Murder, Mystery & Makeup - Tulsa Race Massacre - What Happened?!

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Hi Friends! Hope you have been staying happy and healthy out there, big hugs all around. Today I wanted to talk about the Tulsa Race Mass. Sad sad story and it was just the 101 year anniversary ! Love and appreciate you guys so much and I will be seeing you very soon. x o Bailey Sarian P.S. Make sure you check out my YouTube @BaileySarian!

Hi, how are you today? Did you miss me? I know you did. I know you did. Hi, how are you today? My name is Bailey Sarian and today is Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery, and Makeup Monday! If you are new here, hi, how are you? I hope you're doing well. Every Monday, I sit down and I talk about a true crime story that's been heavy on my noggin, and I do my makeup at the same time. If you're interested in true crime and you like makeup,

I would highly suggest you hit that subscribe button because I'm here for you every Monday. Today we are dabbling in some American history. Woo! As uncomfortable as American history can be, it's still important that we talk about it, right? I'm sure we can all agree on that, at least I hope, because there is something always to be learned from it. So we are going to Oklahoma. That's right, baby, Oklahoma. Oklahoma. In 1921, Oklahoma had a racially, socially, and politically tense atmosphere.

The First World War had ended in 1918 with the return of many ex-servicemen coming back home. Civil rights was still lacking for many people, and the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise. The Ku Klux Klan, I should have looked up when they started, but I think it was around this time. But they were on the rise, and they were becoming more and more popular and more well-known, unfortunately. Tulsa, Oklahoma was a booming oil city, which supported a large number of affluent, educated, and professional African-Americans. This caused tensions in the city, and a combination of factors played a part in all of this, really. It was mainly like just racial tensions.

Oklahoma was admitted as a state in November of 1907. The newly created state legislator passed Jim Crow laws, which were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation. The 1907 Oklahoma Constitution did not call for strict segregation, but still the very first law passed segregated all rail travel and voter registration rules, which effectively disenfranchised most of the black community.

So that meant that they were also not allowed to serve on juries or in local office. Now these laws were in place until the passing of the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was 60 years after this event that we're talking about today. On August 14th, 1960, Tulsa had passed a law that mandated residential segregation by forbidding blacks or whites from residing on any block where three fourths

or more of the residents were of the other race. Now the United States Supreme Court declared that this was unconstitutional. The following year, Tulsa and many other Southern cities continued to establish and enforce segregation for the next three decades. They didn't give a shit. They were playing by their own rules.

Since 1915, the Ku Klux Klan had been growing in urban chapters across the country. By the end of 1921, Tulsa had about 3,200 residents in the Klan by one estimate. And the city's population was 72,000 in 1920. There's a lot of people in the Klu Klux Klan, is what I'm saying. So Greenwood was a district in Tulsa organized in 1906. Greenwood became so successful that it was known as the quote,

the Black Wall Street. So the Black community had created their own businesses and services in this area, and several grocery stores, two movie theaters, they had nightclubs, they had restaurants, numerous churches, and even their own newspaper. Oh yes. They had black professionals, including dentists, doctors, lawyers, all lived and worked in this area as well.

Now, because the black community was not welcome in other towns, cities, or even to live on like the same block as white people, so instead they decided, hey, let's start our own successful town. Let's do it ourselves. And that's what they did. So Greenwood residents selected their own leaders and raised capital there to support economic growth.

I mean, they took it into their own hands, they're like, look, the white men are not going to allow us to be successful in their neighborhoods, or be successful contributing members of society in their neighborhoods, so let's just take it into our own hands, which they did. They built their own town, their own neighborhood that was very successful. And of course, this caught attention from the white community. It fed into the racism that was going on, because how dare they start their own successful neighborhood,

and how dare they be more successful than us? They didn't like that. On May 30th, 1921, a young black teenager named Dick Rowland, who worked as a shoe shiner employed at the Main Street Shine Parlor, he had entered an elevator at the Drexel building, which was an office building on South Main Street. It's believed that Rowland may have been trying to get to the only restroom in the building, but it's unsure.

He goes into the building and he goes to the elevator. Now, the woman operating the elevator was a white woman named Sarah Page, and Dick Roland had entered the elevator, and what happened on the elevator is unknown exactly. But what we do know is that at some point, while the two were on the elevator, Sarah Page had screamed and Dick Roland was seen running out of the elevator. The guy who was working the front desk in the building, he ran over to the elevator and he saw Sarah in what he said was a distraught state and he called the police.

