Dan Snow's History Hit - Tulsa Race Massacre

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

On May 31 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, was torn apart by one of the worst instances of racialised violence in American history. In a period of great racial tension, the white population in Tulsa went on a rampage through the black neighbourhoods in the city killing innocent people, looting African-American businesses and burning whole blocks to the ground. They had been stirred up by a fake news story that wrongly accused a local black man of assaulting a young white woman in a lift. This wave of violence left many homeless, more than a thousand people were injured and over three hundred people were killed. However, this event has been little known as it was covered up with attempts being made to expunge it from the historical record. Thankfully, those attempts failed and knowledge of this horrific incident has been kept alive by the community, journalists and historians. One of those historians is Scott Elsworth who joins Dan in this episode to shed light on what happened in Tulsa on that terrible day and the ongoing work to deal with the painful legacy of these events. 

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today in 1921, 100 years ago, on May 31st, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was torn apart by sectarian violence, by ethnic violence. The white population of Tulsa, stirred up by a fake news report in a local newspaper, went on a rampage that lasted for around 24 hours. The white majority community of Tulsa looted, burned, destroyed African-American properties, businesses, particularly in the prosperous community of Greenwood, known as the Black Wall Street, for its successful businesses and the wealth concentrated there. It was probably the richest black community in the USA. It is known simply as the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Perhaps 1,000 people were injured and up to 300, perhaps more, were killed.

It was then covered up. Attempts were made to expunge it from the historical record. Those attempts failed, thanks to members of the community who told their stories, thanks to journalists, thanks to members of the community who told their stories, thanks to journalists, thanks to historians. One of those historians is Scott Ellsworth. He's a New York Times bestseller. He used to be a historian at the Smithsonian Institute, and he currently teaches history in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies

at the University of Michigan. He's written a new account of this massacre. He's also played his part in Tulsa itself, unearthing literally some of its victims. Scott has also helped us source some interviews in an archive with survivors of the massacre, and you'll be hearing their voices as well. On this centenary, it's obviously hugely important to remember, to try and understand this extraordinary explosion of violence. We've been talking a lot this year about race relations in America and elsewhere.

To listen to all the back episodes of those podcasts, you can go to historyhit.tv, become a subscriber, and you can listen to all of those podcasts ad-free. We've had some really, really interesting historians and thinkers exploring this vital and very timely subject. But in the meantime, everyone, here on the anniversary of Tulsa is Scott Ellsworth. Enjoy. Scott, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Oh, I'm thrilled to be with you today.

Tell me about Tulsa, Oklahoma before this incident. What was that community like? Tulsa, Oklahoma, you know, right in the middle of the U.S. was the boom town of all boom towns. In the year 1900, it was a dusty cowboy and creek Indian town, less than a thousand people. By the year 1920, there were 100,000 people. There were electric streetcars and movie theaters and mansions and opera houses and you name it. And the reason for that was oil. In 1905, the richest small oil field in the world was discovered right outside of Tulsa. And people became millionaires overnight. And people just poured in to this town.

And it grew so fast that people called it the magic city, as in, now you don't see it, now you do. There was a huge community of African-Americans. Were they from the earlier days of this Oklahoma town? Or had they arrived with the huge boom of people? Well, I would say that most of them came with the boom. Some of them had been there for 80 plus years. They had come as slaves of the Indian tribes that were moved on the

Trail of Tears from southeastern United States to what was then Indian territory. But most people came to Tulsa from the western parts of the south, from Arkansas and Louisiana and Mississippi. the western parts of the south from Arkansas and Louisiana and Mississippi. In fact, the black community in Tulsa known as Greenwood was named after Greenwood, Mississippi. And those people came in part to be a part of this incredible boomtown, but they were also trying to escape the worst parts of Jim Crow. Lynchings, murders, all of these onerous laws. And there had been an effort to turn Oklahoma into an all-black state. It didn't work. But this was a place where people got a new start.

And the old timers I talked to back in the 1970s said their folks came out to what they felt was the promised land. So there's almost a double opportunity for African-Americans. There's new political, there's also an economic opportunity going on. Absolutely. And it was a place where the American dream was starting to work for Black people. Scott was also kind enough to share some of the interviews he has conducted over the years with survivors of the massacre. He interviewed the following people in Tulsa in 1978. W.D. Williams was 16 years old in 1921. His parents owned a business in Greenwood.

