomtown, but a boomtown where private citizens would make their own justice. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island.

It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with.

In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished

from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our

lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Before the turn of the century, African Americans who had the education and means to travel the country couldn't escape hearing about the promised land. Everywhere, there was talk about the Oklahoma and Indian territories that offer not just equality and self-determination, but the chance to make a good living. That was certainly true for J.B. Stradford, an ambitious entrepreneur with a social conscience and a quick temper,

ever ready to fight for African-American dignity and equality. J.B. Stratford was born in Versailles, Kentucky in 1861, the son of slaves. His father, J.C., named after Julius Caesar, learned to read and write in secret, taught by his owner's abolitionist daughter. J.C. eventually escaped and fled across the Canadian border to Stratford, Ontario. Swapping a D for the T, he adapted his last name from that city, a common practice. Education gave Stratford the ability to plot his escape and was directly responsible for his freedom. He handed down that appreciation for learning to his son, J.B., named for John the Baptist. J.B. attended college at Oberlin in Ohio.

He became an entrepreneur, opening rooming houses, shoeshine parlors, pool halls, and hotels in various cities. And at the age of 38, he earned his law degree from Indiana Law School. Hearing that African Americans could do well in Tulsa, he moved there in 1899 with his wife, Augusta. He bought acreage on the north side of town with the intention of selling it to other African Americans, the beginning of a black community whose residents, like those in McCabe's rural towns, would succeed by supporting each other. He purchased and built rental property, a move that would provide housing to the doctors, lawyers, merchants, restaurateurs, pastors, and educators who were drawn to Tulsa. Although Stratford could also have sold land to his white neighbors, he vowed not to. He imagined a thriving black business district

taking shape, and he, like Tate Brady, on the other, white side of town, had the gumption to make it happen. But he wasn't alone. Another self-made man, O.W. Gurley, moved to Oklahoma ten years earlier in 1889, drawn by the land rush. Born in Alabama, Gurley was one of the black elite. He was an educated man who resigned a presidential appointment from Grover Cleveland to follow his dream of building a community out West. In 1906, he would also buy land on the north side of Tulsa, break it into lots, and sell it only to other African Americans. That enclave, attracting ambitious middle-class Black residents, would become known as Greenwood.

It would share the ideals of the all-Black towns McCabe promoted, African-American self-determination, entrepreneurship, community, education, and wealth. And the business district, known as Deep Greenwood, would also gain a reputation for glamour, elegance, and excitement. On a cold January day in 1898, Tate Brady and a handful of other white Tulsa pioneers signed the Articles of City Incorporation. It was a grand gesture, more fitting of a cosmopolitan city like New York or Chicago than Tulsa, because in 1900, two years after incorporating, Tulsa was still barely on the map, a downtrodden, lawless settlement of 1,300 residents.

And though the burgeoning but separate communities, black and white, lay on opposite sides of the railroad tracks, Brady, the young merchant, promised that Tulsa welcomed everyone as equals. In the local paper, the Tulsa Tribune, Brady wrote, Indian and white man, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, we work together side by side and shoulder to shoulder, and under these conditions, the Tulsa spirit was born and has lived, and God grant that it never dies. Later events in the city would prove that this Tulsa spirit of racial equality and cooperation

was never earnestly held or fostered, even by Brady himself. Three miles southwest of Tulsa, in the Creek Nation, the small town of Red Fork was a busier and more likely place for growth, because that's where the drilling was. Imagine it's 10 a.m., July 25th, 1901. You've just ridden from your small office in Tulsa to see your friend and fellow physician, Dr. J.C.W. Bland. It's been a dry summer, and when your boots hit the ground, a puff of dust flies up behind you and wafts away in the prairie wind. You squint in the bright sunlight. In the distance, you see an oil rig.

You can barely make out men working there. You grab your doctor's kit and stride to the house. Hello, Sue. Nice to see you. Thank goodness you're here, Dr. Kennedy. What's that I see over there? A rig? That's right. We granted them a lease to drill on our land. Not much money in it now, but if they strike... But here, let me get your hat and you go on up. John took a turn for the worse last night and he's been in so much pain this morning.

The bedroom's upstairs on the right. You hurry upstairs. John? Can I come in? Yes. Come in. Come in. You're as white as a sheet, John. What's going on? Oh, Lord. Sam. I am in misery. Started yesterday morning. Last night it got a lot worse. I'm pretty sure it's appendicitis. Mind if I take a look? I'm just going to press on your abdomen. Tell me if it hurts. No. No. No. Ah. Yes. Ow. Yep.

