Dan Snow's History Hit - Tulsa: The Attack on Black Wall Street

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

From May 31 to June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly Black ‘Greenwood District’ of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hundreds of people died or were injured in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921— the event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.Hannibal B. Johnson is an author and professor. He serves on the federal 400 Years of African-American History Commission and chaired the Education Committee for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. Hannibal joins Dan to discuss how Greenwood was known as ‘The Black Wall Street,’ the white supremacy that lay at the centre of the riot, and how the city grapples with its historical racial trauma today.Click here to listen to a previous episode about The Tulsa Race Massacre.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. On May the 31st 1921, a white mob gathered in front of the courthouse and prison in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A young black teenager had been apprehended by the police, allegedly for an assault against a young white woman. The assault seems never to have taken place. It was fanned by fake news, by the newspapers, and that mob in front of the courthouse went on a rampage through the black area of Tulsa, the Greenwood neighbourhood, an affluent area known as the Black Wall Street, and caused astonishing damage. They killed, they plundered, they looted, and they burned. It is one of the most remarkable, shocking incidents of white vigilante violence against the black community post-reconstruction. We covered this for the anniversary of the centenary last

year. It was one of the most successful ever podcasts. We thought we'd revisit it this year. We talked to a very brilliant professor, Hannibal B. Johnson. He chaired the education committee for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. He's written numerous books about it. He is the oracle. As you'll hear, the man's knowledge is encyclopedic. It was great to have him on the podcast. If you want to go back and listen to other episodes

of this podcast featuring accounts of the Tulsa Race Massacre, then please do head over to History Hit TV. You can get them all there without the ads. You just follow the link in the notes of this podcast. You whip over there. You sign up to History Hit TV. You can watch documentaries. You can listen to podcasts. It's all happening over there. Available anywhere in the world. USA, Canada, New Zealand, Mongolia. I checked it out the other day in Egypt. I was watching History Hit TV in Egypt. It was very enjoyable. Travels well. What can I say? So anywhere where you get the internet, you get History Hit TV. So please go

and check it out. In the meantime, though, folks, here is Professor Hannibal B. Johnson. Enjoy. Hannibal, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is great to be here. This is so interesting. Tulsa and the Black Wall Street. Tell me about this community of affluent African-Americans in Tulsa. Well, as you may well know, legal segregation was the order of the day back when this community was formed in 1906. So it was called the Greenwood District. Later, legendary statesman Booker T. Washington dubbed it the Negro Wall Street of America, and that later morphed into Black Wall Street,

really a nod to the business character of part of the community. Actually, a more appropriate moniker as opposed to Black Wall Street would have been Black Main Street, because these were mostly small businesses, mom-and-pop type operations, the kinds of businesses that one might find in any city or hamlet or town in Oklahoma or elsewhere in the United States. So these were grocers and restaurants and movie theaters and hotels and dance halls, pool halls, haberdasheries, and hotels and dance halls, pool halls, haberdasheries, beauty salons, barbershops, theaters, that sort of business enterprise really conglomerated in the segregated black Greenwood district, together with service providers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and dentists.

That was relatively unusual to have such a concentration of business and professional people, and it became kind of an example of black promise and prowess throughout the United States. And again, the community was formed in 1906 as part of the city of Tulsa. Tulsa in 1906 was a really growing, thriving, fossil fuel-centered community. Oil was discovered in and around Tulsa in 1905 and in other years. Tulsa became the self-described oil capital of the world several years later. And was it something about its newness that meant African Americans were able to get a piece of the action when they'd been excluded economically from maybe the more traditional communities that they'd come from? Why were they thriving there? So the black presence in Oklahoma generally precedes Tulsa's ascendance as the oil capital of the world. the oil capital of the world. The black presence in Oklahoma really began in the 1830s and 1840s because the so-called five civilized tribes, the Cherokees, the Muscogee Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and the Seminoles, were forced out of their homelands in the southeastern United