They lived above their stores and offices. And he remembers Tulsa's prosperity. The black people here came here on the heels of this oil discovery, okay? And there was plenty of way, plenty of money. So what happened in 1921? Is this one of those extraordinary moments in history that has long roots stretching decades into the past, centuries into the past? Or was this just a sudden tsunami? It's kind of both. So I think it's important for the listeners to know that American race relations right around the years of World War I were at an all-time low.

This was an era of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the largest terrorist organization in American history, which was anti-African American, also anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic. This is a time where lynchings are still going on nationwide. The numbers had started to go down, but the barbarity has increased. In the United States, there were people burned alive at the stake in the early 20th century. This was also a period of something we all called race riots in those days. Everyone did. And it meant there was some sort of a racial incident that then turned into white mobs invading African-American communities, attacking Black people, looting,

burning, and all of that. So all of this is going on in the air in America. It's part of the atmosphere. But also there was a very strong feeling amongst African-Americans, especially African-American World War I veterans who had fought to make the world safe for democracy in France, were treated decently by the French, and they were wondering when they got back to the United States when they were going to get some democracy back home. And there was a sense when whites invade our communities, we're going to fight back. So that's part of the air for everything that happened. That's in the atmosphere. Robert Fairchild describes his memories of the racial animus.

You may want to have a quick listen to this if you're playing to young people. He uses the racialized language of the time. Was it only whites that would get their shoes shined in that parlor? That's correct. Okay. Yeah, no, they had to sign that Negroes not wanted. Okay. All over town.

At one time, Oklahoma, I mean, Tulsa in particular, had been open. No segregation. Was that, do you remember that, or was that before you came? Before I came. And people would tell you about that? Yeah, people would tell me about it, but in order to make sure that we got the message, they put up the signs. I had heard some of the old timers say that at one time that we didn't have these problems.

And in 1919 or 1918, there was a lynching of a woman in Wagner. Black woman. Yeah, black woman. And they not only killed her, but drove up and down the street behind some of the vehicles. Okay. And the Negroes read about it and said, no, they can try that over here, we're going to fix it. Here's W.D. Williams.

What about the Ku Klux Klan? Were they around before the riot? Yeah, they were. What would they do? Just parade. And they didn't do any harm so far as I Yeah, they were. What would they do? Just parade, and they didn't do any harm so far as I could, you know,

as I remember with blacks, just getting started. Where would they parade? They wouldn't parade down Greenwood, or would they? No, they'd go around town. They didn't come down Greenwood. Did they ever burn any crosses around? Yeah, they'd burn crosses up. They didn't come down here. Did they ever burn any crosses or a ram?

They'd burn crosses up on the Brickyard Hill and around them. But I don't know of anybody. John Smith, the brother of the newspaper publisher, had his ear cut off. Cut off. And what about the short-term triggers for this outbreak? So the short-term trigger, there was an incident in an elevator in a downtown office building in Tulsa on May 30th, 1921. A 19-year-old African-American shoeshiner or boot black had gone down the street to use a, quote, Negro restroom, a colored restroom on the top floor of the Drexel building. And this is something he would have done every day.

And to be able to do that, he had to ride the elevator. And elevators in 1921 all had elevator operators. Some people may remember still no elevators with a wheel that you turn. It's hard to line up the floors. So what we think happened that as Dick Rowland entered the elevator, he tripped. He shot his hands out to break his fall. But in so doing, he caught the shoulder of Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old elevator operator. She screamed. Dick ran out of the elevator. The Tulsa police were summoned, but they didn't seem particularly worried. They didn't put out an all points bulletin. They arrest him, but not until the next day, very calmly at his house.

Bring him in and the wheels of justice seem to be turning just fine. In fact, Sarah Page refused to press charges. W.D. Williams actually worked with the young man, Dick Rowland, whose alleged incident in the elevator sparked the response from the white community. Do you think Rowland did anything in that elevator? I mean, judging on what you knew of his character? I don't think so. Okay. I don't think so. I think it was just a matter of, supposedly, when the elevator got down and was thrown in the road, and this white fellow saw him in the embrace and she went to struggling with him, he was attacking him.

Right, okay. Now that's the question. Anyway, he was exonerated. The Tulsa Tribune, the white afternoon daily newspaper, decided to take a whole different tack. They had a front page article that said this wasn't a simple tripping on elevator. It said that Dick Rowland sexually assaulted Sarah Page, that he'd been stalking her, that he scratched her face and tore her clothes. But the Tribune also printed a now lost editorial titled, To Lynch Negro Tonight. Both Robert Fairchild and W.D. Williams remember the atmosphere just before

the riot really kicked off. And the Tribune came out that afternoon and told about what had happened and said, it looks as if we're going to have a lynching. Here's W.D. Williams. He was arrested that night. The next day, the hospital came of the Tribune to lynch Negro tonight. That's what they said off the ground. The Tribune hit the streets at about 3 o'clock on Tuesday, May 31st. Within a half an hour, there was lynch talk on the streets of Tulsa. And that soon grew into action. A white lynch mob gathered outside the courthouse.