The police came out and most likely questioned Sarah, but there was no written account anywhere of her statement that has been found. They must have been like, oh, I'll just remember it with my mind, or they burned it. We don't know. Most believe that the police had determined what happened between the two, and then authorities conducted like a low-key investigation of their own without doing the proper paperwork.

Now, unfortunately, people were talking, rumors were swirling. Not even long after the incident took place, about what supposedly happened on that elevator, it had circulated through the city's white community. A front page story in the Tulsa Tribune reported that police had arrested Roland for sexually assaulting Paige. This is what they put on the front page of their newspaper, that Roland had sexually assaulted Paige.

Mind you, this didn't happen. I know it's a spoiler, but he didn't sexually assault her. They were just being shitty people. Okay, but they ran it. Oh baby, they ran that story. Front page, front page. You don't think that's gonna get people a little riled up? Of course it is.

It's 1921. They're just waiting for an excuse to rage. The white people, that is. This newspaper gets out there and Roland had a good reason to be scared because at this time, an accusation alone could put him at risk for an attack by angry mobs of white people.

He knew his life was gonna- is now in danger. So Roland, now fearing his life for good reason, Roland decided to stay with his mother, who lived in the Greenwood neighborhood. So he went there to try and hide out until hopefully things calmed down. On the morning after the incident, Roland was located and arrested and taken to the Tulsa City Jail, then was transferred due to the jail receiving

threatening phone calls from people saying that they were going to kill Roland and to just hand him over because they were going to take care of him. They meaning the angry white people. So as nighttime approached, an angry white mob was gathering outside the courthouse where Roland was at,

and they were demanding that the sheriff hand over Roland. The sheriff Willard McCullough, he refused to hand over Roland and his officers barricaded the top floor to protect him as well. They shut down the building's elevators and had the remaining men barricaded the top floor to protect him as well. They shut down the building's elevators, and had the remaining men barricade themselves at the top of the stairs, um, with orders to shoot any intruders in sight,

pretty much, if they came up and were trying to get through. The sheriff though decided, I'm just gonna go outside and try and like, talk to the angry people, angry white people, try to calm them down, so he goes out there, tries to calm them down. So he goes out there, tries to calm them down and send them home, but he had no luck.

They were not going anywhere. They were not going unless he handed over Roland. The angry mob wanted Roland lynched and were protesting to lynch Roland. Now a few blocks away, members of the community gathered and discussed what was going on. What happened to Roland? Why was everyone angry?

Like, what are we gonna do to calm this down and make sure that Roland is okay? They were trying their best to come up with a plan to prevent the crowd from lynching Roland, because let's be real, it was probably going to happen if they allowed it. At around 9pm, a group of about 25 armed black men, including some World War I veterans, they went to the courthouse to offer help guarding Roland from the growing mob. Now the reason it said why they went down there

in the first place, because naturally, you know, people want to think like, well, they were trying to start something by going down there and they shouldn't have done that. But the reason they said that they went down there in the first place was because the main sheriff, Sheriff McCullough, he personally told them that their presence was required at the courthouse. So 25 of them, they go out there,

and the sheriff turns them away, saying they were not needed. But 10 witnesses said that they were just following the order from the sheriff in the first place, that he personally asked for them to be there. The sheriff went out and made like a public statement saying, I never asked for them. He's publicly denying that he gave any orders for them to be there.

So a little frustrated, but they were just trying to follow the rules. Now, seeing the armed black community show up, many of the white mob tried to unsuccessfully break into the National Guard Armory nearby. They were trying to break in, steal guns, and also get more ammunition. So rumors are still circling around that there's going to be a possible lynching.

Obviously, people from the Greenwood community were getting nervous about this. It's probably going to happen. It's going to happen unless they stand their ground. 75 members of the Greenwood community, they had returned to the courthouse armed and they showed up there around 10 p.m. They just were there to make sure that nothing happened to Roland.

Like it was simple as that, you know? Unfortunately though, there was only 75 of them. When they got to the courthouse, they see that there were over 1,500 angry white people. 1,500 versus 75, scary. Now, according to witnesses, a white man is alleged to have told one of the armed black men to surrender his pistol.

Of course, it was probably more aggressive than that, but pretty much telling him to give me your gun or whatever, you know, but the man refused and a shot was fired. Now, some say that it may have been accidental or it was meant to be a warning, but because of this one shot, it turned into many firing their weapons at one another. So after shots were fired, pretty much chaos broke out.