States in the 1830s and 1840s in Indian removal. Now, together with those Native tribes were a number of Black folks, because all five of the tribes engaged in the practice of chattel slavery. So they had Black folks enslaved within those tribes. There were also some Black free persons living with the tribes as well. But that's how African Americans migrated into Oklahoma in the first instance. Some of those people, after the Civil War, received land allotments. All five of the so-called civilized tribes aligned themselves with the Confederacy during the American Civil War. And in 1866, some years thereafter, those tribes executed treaties with the federal government, whereby most of them, the exception being the Chickasaws,

agreed to accept their formerly enslaved people as tribal members. Later in the 19th century, tribal members were granted land allotments. Tribes typically held their land communally, but the federal government, in a very intentional policy, decided to break up the tribal land mass and allot land individually. And so some of these black folks got land. Land was an accession to wealth. Some of that wealth found its place among people who would migrate into Tulsa's Greenwood District, and certainly among people who would support the businesses that proliferated in the Greenwood District in the early part of the 20th century. So talk to me about the events of summer, late spring 1921, and the Black teenager, Dick Rowland.

When we talk about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it's important to understand it in context. 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it's important to understand it in context. So Tulsa in 1921, in the run-up to the massacre, which was May 31st and June 1st, was what I call a tinderbox or a powder keg. For a number of reasons, really a confluence of factors. One is, let's look at the national context in 1921. We know that in 1919, just two years prior, there had been over two dozen major events that were described as race riots throughout the United States in places as far-flung as New

York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Omaha, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Longview, Texas, and on and on and on. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP described the summer and fall of 1919 as Red Summer. Red's a metaphorical reference to the blood that flowed in the streets from all this racial unrest. The other thing that's happening in terms of race during this period is lynching. Lynching is a form of domestic terrorism aimed primarily at African Americans. And the point of lynching is not simply to punish a person who's violated the law or who's perceived to have violated the law or engaged in some sort of social infraction. The purpose really is to send a message to the entirety of the black populace about their relative place in American society. So the purpose of lynching, this brutalization of black bodies, was really to reinforce white supremacy.

So there were dozens upon dozens of lynchings every year in the run-up to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and thereafter. So certainly a factor. The Greenwood District, this segregated black community, existed on a 35-square block area that abutted downtown, separated by the Frisco Tracks. This was land that was desired by railroad interests and other corporate interests. In fact, even before the massacre, there was talk of moving the black citizens of Tulsa farther north and repurposing the land for higher and better uses, the construction of a railroad depot and other things. So that certainly became a factor as well. Psychologically, there's a dynamic that I refer to as cognitive dissonance.

So white supremacy was really the racial ideology of the day. It had untold currency back in 1921. If you are a white citizen of Tulsa and you're able to look north from the Frisco tracks, the racial dividing line into the black community and you see black folks with a high degree of home ownership, you see cars, you see people dress well, you see people patronizing their own businesses, it creates cognitive dissonance. That really is a disharmony between what one believes ought to be the racial reality and what's happening on the ground. So one way to resolve that disharmony then is to bring the black community down a few notches. And one way to do that, of course, is through violence. The KKK, the iconic domestic terrorist organization, had a foothold in Tulsa and in Oklahoma throughout the decade of the 1920s. That only really elevated or burgeoned after the massacre.

And then finally, the media. We talk about the role of the media in society today. The media were no less important back in 1921. The media outlets back then were mostly print newspapers. And in Tulsa, there was a print newspaper, an afternoon daily called the Tulsa Tribune, that published a series of incendiary articles and editorials that really fomented hostility in the white community against the black community. And one of those articles was the article that described the incident between the two teenagers you referenced. It was an incident in an elevator on May 30, 1921, a Monday. It involved Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black boy who shined shoes in downtown Tulsa.

He needed to use the restroom that morning, so he walked over to the downtown Drexel building. He entered the Drexel building and boarded the elevator. The elevator was manually operated by a young girl named Sarah Page, 17-year-old white girl. Something happened on the elevator. We don't know exactly what happened, but presumably it caused Dick Rowland to bump into or brush up against Sarah Page. She overreacted and began screaming. The elevator landed back in the lobby. Dick Rowland, frightened, exited the elevator and ran away.

Sarah Page, distraught, exited the elevator, and she was comforted by a locally owned store clerk. The store was Renberg's, and she told him her rendition of the events that transpired in the elevator. He interpreted what she said as an assault on the elevator. So he called the police. He was concerned for her safety and wanted to get Dick Rowland apprehended. Dick Rowland was ultimately arrested by the sheriff, Sheriff McCullough, and put in jail. The jail sat atop the courthouse. Sarah Page, for her part, would ultimately recant the original story.