100, 200, 500, 800. Probably by nine o'clock at night, there were at least a thousand whites gathered outside the courthouse demanding that the sheriff turn over Dick Rowland to them so he could lynch him. He would not do that. But at around 930, a group of 75 African-American World War I vets, many of whom had gone and put their uniforms on, all of them armed with rifles, pistols, and shotguns, went down to the courthouse, presented themselves to the sheriff, said, we're here to help you defend the prisoner if you want to. The sheriff said, no, get out of here. And as they were leaving, an elderly white man tried to wrestle away a gun from a black vet. A shot went off and the massacre began.

The worst single incident of racial violence in American history started at that moment. Did those men survive or were they set upon by the crowd? Well, I think most of them did survive. There were whites that were armed. There was a shootout that happened there. But the black vets, some died, but the black vets were able largely to work their way back to Greenwood, which wasn't far from downtown. There weren't a lot of streetlights. It was quite dark. But what happened next is the Tulsa police, who had been absent, they suddenly show up. And rather

than try to disarm the mob, and the lynch mob now doesn't care about Dick Rowland. They now have a bloodlust and they're out to get any African-American they can find. But the police officers deputize members of the mob. Policemen also break into pawn shops and sporting goods stores to get access to rifles and pistols. They start handing them out to mob members and tell them to get a gun and get a black person, although they didn't use that term. Meanwhile, whites murder innocent African-Americans in downtown Tulsa, people getting off of work. The first fires are set on the edge of the community. Whites make drive-by shootings through black residential neighborhoods. They'll pile into cars, fire out both sides of the windows into children's bedrooms, living rooms, parlors, all that.

And there's a bit of a firefight at the main African-American commercial district known as Deep Greenwood. But black property owners are able to keep these people from coming. W.D. Williams remembers his father shooting at white rioters as they escaped from the building. He would like snipe at people or right just every once in a while there'd be a few shots or anytime a guy exposed himself why he cut loose he had the advantage in that I wish I had a side picture of that building. Uh-huh. But anyway, say for instance, on the back side was the bathroom. Uh-huh. And right at a little angle like this.

It's a sort of triangle shaped building. Yeah, yeah. And the bathroom was in this wasted corner. Okay. in this wasted corner. Okay. So he sat in, it used to be the bathroom and the toilet was separate.

So my mother was having this wall knocked out and where the plumbing came up and the angle over, you know, to lock against by, well, he just put his gun and rested on the hand and the screen was down.

It was fired through the screen. Well, he wasn't exposed to any... Any what? ...philosophies. When your father and you split up and then you went down the alley and they captured you there. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, where did they take you then?

They took me back up to Greenwood, down in the 300 block. Okay. Where this parade all over Greenwood. Then they parade this down this way. Okay, south on Greenwood towards Archer. Right. Okay. Well, when it got, they were going down to Archer, but they had buildings burning on that side.

Which side, on the? On the south side of Archer. Oh, okay. So they just hurried us over to Fitzroy. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the massacre in Tulsa 100 years ago. More after this.

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and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Then at about two o'clock in the morning, all the fighting seems to end. Some blacks had already left town. Others thought, OK, it's over.

Everything's going to be fine. But it wasn't. And what they didn't know is that whites were now organizing in their own neighborhoods, gathering at street corners. Men would jump up on cars and say, look, make sure you have enough ammunition. Make sure you have enough guns. We're going to go in at dawn. make sure you have enough ammunition, make sure you have enough guns. We're going to go in at dawn.

So right before dawn on June 1st, 1921, crowds of whites in the thousands had gathered on the outskirts of Greenwood. There was an odd factory whistle that went off. We still don't know what it was from, but it was clearly a signal for them to move forward. And at that point, but it was clearly a signal for them to move forward. And at that point, the mass destruction of Greenwood began. Why do you think this white community was so radicalized? Is there a memory of the terror that the white community lived in the South of slave revolts? Is it about the affluence of the area? Was there a acquisitive nature here? What do you think lends this its extreme severity? Well, I think there's a number of reasons. You have to realize that white supremacy and white racism was just part of the air that white Americans breathe. And again, this is the time of birth of a nation, D.W. Griffiths, very important, hugely popular motion picture that basically