One gunshot pretty much started everybody getting out of control. So those who came from Greenwood, they pretty much retreated on foot back to Greenwood, some in vehicles, I'm sorry, but they pretty much went back to Greenwood. The armed white mob, instead of just leaving them alone, they decided to follow them back into Greenwood.

So a lot of the angry white mobsters, they stopped to loot local stores for additional weapons and ammunition. Along the way, any bystanders who they saw like leaving a movie theater, maybe like the show had just ended, they're walking out, someone leaving a restaurant or whatever, the angry white people, they shot them.

They were just shooting anybody that they saw who was black. So panic had set in because the angry white mob, they began firing on any black people that they saw, turning quickly into an angry white riot. At around 11pm, members of the National Guard unit began to assemble at the armory to organize a plan to subdue the rioters. Several groups were deployed downtown to set up guard at the courthouse, also at the police station and other public facilities. The forces

appeared to have been deployed to protect the white districts which were adjacent to Greenwood and not there to protect Greenwood itself or the community aka the black community at all. It was there to protect the angry white people. As the evening continued, the National Guard rounded up numerous black people and took them to the convention hall on Brady Street for detention. Why they were being arrested and detained? Well, to simply put it, they were being arrested because they were black. I mean, they didn't have guns. There were many people arrested, detained, and taken in who were not armed,

who were just fucking minding their own damn business. And that's a fact. I mean, that's not even up for debate. Some people try to debate it, but I don't know why. So many prominent white Tulsans also participated in the riot, including Tulsa founder and Ku Klux Klan member, W. Tate Brady,

who participated in the riot as a night watchman. He showed up like, oh, I'm gonna help with this shit. So June 1st, 1921, throughout the early morning, small groups of whites made it into Greenwood by car, some on foot, but mainly on car, and was just shooting with no rhyme or reason into businesses and residents. And they would throw lighted oil rags

into several buildings along the streets, setting whatever was in their path on fire. Then crews from the Tulsa Fire Department came to town, you know, they arrived, right, to put out the fires as firemen do. So they showed up and they were there to put out the fires, but the firefighters were turned away at gunpoint by the angry white mob. They would not allow them to enter into the town and put out the fires.

So residents inside Greenwood, many of them began to get their handguns or something to defend their neighborhood, while a lot more tried to flee the town completely. They had to get their handguns or something to defend their neighborhood, while a lot more tried to flee the town completely. They had to get out. But throughout the night, both sides continued fighting. According to a Red Cross estimate, around 1,256 houses were burned throughout the night. 215 others were looted, but not set on fire.

Two newspaper companies, schools, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores, and many other black owned businesses were destroyed or damaged by fire. For what? We know what, because they were racist and angry. It's believed that 100 to 300 people were killed during this massacre.

Numerous eyewitnesses described airplanes flying above the town, and they were firing their rifles out of the airplane, and they also dropped fire bombs on buildings, homes, and families. Law enforcement personnel were thought to be aboard at least some of those airplanes, but there were some flights said to be privately owned.

By who? You know, by who? Eyewitness accounts such as testimony from the survivors during commission hearings and a manuscript by eyewitnesses discovered in 2015 said that on the morning of June 1st, at least a dozen or more planes circled the neighborhood and dropped burning turpentine balls on an office building,

a hotel, a gas station, and multiple other buildings. Men also fired rifles at young and old black residents, gunning them down in the street where they just left everybody in the street. Law enforcement officials you know stepped in and gave a little statement. They're like look those airplanes they were put there to simply provide safety and protection against a quote n-word uprising end quote. In other parts of the city where you know there was a lot of middle class white families who employed black people in their homes as live-in cooks and servants.

Well, the angry white rioters went to their homes and they demanded that the families turn over their employees to be taken to detention centers around the city. Now, because these angry white people are showing up with fucking rifles and fucking shit, many of them complied because if they didn't, well they were harassed by the rioters and their homes were then vandalized.

So then the governor of Oklahoma, well I kind of already mentioned this, but the governor of Oklahoma had ordered the National Guard to come in, you know? So 109 troops from Oklahoma City, and then following that Oklahoma City was put under martial law, which would be established that day. So troops were pretty much arresting anyone and everyone

who was black and then requiring them, requiring the detainees to carry identification cards. And it said as many as 600 black Greenwood residents were held at three local facilities. They had the Convention Hall, which would be now known as the Brady Theater, the Tulsa Fairgrounds, which then it was located about a mile northeast of Greenwood, and McNulty Park, which was a, or is a baseball stadium. Is it still a baseball stadium? Probably. Some were held at these locations for as long as eight days.