Right at your appendix. And your fever's high. I don't think you're well enough to move, though. And I don't have the right instruments to take it out here. I'm of the mind that it might get better if you rest, apply some heat. If it doesn't improve tomorrow, we'll have to find a way to operate. Agreed. On your way out, ask Sue to boil some water, would you? Of course.

So sorry I can't do more for you now, but I'll check. They found oil. What? And gas. You look at Bland, and despite his pain, he's grinning, thrilled at the news. Where? Tell me, what happened? The Trullers are downstairs waiting in the foyer. They just knocked on the door and said there's oil all over the rig. The two of you look at each other. You feel it, what you've heard about, that rising excitement, oil fever. You have to see it for yourself, and you can tell you're not the only one. There's a new light in John's glassy eyes.

Sam, I know I shouldn't, but you want to take a walk? The two doctors walked several hundred yards to see the well flowing. After watching for a short time, Dr. Bland's ailment disappeared. Later, Kennedy would say he thought their excitement over the oil helped to cure Bland's case. That oil strike, the first in Tulsa County, would become known as the Sue A. Bland No. 1 after Dr. Bland's wife. Oil men and fortune hunters soon arrived in droves. At three long miles away and with no oil beneath it, Tulsa shouldn't have grown from a muddy one-horse town into a big city. But its white leaders were savvy promoters and quickly exploited the strike in Red Fork. They built a bridge over the Arkansas River and advertised Tulsa as a place where oil men could eat the best fried

chicken in the Southwest and at the end of a hard day's work, find a place to stay. One of those places would be the Brady Hotel, which former shoe salesman Tate Brady built in 1903. Within a few years, city leaders arranged for the railroads connecting the petroleum fields to run through Tulsa, establishing it as the oil capital of the Southwest. In 1905, a man named Robert Galbraith drilled for oil on land owned by a Creek woman named Ida Glenn. On her farm about four miles from Tulsa, he struck black gold. The strike would be called the Glen Pool after Ida, and it would make Red Fork look like a puddle. Oil was transforming Oklahoma, and city leaders wasted no time in promoting their little Tulsa as the oil capital of the world. From 1907 to 1920, the city swelled

tenfold to 72,000 residents. As it grew, so did the power of white city leaders and the fortunes of black business owners in Greenwood. With their new money, white Tulsans built an opera house, one of the finest hotels in the country, a convention hall, gilded mansions, and an airfield. In 1919, the city shipped commercial goods across state lines by air for the first time, from Tulsa to Kansas City. Many African and Native Americans also found themselves flush with oil money. When Congress passed the Dawes Act in 1887, allotting parcels of Indian land to individual tribe members, the lawmakers had assumed that the dry lands of the plains wasn't worth much. But the discovery of oil changed all

of that. It made some tribal members, both natives and African Americans, very wealthy. Oil was discovered under the land of little Sarah Rector, a five-year-old African American member of the Creek Nation. Despite whites trying desperately to get hold of her property, her parents managed it well. And afterward, Sarah Rector attended some of the finest schools in the U.S. and grew up to be an oil baroness, one of the relatively lucky few. But over time, white oil men and land speculators would swindle many Native Americans and former slaves out of their oil wealth. Some oil-rich Native Americans

were even murdered for their property. The pattern that began hundreds of years before of white settlers coveting then taking land owned by Native Americans, hadn't changed. And with oil exploding out of the ground, envy grew even stronger. It was hard for many white Oklahomans to tolerate the success of non-whites, of the Creek, of the Osage, and especially of wealthy African Americans. In Tulsa, spurred by gushers of oil money, Greenwood, too, began growing. It attracted thousands of African Americans from across the country, some drawn by tales of black life in the middle-class neighborhood, others figuring they could make a good living in the oil boom. There were doctors, like A.C. Jackson,

who the founders of the Mayo Clinic would later call one of the finest surgeons in the country. Lawyers, like B.C. Franklin Franklin would later take cases to the Supreme Court. And educators like E.W. Woods, who walked 400 miles from Tennessee to eventually become the principal of Greenwood's new Booker T. Washington High School. Greenwood also attracted merchants, both men and women, who wanted to shape their destinies and never again be beholden to white employers. O.W. Gurley built the first grocery store at the corner of Archer Street and Greenwood Avenue. John Williams started an auto repair business that succeeded so wildly that he and his wife