portrayed African-American men as animals, that all they wanted to do was to rape white women. You have these new segregation laws are now being passed in the North and West, as well as in the South. White racism is taught in all of America's universities at Harvard, Yale, here at the University of Michigan. So this is a part of it. Also, whites in Tulsa had lynched a white accused murderer. And the sheriff had turned over this young man, 18-year-old young man, to a white lynch mob. They had murdered him. And then afterwards, the city government, the mayor, the chief of police said this lynching was a good thing because it showed the criminals that

the law-abiding citizens in Tulsa weren't going to put up with any more crime. So this is all part of the air. There had been a campaign in the Tribune. They'd written about a white minister who later becomes very important in the Ku Klux Klan who claimed that white girls were dancing with black men at these illegal roadhouses. I don't think that happened. But there is this great campaign against African-Americans and a great anger. The idea that a black man sexually assaulted a white woman, that just drove white people absolutely crazy and just off the chart angry. I mean, it was like a bloodlust that happened. Tell me about the events of that day,

the second day of violence. Well, so as these crowds then start marching into Greenwood, some whites had stolen a machine gun from the veterans organization. They had put it at the top of a granary, a grain elevator that looked down onto Greenwood. They began opening fire. And basically, Greenwood is destroyed block by block. Any African-Americans that fight back were overwhelmed and killed or chased away. And there were a lot of African-Americans who fought back against this mob. Everyone else was, quote, arrested by police, National Guard members, members of the mob, disarmed and taken away. Whites then went building by building, house by house, broke into them, looted them, and set them on fire.

And this goes block by block by block. Robert Fairchild has some vivid memories of the day itself. The lady that we rented from, she stayed. But she wore the black? She was black. Okay. It wasn't, it was all black. There wasn't no white anywhere near that area.

Okay. And they told her to leave. She said, no, I'm not going to leave because if I leave you're going to burn my house down. And if you're going to burn my house down you might as well kill me now. And so she stayed and they let her alone. Do you remember her name? Yeah, you might as well kill me now." And so she stayed and they let her alone. Do you remember her name?

Yeah, Mrs. Hardridge. I'm told that the Negroes fought one of the whites until they got down to the Frisco Railroad tracks in Cincinnati and they was supposed to make the last, last stand there, and of course they were out and they finally had the fleet. Right. And of course, so the next morning we got up. Longest I can get, we better get out of here. And so we started walking down the Milling Valley track.

Was this right after dawn, or do you remember what time it was? Around 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning. Okay. Just barely daybreak. And you were out there? Yeah. I was out there. I was out there.

I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. I was out there. Was this right after dawn or do you remember what time it was? 5, 6 o'clock in the morning. Okay. Just barely deep. And when you got out there, you saw people come out.

Yeah. Walking. Some of the local militia, what they called the National Guard, they were mobilized. But rather than, and they were all whites, rather than to try to stop the invading mob, they instead sort of set themselves facing the African-American community against an alleged black invasion. And they ended up opening up with their machine guns on African-Americans as well, too. We also know that there were airplanes in the air. There weren't many airplanes in Tulsa in 1921. There's evidence that at least one of them dropped dynamite onto Greenwood. And you have furious firefights as groups of blacks try to fight back this mob or in Tulsa anyway. And eventually it's just destroyed. You have

over 1,000 African-American homes and businesses were looted and burned to the ground. All the churches, 12 churches were destroyed. So you had two movie theaters, two newspaper offices. One of the two schools was burned to the ground. A black hospital was burned to the ground. 30 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, dress shops, photography studios, you name it. There were 35 square blocks that afterwards photographs look like Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Frankfurt or Berlin at the end of World War II. W.D. Williams describes the scenes after the white community had set fire to the black neighborhoods. The family business was burnt to the ground,

and he and his mum and dad had to live in a tent for six weeks after the riot. There at Greenwood and Archer, where you're... No, down right here. Oh, okay, where the theater was. And, okay, so how long did you stay in the tent? I mean... About... Well, it was about... I imagine about all together, June through August.

By September, they had put this building back up. I imagine about all together June, July, August by September they had put this building back up the Williams building how did your there was a burned out shell I think it was a dream when they put it in place

and had some rooms up there but it wasn't quite fixed or removed in any way you have recently and had some rooms up there, but it wasn't quite fixed where we moved in anyway. You have recently led a team that's found an unmarked mass grave. That's correct. This is a long effort that I started 23 years ago during the era of a state commission on the massacre. We did a lot of work. We interviewed 300 people back then. We found records nobody had seen. We had an inkling as to where some of these victims were buried in Masqueray, but we were caught up in politics and shut down. And then two years ago, the now current mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, asked me to help get that search started again. We went back to work.