For what, you ask? For being black. Martial law was declared around 11 30 a.m., and by noon, the troops had managed to suppress most of the remaining violence. In the hours after the Tulsa Race Massacre, all charges against Dick Rowland were dropped. Sarah, the woman who was working the elevator, she decided that she didn't want to press charges or she dropped the charges.

So the police had concluded that Rowland had most likely just stumbled into Paige or even stepped on her foot while they were both in the elevator, which led to her kind of shrieking or screaming, whatever she did. Roland, who was kept safely under guard in the jail during the riot, he ended up being exonerated and he left Tulsa the next morning and reportedly never returned. I mean, yay for Roland, but 35 city blocks

were completely destroyed, over 800 people were treated for their injuries, and the official tally of deaths in the massacre was 36 people, which now historians consider much too low. The Tulsa Race Massacre stood as one of the deadliest riots in US history, behind only the New York draft riots of 1863, which killed 119 people. In the years to come, as the black community worked to rebuild

their ruined homes and businesses, segregation in the city only increased, and Oklahoma's newly established branch of the KKK grew in strength. Of course, how the newspaper was playing this, of course, was trying to make the black community out to be the bad ones, like they tend to do. For decades, there was no public ceremonies, there were no memorials for the dead, or any efforts to even acknowledge the

events taking place between May 31st and June 1st in 1921. Instead, there was a deliberate effort to cover up the whole thing, like it never happened. Yep, that's right, Tulsa Massacre, what's that? Rumors. That's how I imagine the people in the office were. What's that? Never heard of it, never happened, no. Remember the Tulsa Tribune? They were the newspaper who reported the story in the first place and essentially caused the outrage.

Well guess what? They removed the front page story of May 31st from its bound volumes, essentially erasing it from its records like it never happened. They should be held accountable. Scholars later discovered that police and state archives about the riot were completely missing as well. As a result, until recently,

the Tulsa Race Massacre was rarely mentioned in history books. It wasn't taught in schools or even talked about. In 1996, on the riot's 75th anniversary, a service was held at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which rioters had burned to the ground, and a memorial was placed in front of Greenwood Cultural Center. The following year, an official state government commission

was created to investigate the Tulsa Race Riot. Scientists and historians began looking into long ago stories, including numerous victims buried in unmarked graves. In 2001, the report of the Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 were made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921. Over the next year, local citizens filed more than $1.8 million in riot-related claims against the city. They did that by June of 1922.

Now, despite the promise of funding many people from the Greenwood community, spent the winter of 1921 and 1922 in tents as they worked to rebuild their neighborhood. Oh yes, they were living in tents set up by the Red Cross. Most of the promised funding was never raised for the residents, and they struggled to rebuild after the violence. They had little to no financial help. In order to continue rebuilding, a new fire code was said to be set in place to prevent another tragedy from happening. And they were going to do this by banning wooden frame

houses in place of the previously burnt homes. Now because of this new fire code that was supposedly being set in place, it halted all construction and caused major delays. So they weren't even allowed to rebuild until this new fire code was set in place. So they're just sitting and waiting and they keep putting it off, putting it off, putting it off and they were doing that on purpose because they wanted to take the land over. So the reconstruction committee simply failed to formulate a single plan moving forward, which left many of the residents prohibited from rebuilding for several months because it was going against the fire code. City planners though, they immediately saw the fire that destroyed homes and businesses across Greenwood

as a really good thing. They were like, hey, awesome, there's a bunch of open land, because they had plans for this new land, okay? Showing a complete disregard for the welfare of affected residents. But they were like, oh hell yeah. You know why? Because they were making plans of their own

on what they wanted to do with the area. Plans were immediately made to rezone the burned area for industrial use. The reconstruction committee wanted to have the black landholders sign over their properties, and less than two years later, a large central rail hub called the Tulsa Union Depot was built where many of the homes and businesses destroyed used to be. Now this is not a fact, but a personal opinion that I stand by and truly believe. They were purposely blaming this fire code to prevent them from building in this area,

because they knew, the white Oklahomians, they knew that they wanted to take this land over, and they didn't want to give them 1.8 million dollars, so they kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. And eventually the people who were living in tents trying to rebuild, they had no money, right? They had no homes. They were growing more and more exhausted.

So they left. And some of the land holders were offered a small compensation for their land. But it was said to not be much, you know, like it, they had no option at that point. Because they had all this extra land now, it allowed for them to build an even larger train depot because they just had so much extra space now.