Lula eventually built the Dreamland Theater, a 750-seat showpiece featuring live performances and silent movies starring Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Lula also ran Williams Confectionery, a soda fountain said to have seen more marriage proposals than anywhere else in town. But most of Greenwood's residents did still work for whites. They found employment with middle class and rich white residents of Tulsa, working as maids, butlers, shoeshine boys, and chauffeurs. But these domestic workers spent their paychecks at Greenwood's local businesses, indirectly funneling oil money into Greenwood. O.W. Gurley and J.B. Stradford grew rich, along with many others. And much of the community, though not all, lived comfortable, middle-class lives. By 1920, Greenwood had 108 Black-owned businesses,

two theaters, 15 physicians, numerous lawyers, a hospital, a library, two newspapers, a handful of black-owned banks, more than 20 churches, and the 54-room Stratford Hotel, one of the most luxurious black-owned hotels in the nation. Thursdays in Greenwood were like holidays. It was when black domestic workers, who lived with their white employers on the south side of town had a day off. Couples paraded up and down Greenwood Avenue in their finery, men in suits and hats, some dangling $20 gold pieces from their vests. Women spent hours at Mabel Little's Little Rose Beauty Salon and then, on the arms of suitors, strutted down the street in colorful dresses. They would catch snatches of jazz from the windows of nightclubs, where crowds gathered to hear famous or soon-to-be-famous musicians perform. These African-American Tulsans were not welcome on the south side of town when not working. But that meant black money would stay in Greenwood, circulating 19 times before it left, building wealth. In a nod to its affluence, Booker T.

Washington would nickname Greenwood Negro Wall Street, and by the dawn of the 1920s, Greenwood had become a rollicking, optimistic symbol of entrepreneurship and self-determination for African Americans all over the country. But there was an underside. Whites from the south side of Tulsa would cross the tracks to visit prostitutes in bars unseen by their white friends and colleagues, and the threat of violence was never far away, especially as white prejudice seemed to grow worse than ever there in Tulsa and across the country. With the end of World War I in 1918, a poisonous element added fuel to the fire of white hostility, unemployment. The war had created an enormous demand for oil, but once the war was over, demand waned. Whites who had flocked to Tulsa for oil jobs were

now out of work, and unemployed white men were envious of the wealth in Greenwood. On the surface, there was every reason for the holiday-like feeling of celebration that permeated Greenwood on Thursday nights. Life was good for people like Lula Williams, as she took tickets at the door of Dreamland Theater. And it was good for the soda jerk serving the crowds at Williams Confectionery and for the bar owners and the musicians serenading the crowds at night. But it wouldn't and perhaps couldn't stay that way. Underneath the glamour was a rising menace. For more than two centuries,

the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Thank you. the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom.

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for yourself. By the early 1920s, Jim Crow, the network of local and state laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination, was firmly entrenched in the South. In Oklahoma, most black citizens had been unable to vote since the state passed a law disenfranchising them in 1910. Neighborhoods were legally segregated. African Americans had to use colored restrooms and black-only train cars. Traveling by car, too, was hard. You couldn't easily buy gasoline or stay at a hotel. Jim Crow was bad all over. But Oklahoma even segregated its phone booths, something no other state had done.

And lynchings, once uncommon in the West, were growing in Oklahoma. They served as a form of public terror. One night in 1911, an African-American mother and her young teenage son were both lynched near Okema, following a scuffle during which the deputy county sheriff was accidentally killed. The lynch mob hung the bodies of Laura and L.D. Nelson from a railroad bridge. Upon their discovery in the morning, a crowd of whites came to view the spectacle. A photographer shot a close-up of the twisted remains of mother and son, and later that image would circulate widely on a postcard. No one was ever prosecuted for the deaths. The message to black Oklahomans was clear. Get out of hand, and this

will be your fate. But less than a decade later, resistance to this message was growing. Close to 400,000 African Americans had served in World War I, and the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy abroad hadn't escaped them. When black soldiers returned from the war, they increasingly expected to be treated with respect and dignity. In 1919, the great black orator W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in an editorial, We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make war for democracy. We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why. But Black veterans' newly awakened sense of self-worth and pride

was clashing with racial prejudice in Oklahoma and across the country. Imagine it's a warm Thursday evening in Greenwood in the spring of 1919. Earlier this morning, you were on the south side of Tulsa where you clean house for a white family. But in the evenings, you're free to do as you please. You and your beau, James, walk hand in hand down the street toward the Dreamland Theater for a show. The street is filled with neighbors enjoying their night off. You squeeze James' hand. I'm so happy to have you back. I've already been back for six months. Still, I miss this during the war. Me too. You do a little pirouette on the street in front of him.