We have a terrific team of archaeologists, of forensic scientists, and history volunteers. And in October, we discovered a mass grave in a Tulsa cemetery that contains at least 12 coffins that we are confident pulled the remains of identified and unidentified African-American massacre victims. And on June 1st, we're going to begin exhuming that grave. Is it interesting that you've been so involved with the community there? Because the second part of this story, in a way, is the fact that it was completely unknown and covered up almost from the minute it occurred. Yeah, which is what I write about in this brand new book, The Groundbreaking, that just came out about the massacre. So for 50 years, the story of the massacre was actively covered up in Tulsa.

In the white community, the white daily newspapers went out of their way, never to mention it. Official records disappeared, were stolen and disappeared. People were told this was just something you didn't talk about. And researchers, as late as the early 1970s, had their lives threatened, had their livelihoods threatened for bringing it up. Ironically, in the African-American community in Greenwood, it wasn't spoken about publicly either for a long time. And I think the way to think about it is to think of the massacre survivors like Holocaust survivors, in that they had experienced these horrific, traumatic events in their younger years, and they didn't want to burden their children or grandchildren with those memories. So this is something they simply didn't talk about.

So for about 50 years, this was covered up. And in the past 50 years, we've been slowly getting the story out. You mentioned the surviving community there. Were African-Americans able to resurrect a community to make a life in the city after this appalling ethnic cleansing? Yes, and that's what the astonishing story is. Remember, Tulsa, there was so much money in Tulsa. So you had very high employment before the massacre of African-American women as well as men who would work in the white community in service jobs as butlers, cooks, maids, chauffeurs, ditch diggers, dishwashers, whatnot. But they got a good paycheck. They worked in the white community and they brought that paycheck back to Greenwood and spent it at black-owned stores and institutions, which allowed the

commercial district to grow. What's astonishing is that within a week or so after the riot, these Black men and women, they went back to work in these same white neighborhoods where people had been trying to kill them, and the money started to flow back into Greenwood. Also, there was not a bank in Greenwood before the massacre, so the most well-to-do merchants, black merchants, they had money in white banks in downtown that wasn't hurt. So what's astonishing is that the community rebuilds and fairly quickly. You have three-story brick buildings in deep Greenwood that are rebuilt within a year and a half. And old timers would tell me that Greenwood

in the 1940s was even greater than it had been in the 1920s. There are voices who say that sometimes we can be too aware of our history, that these events are so appalling that perhaps it's best if we try and do what many of the survivors of that massacre did, which is actually try and bury the truth. Why is it important that we have a full reckoning? Why is it important we talk about this? Well, sure. And I must add that this has been painful for Tulsans. I mean, you have generations of people who were taught a completely false history of their city. As the historian John O'Frankel once said, Tulsa lost its sense of honesty, and it did for a long time. So for people to grow up and realize, oh my God, something else happened here, that's

been traumatic for a lot of people. But look, our history is important. As someone once told me not long ago, history is education. Everything else is just training. But to be able to learn from our history, we have to learn from the whole thing. You just can't pick the parts that are good. Look, the United States has made great contributions to the world. There's no question about it. And those are important things that need to be talked about. But we've also had great failings as well. And we have to teach about those. If you're going to learn from the past, you have to face the whole thing. Look, the past happened. It is what it was. But to learn from it, we have to hear the whole thing.

Perhaps one of the U.S.'s greatest contributions to the world can be honesty about its past, which is in short supply among the world's nations these days. Well, that would be marvelous if that's the case. The irony is that Tulsa had this great skeleton literally buried in its municipal closet for so long. And it has been forced now to grapple with it for a while. And in an odd way, I think Tulsa is ahead of most communities. We live in what in the groundbreaking, the new book I refer to as the age of reevaluation. And I know this is going on because I read the Times every day and statues are coming down, rightly or wrongly.

Buildings are being renamed. Plaques are going up. All of that. And I think that's healthy for us, but it's hard to do. It's a difficult moment, but we need to go through it because we have to be honest about how we got to where we are today. Well, thank you so much for all the work you've done on this and for coming on this podcast. Remind us again what the book's called. Yes, the book is called The Groundbreaking, The Tulsa Race Massacre, and An American City's Search for Justice. In the UK, it's been published by Icon Books and has a slightly different subtitle in the

US where it's been published by Dutton Penguin Random House. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast.

Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating

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It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.