She refused to cooperate with prosecutors when they charged Dick Rowland with this assault. Things might have just died down had it not been for the intervention of that daily afternoon newspaper I described earlier called the Tulsa Tribune. So the day after the elevator incident, the Tulsa Tribune published an account entitled, Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator. It was a scurrilous, scandalous account of an attempted rape in broad daylight in a public building in downtown Tulsa. It was intended to enrage and inflame the community, and it had its desired effect. What the article did was make Sarah Page, the white girl, look more virtuous because she had a somewhat checkered background. And the corollary of making Sarah Page look more virtuous is to make Dick Rowland look more villainous.

Again, the white community was alarmed. So a large white mob gathered, ultimately numbering in the thousands, gathered on the lawn of the courthouse. There was talk among that mob of lynching Dick Rowland that evening. Black men got wind of this lynch talk and they were concerned. So several dozen black men marched down to this lynch talk and they were concerned so several dozen black men marched down to the courthouse they were confronted by the sheriff who said he had things under control that the prisoner was safe in the jail he had shut off the elevator he had a guard on the stairs and that the best thing that they could do to avoid conflict was to return to their community

the greenwood community they did. But the lynch talk persisted. They were aware of lynchings around the United States generally. They were aware of a very public lynching that had occurred in the Tulsa area just nine months prior. So again, several dozen black men, some of them World War I veterans, who knew how to use the weapons that they carried, marched back down to the courthouse intent on protecting Dick Rowland from what they thought would be a certain lynching. There were words exchanged between the much larger white group and the smaller black group. A white man tried to take a black man's gun. And in the words of a number of the survivors of the massacre, all hell broke loose after that.

The Greenwood community was invaded by the white mob again numbering at its peak in the thousands. Several members of the mob were deputized by local law enforcement. The mob prevented the Tulsa Fire Department from putting out the raging fires that were spreading all throughout the Greenwood district, some of which were apparently set, according to eyewitnesses, by incendiary devices that were dropped from private planes that flew over the Greenwood District during the period. The upshot of all that is this. As best we can determine, somewhere between 100 and 300 people, most of them black, were killed during the massacre. Hundreds more were injured. At least 1,250 homes in the black community were destroyed, as were a number of business and commercial establishments.

Property damage conservatively estimated at the time was $1.5 to $2 million, translated into today's currency would be in the tens of millions of dollars. A number of people in the Greenwood community, mostly men, were interned throughout the city, very much like people of Japanese ancestry were interned during World War II, ostensibly for their own protection. They were interned by the Oklahoma National Guard, a unit of which was sent in from Oklahoma City to quell the violence. They did that on the afternoon of June 1st, 1921. The Red Cross, the American Red Cross, set up operations in Tulsa immediately after the massacre. Maurice Willows was sent in from St. Louis to run that effort. It was a successful effort by all accounts in terms of providing health care, food, shelter, and clothing for the people in the black community, many of whom were destitute after the massacre. And a couple

of white churches I should mention that are still here, prominent churches, Holy Family Cathedral and First Presbyterian Church, were helpful in terms of providing refuge for these victims of the massacre in the immediate aftermath of this disaster. It counts, as you mentioned, aircraft. It was like a war, like a scene of urban warfare. So as best we can determine, the planes were not government planes. They were private planes. And they were used really for two purposes. Eyewitness accounts and historians believe that they strafed the community with bullets.

And as I mentioned earlier, they dropped some sort of incendiary devices, I'll call them. Some people say that there were nitroglycerin bombs. Some say they were turpentine. But they were devices that really caused the fires to spread more rapidly and burn more brilliantly. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Tulsa race massacre. More coming up. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from ballads to banqueting, from ghosts to gunpowder plots. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What about Dick Rowland back in the jailhouse? Dick Rowland was never harmed in any way. Ultimately, he found his way out of Tulsa, relocated first in Kansas City,

and as best we can determine, later in Portland, Oregon. And charges against him were dropped? Never pursued. No charges against him were pursued, in part because Sarah Page was not a cooperating witness. What was the impact? The impact on the city is still visible, I'm sure, but what was the impact in the immediate aftermath? There was that vibrant economic community restored and rebuilt or did it ever recover?