What do you think of my hair? I think you probably spent too much time and money at Miss Mabel's today. But it looks terrific. As you approach the theater, James catches sight of his friend Daniel and the crowd gathering outside. Since they served overseas together, James spends almost as much time with Daniel as he does with you. Sorry, Sally. Do you mind? I'll just be a minute. You know better than to believe that. I'll wait for you under the awning, but don't be too late. We only have a few minutes.

As he disappears into the crowd, you find a spot along the wall where you can people watch. As you wait, you can't help admiring the reflection of your new hairdo in the glass. But then, a man stumbles up to you. He's white, small and thin, and obviously drunk. You look nervously around for James, but he's vanished. The man looks you up and down suggestively. Then he reaches out to touch your arm. You pull away. Miss, you're such a beauty. Excuse me? Made a lot of money this week. I bet you'd like some of that, wouldn't you? You know there are prostitutes here in Greenwood, and you've never met them.

Clearly he has, and thinks you're one of them. You're horrified. I'm afraid you're mistaken, sir. The man steps forward and grabs your arm again. No, I don't think I am. As the man fumbles for your waist, you see James and Daniel approaching. James rushes forward. He grabs the drunk by the collar and roughly pulls him away.

No, James, don't! You and Daniel pull James away before he can bloody the man's nose or worse. You're all shaking. The man is scared and scrambles down the street. When he's far enough away, he turns and screams. Colored with money! The root of all evil! James puts his arms around you and you hold each other, trying to calm down.

James doesn't say anything, but his jaw tightens like he's trying to contain his rage. He nods goodbye to Daniel, and then James takes you by the hand and you both walk silently into the theater. Before the war, James would have handled this differently, but since he's come back, he struggles. He's a proud man with a quick temper, and you're terrified one day it'll get him in trouble. Racial prejudice took on its most forceful front with the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK first began in Tennessee with the front with the Ku Klux Klan.

The KKK first began in Tennessee with the end of the Civil War in 1865. It was a threatening organization whose members killed African Americans, especially those running for office and white sympathizers. Its methods became so horrifying that the federal government cracked down, passing the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, allowing the government to prosecute the Klan for hate crimes. While violence continued, by the early 1870s, the organized KKK was largely defunct. Until two things happened. The first was a silent film made by director W.D. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. Called Birth of a Nation, it was an artfully

made production that promoted the sanctity of white female purity. The movie depicted black men as beasts, unable to contain their sexual urges toward white women. No white woman could safely be near any black man, the film suggested, and whites needed to rise up and protect their women. It depicted the Klan heroically as a force that saved the South. When the film was released in February of 1915, it went gangbusters. President Woodrow Wilson even screened it in the White House, the first film shown there. Not surprisingly, Birth of a Nation was controversial. The NAACP organized a boycott against it. In New York, the white rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, one of the co-founders of the NAACP, spoke out against it. Wise told the press that the film was

an indescribable foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings. Several states and cities banned it. But that didn't stop the film's influence. It became the top-grossing movie of all time until 1939, when Gone with the Wind was released. But more consequentially, it fostered a violent racism across the South and helped revive the Klan only a few months later. A former teacher named William Joseph Simmons was so inspired by the movie that he decided to reignite the Klan with himself as Imperial Wizard. He chose Thanksgiving Day, 1915, to formally restart the group with a cross burning on the top of Stone Mountain, Georgia. But Simmons was no businessman,

and the Klan had few members and little money. Simmons' reinvigorated Klan didn't entirely come into its own until 1920, when it was fostered by a little-known Georgia woman named Elizabeth Tyler and her married lover, Edward Young Clark. Tyler and Clark had formed a public relations firm called the Southern Publicity Association. They generated news coverage and public attention for groups like the American Red Cross. And then they came across the newly revived Klan. It was a perfect business opportunity. Tyler and Clark would make an offer to Simmons. If he were to hire them, they would seek publicity