There were no zip zada convictions for any of the charges related to the violence when it came to the white rioters, because the black community paid a big price and a lot of them were detained. There were decades of silence about the terror, violence and losses of this event. The riot was largely omitted from local, state

and national histories. A woman by the name of Mary E. Jones Parrish, she was a young African-American teacher and journalist from New York. She was hired to write an account of the riot. She was a survivor and wrote about her experiences and collected other accounts and experiences that people she knew. She gathered photographs and compiled a partial roster of property losses in the African American community.

She published these in events of the Tulsa disaster, which was the first book to be published about the riot. Many who tried to share their stories to local newspapers, city newspapers, town newspapers, wherever they could, encountered pressure mainly by the white community, to keep silent, or they would take the story and do nothing with it. Five elderly survivors filed a suit against the city

of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma in February of 2003. This suit said that the state and the city should compensate the victims and their families to honor their admitted obligations, which was detailed in a commission's report. The federal district and courts dismissed the suit, citing the statute of limitations had been exceeded on the then 80-year-old case. The state requires that civil right cases be filed within two years of the event. The Supreme Court of the United States,

when you hear that, the Supreme Court of the United States, you kind of think like, oh, there's hope, right? The Supreme Court, I mean, that's major. Anyhow, well, they failed the people and they declined to hear the appeal. And this was in 2003. So, I mean, it's not like it was back in 1921. So in April, 2007, there was a push for US Congress

to pass a bill that extended the statute of limitations for this particular case, given the state and city's accountability for the destruction and long suppression of material about it. Now the bill would be introduced and heard by the Judiciary Committee of the House, but once again, did not pass.

They reintroduced the bill in 2009 as the John Hope Franklin Tulsa Greenwood Race Riot Claims Accountability Act of 2009, and then again, they reintroduced the bill in 2012, but it has not gotten out of the judiciary committee. It's just sat there. It was named in honor of the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, who was a firsthand witness to the destructive impact that the riot had on the community.

Dr. Franklin made numerous contributions to the understanding of the long-term effects of the riot on the community. Dr. Franklin made numerous contributions to the understanding of the long-term effects of the riot on the people and work to keep the issue alive in history. According to the State Department of Education, it has required the topic in Oklahoma history classes since 2000, and the incident has been included in Oklahoma history books since 2009,

but it wasn't required really countrywide or anything to actually learn about it. So, a bill in the Oklahoma State Senate requiring that all Oklahoma high schools teach the Tulsa Race Riot failed to pass in 2012. The opponents, the people who were against this bill, claimed, schools are already learning about this riot, we don't need to make it a bill. And in November, 2018, the 1921 Race Riot Commission was officially renamed the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.

Nearly a century later, in April of 2020, yes, in April of 2020, this happened in 1921, Tulsa plans to dig for suspected mass graves in a city-owned cemetery that may have been used to dispose the victims' bodies. They believe that there's a mass grave somewhere. There has to be. Unfortunately, there really isn't much of a happy ending to this story, but my friends, that is the awful story about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

What is owed this community 99 years later is a repairing education and economic incentives, something more than symbolic gestures or an official report as an apology extended to the survivors. It's in the Oklahoma legislators hands and it has been for a very long time. I'm sure we can both agree that this story is just absolutely horrific. And it's a good example for anyone out there

who likes to say like, why didn't they just start their own community then and be successful? Because I've seen shit like that. And it's like, well, they did. They did just that and it was taken away from them. It was burned to the ground along with their families, their family members, their wives, their kids, destroyed, taken from them.

They were punished for succeeding. And this, the Tulsa Race Massacre, was just a small little bump in the road of racism, abuse, murder and attacks that they have faced in this country. The black community during this time, they had just come back from World War I. They were serving a country. It wasn't even their country. They went to war, fought for our country, came back home and fought another war. And it's like nobody wants to acknowledge, I'm sorry not nobody, but a lot of people don't want to acknowledge this struggle that's gone on for a long time, as if their lives don't matter.

And I challenge you to just learn some history. Read about the things that have been suppressed for a long time, like this. The 99th anniversary just passed. Next year is going to be the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I don't know, I was trying to think of a plan, like what can we do to help?

I'm open to suggestions in the comment sections. I don't know how to get like a bill passed or something, but I would love to have that to happen. These families deserve it. If you were in their shoes, you would feel that way too. Come on, I hope this is all making sense. I'm being very careful with my words because a lot of people can take this as a personal attack and get very defensive and that's not what I'm trying

to do. I'm just trying to have a conversation. We have to educate ourselves and we have to do better. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. You make good choices. Please be safe out out there and you guys next week bye