I hope everybody will be able to look at some of the panoramic views of the devastation in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. The community was virtually obliterated. But the story here is really one that has a longer arc than the massacre. For me, the story is the indomitable human spirit, and I'm getting to your question. So immediately, almost even as the embers from the massacre still smoldered, the rebuilding began. There were efforts in black churches throughout the United States to collect money and send to the Greenwood District here in Tulsa. The NAACP contributed money to the rebuilding. People locally encouraged other people to rebuild using milk crates or whatever they could find to rebuild, and they did that.

And they did it against extraordinary odds. The city of Tulsa worked to expand the fire code, which would have made it cost prohibitive to rebuild. That was challenged in court by a local black attorney named B.C. Franklin. The Tulsa Tribune, on June 4th, 1921, that's just three days after the conclusion of the massacre, published an editorial entitled, It Must Not Be Again. And one would think from afar, with that title, what the article is going to say is, we can't have this kind of violence and this kind of disruption and chaos in our city again.

That's not what it was about. The piece was about the possible rebuilding of the Greenwood District. Again, entitled, It Must Not Be Again. Sort of a vicious, scathing editorial about the relative worth of the black community in Tulsa, even as people lie in hospital beds dying from the massacre. So those are incredible odds against which to rebuild a community. But the community was rebuilt to such a degree in 1925 that the black community here in Tulsa hosted the National Conference of

the National Negro Business League. That was Booker T. Washington's black chamber of commerce. The community actually peaked not pre-1921 massacre, but it actually peaked in the early to mid-1940s with hundreds of black-owned and operated businesses throughout the community. And it was successful decades thereafter. The decline really begins in the 60s and through the 70s for a couple of probably counterintuitive reasons. One is integration, and the other is urban renewal. In terms of integration, it's important to understand the economics of the community as a black business community. It was a black business community

created as such by necessity because of segregation. The unintended consequence of that segregation was to trap black dollars in the black community, which ironically supported the businesses that operated within the context of that community. When integration comes along and the dollars begin to flow outside the community and there's not a commensurate investment by the white community in the black community, then it undermines the financial foundation of the community. As the businesses began to become dilapidated, to close, etc., then properties become ripe for urban renewal. Urban renewal is an effort throughout the United States during this period that looks for blighted communities with the stated intention, generally positive, at least if you look at it superficially,

to rid communities of blight, to take out these properties that are in distress, that are not being cared for. So a number of the properties, former businesses in the Greenwood community, were targeted by urban renewal. And ultimately, the urban renewal process, in its ultimate wisdom, located a stretch of highway right through the Black Business District, right through Greenwood. It had a devastating impact, and it's still here. And the interstate bisects what was a teeming business district called the Greenwood District, fondly known as Black Wall Street. It's so interesting in the US that the black communities are demonized when they are denied economic opportunity and they're demonized as failing and dysfunctional and corrupt communities. And then they're demonized when they are vibrant economically as well. Like it's extraordinary. These African-American communities, like what are they supposed to do? What are they supposed to do?

It's a great question. So a lot of people, when they hear this story, they don't understand that the Greenwood District, this black sector, was a part of the city of Tulsa. And had it not been for segregation, had they been able to engage in commerce with white Tulsa, the dominant forces in Tulsa, there would not have been a Greenwood district. But what I say is that the Greenwood district really represents an economic detour. It's as though metaphorically, these black citizens approached the gates of economic opportunity in downtown white-dominated Tulsa. They were turned away.

They were detoured back into their own community. They were detoured back into their own community. And they created, based on their treatment by the dominant culture, a successful neighborhood and a successful business community on their own geographic space. And what we can do in the present, though, I think is really not so much think in terms of geography, but think in terms of psychology. How do we leverage the example set by these people who were hopeful to a fault, who were believers in their own capacity, who were able to work with whatever came their way, whatever they were imbued with and whatever they were given? That's an example, that black Wall Street mindset, as I describe it, that we can use in the present, not being as limited geographically, not even being limited in terms of possible markets.