for the revived organization. They would also actively recruit new members. They came up with a simple method of attraction. They would open up the Klan not just to racists who were threatened by African Americans, but also those who hated immigrants, Jews, communists, and Catholics. Imperial wizard Bill Simmons, desperate to grow his organization, agreed. It was a goldmine for Tyler and Clark. The Southern Publicity Association would get $8 out of every $10 membership they could bring in. The pair hired 1,000 recruiters known as Klegels to travel through the South and Southwest. They too received commissions. And within 16 months, KKK membership had swelled by 100,000 hoods,

and Tyler and Clark were rich. But even before Tyler and Clark applied their business prowess to the organization, the KKK under Bill Simmons had used the popularity of Birth of a Nation to fan the flames of white outrage and inspire one of the most dangerous summers in American history in 1919. Along with this second incarnation of the Klan, a wave of immigration, enforcement of Jim Crow laws, the return of Black veterans, and increased unemployment prompted a series of bloody riots across the country. In city after city, houses were burnt down, neighborhoods destroyed, and hundreds of blacks were lynched and killed during a period known as the Red Summer of 1919. But by 1920, the mass violence hadn't yet made it to Tulsa.

However, the city, now home to 100,000 people and 400 oil companies, was plagued by crime. It wallowed in everything from prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging to robbery and murder. The shrill, sensationalist editor of the Tulsa Tribune, Richard Lloyd-Jones, began an editorial campaign to get police to clean up the immorality. When little happened, he upped the ante, writing diatribes against the police themselves. He viewed them as incompetent or outright unwilling to cleanse crime from Tulsa's borders. So that year, city leaders took matters into their own hands, demonstrating their belief in vigilante justice.

They lynched a white man. Eighteen-year-old Roy Belton was accused of robbing a taxi driver named Homer Nida. Arrested, Belton was held in jail on the top floor of the Tulsa Courthouse. But upon learning that the injured taxi driver had died in the hospital, an enraged mob of 1,000 people gathered at the courthouse and demanded Belton be released to them.

When Sheriff James Woolley refused, the mob pushed inside and grabbed Belton. Soon, Belton was forced into a car. Drivers had already staked out their destination, a lonely Belton. Soon, Belton was forced into a car. Drivers had already staked out their destination, a lonely part of Jenks, nine miles outside of town. Hundreds of cars followed him. There, they hanged Roy Belton, with the police officers looking on. The crowd rushed the body, grabbing shoes and clothing for souvenirs. The ringleaders sold the rope they hanged Belton with for 50 cents an inch.

A.J. Smitherman, African-American owner of the Tulsa Eagle, immediately condemned the lynching. There is no crime, however atrocious, that justifies mob violence, he wrote. For him and many others, the issue was obvious. If the mob could do this to a white man, no black was safe. And that meant Greenwood wasn't safe. But not just because of racial animosity. There was another factor, greed. With land at a premium in South Tulsa and the city booming, white business leaders stood to make even more money if they could expand downtown to the north. But Greenwood stood in their way. Just north of the Frisco Railroad, a perfect spot for more industry or a gleaming new railroad station, the land on which Greenwood's hundreds of businesses and homes stood was very

valuable. Quiet offers to buy Greenwood property were rebuffed. Some black leaders tried to persuade African-American business owners to sell, but they refused. They understood the value of what they had. And real estate had emotional resonance well beyond its financial value. After slavery, owning land was a powerful symbol of African American liberation. But by 1921, land speculation, growing white unemployment, increasing envy over black wealth, and growing black self-determination were all coming together to create an untenable, explosive situation. And that old, ugly notion that whites and blacks shouldn't or couldn't live next to each other was in the air,

fanned by the flames of the red summer of 1919 and the growing clout of the Klan. To many, a racial conflict was inevitable, but few could have anticipated the violence that was about to be unleashed. What happened next would be far deadlier than anyone could have imagined, and its effects would reverberate through Tulsa for decades to come. Next week on American History Tellers, a local newspaper calls for 19-year-old shoeshine boy Dick Rowland to be lynched, touching off a race massacre unheard of in America before or since.

African-American residents scramble to protect their community as violence erupts, and Greenwood's families are torn apart and its hard-won wealth threatened. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Produced by Hernan Lopez for Wondery. We'll be you next time.