Because of technology, the markets are much broader than they ever were. So it's the belief in self based on role models and examples of the past that we can really exploit or leverage in the present. For decades afterwards, it was not talked about. And I'd like to know why. And then I'd also like to know what people today in Oklahoma and Tulsa think about it and are taught about it. Some people would argue that there's been a conspiracy of silence, or at least there was in the immediate aftermath of these events. I think there are a lot of psychological dynamics that went on. In terms of the city leaders, the city fathers, and I mean fathers literally, the leaders were pretty much positioning Tulsa as a cosmopolitan, desirable city.

As Tulsa's fortunes rose because of the discovery of oil and because of the wealth that that brought, the Chamber of Commerce types wanted people to come to Tulsa and see Tulsa as a metropolitan, desirable place to relocate. And so they were interested in minimizing this terrible tragedy that occurred in the way of the massacre. In the black community, there was what I describe as post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. There was fear that such an event could recur. There was fear that such an event could recur. So even some of the elders, some of the people who were survivors and were living as recently as 20 years ago, they said that this was not talked about in my family because the elders felt that if it were talked about, it might hobble young people.

It might limit them and cause them not to reach their full potential. So they decided sort of not to talk about it. Curriculum is the way that we know about these public events. I mean, it's typically shared with us through curricular materials. And the curriculum did not reflect this history for many, many decades. And that was intentional. Again, who's in control of the curriculum? The Black community was not in control of the curriculum, not in control of what substantively goes into the teaching of Oklahoma history. So it's a confluence of all those things that led us to where we are in terms of teaching about that history. We're in a different place now, thank goodness. Thank goodness. And yet that's so interesting that I actually find myself doing this with my daughters. Sometimes I can't bear to tell them the history. I wonder if you find that within the African-American community.

I guess I'm saying I understand a little bit why some of those community leaders would not want their young people to think they've been brought into this world, where they could at any time be made destitute, be the victims of arbitrary violence. Can you understand in a way, even though you are a brilliant historian, your job is the opposite, can you understand that impulse? Yes, but I also understand the contrary impulse, which is it's imperative that we know something about our surroundings. And if we are interested in understanding why dynamics, particularly racial dynamics, are what they are in the present, we have to look to the past because the past really holds the key to explaining something about where we are today and to helping us work

together to get to a better place. And so for those reasons, we have to talk about this, what I call hard history. So in the last 20 years or so, we've made great strides in terms of infusing this history into the curriculum, getting buy-in from leaders in the educational community and in state government, local government, school boards to teach this history. We've created Greenwood Rising, recently opened back in August. It's a history center that's an experiential telling of the history that encourages people to not just understand the history locally, but to connect it to analogs throughout the nation and throughout the world.

to analogs throughout the nation and throughout the world. Because what happened in Tulsa is a failure, in my estimation, of the recognition of our shared humanity. If we recognize our shared humanity and we accorded each and every other individual the dignity and worth to which he or she is entitled, we wouldn't have a 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre or a Holocaust or any number of other tragic events that have occurred throughout the world. So connecting up this history, connecting the dots, so to speak, is really important. And then also inspiring people to be difference makers. Once your eyes have been opened, they can never be completely closed again. And you're obliged to actually do something to make the world a better place. And that's kind of the overarching message that you get

from Greenwood Rising. An inspiring place to end. Thank you so much. Also, tell everyone about your book. You're being very modest. The other big plank of this is your book that everyone needs to read. So tell us what it's called. I've written several books about this history, but the latest is called Black Wall Street 100, and American City Grapples with its Historical Racial Trauma. And I wrote the book on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the massacre, when I knew that people, not just here, but from all over the world who heard the story, would want to know what is different about the Tulsa of 2021 as compared to the Tulsa of 1921? So I tell the history in a summary sort of way, but the bulk of the book is focused on what we have done with that history over the course of these many decades and what more we might need to do as we move forward.

Well, thank you very much. I look forward to visiting your new centre there, your Interpretation Centre and everything. And thank you very much for coming on the pod and telling everyone about it. Absolutely. My pleasure. I feel we have the history on 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. Thanks, folks. You've made it into another episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. This part of the history of our country things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please don't ever do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.