The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Newspaperman Who Championed Black Tulsa

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

In the years leading up to the horrific Tulsa massacre of 1921, the Greenwood district was a thriving Black metropolis, a city within a city. Buoyed by money from Oklahoma’s oil boom, it was home to the original Cotton Club and to one of the first Black-owned daily newspapers in the United States, the Tulsa Star. The Star’s founder and editor was A. J. Smitherman, a lawyer and the Alabama-born son of a coal miner. He addressed his eloquence and his ire at local nuisances like prostitution and gambling halls, as well as the gravest injustices of American life. The Radio Hour’s KalaLea is the host of “Blindspot: Tulsa Burning.” She looks in this story at how Smitherman documented Greenwood at its height, and how he tried to prevent its destruction.  “Blind Spot: Tulsa Burning” is a six-part podcast co-produced by the History Channel and WNYC Studios, in collaboration with KOSU and Focus Black Oklahoma. The team includes Caroline Lester, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Joe Plourde, Emily Mann, Jenny Lawton, Emily Botein, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Bracken Klar, Rachel Hubbard, Anakwa Dwamena, Jami Floyd, and Cheryl Devall. The music is by Hannis Brown, Am’re Ford, Isaac Jones, and Chad Taylor. The executive producers at the History Channel are Eli Lehrer and Jessie Katz. Raven Majia Williams is a consulting producer. Special thanks to Herb Boyd, Kelly Gillespie, Shelley Miller, Jodi-Ann Malarbe, Jennifer Lazo, Andrew Golis, Celia Muller, and Andy Lanset. Maurice Jones was the voice of A. J. Smitherman. Additional voices: Terrance McKnight, Dar es Salaam Riser, Javana Mundy, John Biewen, Jack Fowler, Tangina Stone, Emani Johnston, Danny Wolohan, and Jay Allison. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been hearing a great deal lately about what happened in Tulsa in 1921. It sometimes referred to as a riot, but it was far, far worse. It was a direct, horrific attack on the black community of Tulsa. Scores of people were killed, an entire neighborhood was burned to the ground. This was one of the deadliest episodes of racist violence. in the long and terrible history of Jim Crow. And yet for most of this century, the Tulsa Massacre was little known except to historians,

and the memory of it was deliberately suppressed in Oklahoma and well beyond. Our story today is part of a new podcast called Blind Spot, Tulsa Burning. It was produced by our colleagues at WNYC Studios, along with the History Channel, KOSU in Oklahoma City, and Focus Black Oklahoma. We're going to start now years before the massacre when the Greenwood District was very much on the rise. This was during the oil boom in Oklahoma, and Greenwood became so prosperous that it became known as Black Wall Street. Tulsa Burning is presented by one of the producers of our program, Kalalia.

When I started learning about the history of Greenwood, one of the things I had to get up to speed on was Oklahoma's guardianship laws. oil drilling had made the land there really valuable. Guardianship was one of the ways that white settlers had of stealing that land away from the five native tribes and the Black freedmen who owned it. The scheme was so brazen that it came to be known in Oklahoma as the guardianship racket. Land ownership laws in Oklahoma were pretty soft, pretty porous. That's Kareesh Ali Lansana. He teaches Afrikanahse. studies and creative writing at Oklahoma State University, Tulsa.

Anyone who was appointed by the courts could make a claim that these Native American parents were incompetent or unfit to raise their children and to steward their land. And the court would just say pretty much okay. You now have custody of the children and the land. As part of the guardianship racket, people mostly white would petition to gain control of those children and the lands they owned. The courts generally granted those petitions based on even flimsy claims of incompetence or unfair treatment or that the parents were insane.

And then they would become the new guardians of the land and the children. And then they would do what they would with the children and strike it rich via oil or it was fertile land for grazing of cattle. And the Native American folks who lost their land were just out. just, you know, now poor and without property. One of the more famous cases was a Creek Friedman warrior a renti. Renti's family owned 1,600 acres, about $120,000 per year in royalties. That was a lot of money back then, the equivalent of some $1.6 million today.

And this was a big deal because, you know, he was an attorney and a journalist, so he had some means. Now, Warrior A. Rinty, was it your typical turn of the century Oklahomaan? He was Muskogee Creek, black, and highly educated, and he was rich, mainly because he inherited a large estate from his sister, and each of his eight children had their own land allotments. So in 1910, Rinty received a letter that a new guardian was appointed to his children and he'd be losing his family and losing the land. He actually went to the officials and said you would take my land and my children over my dead body. He was arrested and spent a brief time in jail. But Renty had an important ally, a journalist from Muskogee, Oklahoma. His name was A.J. Smitherman.

Smitherman is passionate. He's engaged. He is a leader in so many ways. Except not in the ways that most Oklahomans were used to. This is a black man with a great deal of agency, right? A great deal of power and wasn't afraid to let folks know what it was on his mind. There was no accountability. And my great-grandfather called it the dispossession of wealth.

And that's exactly what was happening. My name is Raven Magia Williams. And my great-grandfather is A.J. Smitherman. Smitherman saw the guardianship laws as just another. scheme by the state to give white people the resources and legal cover to seize black and native land. He was also a practicing attorney. He took up Renty's case and won. During that investigation, he uncovered more than 3,000 other cases in the region, amounting to over $100 million, stolen from native children. He wrote about it in the local newspaper. The biggest game of graft in the state today

is the guardianship graft. They have Jim Crowed us, attempted to disenfranchise us, taxed us without giving us representation, and after doing all of this, they are clamoring to be guardians of our children. The children of the race, they have so grossly wronged. It became a worldwide known scandal because Oklahoma was one of the largest metropolises of oil in the world. And that's, I think, the beginning of my great-grandfather. realization of just how much you can influence things using a newspaper. AJ Smitherman was born in Alabama in 1883, less than 20 years after the abolition of slavery. His parents named him Andrew Jackson, like the president.

And when he was a baby, his family moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma. His father worked as a coal miner and his mother, a schoolteacher. In a way, Smitherman was a child of Oklahoma. He was European, native, and African, just like a lot of people there. But in the eyes of the state, he was black and subject to all the restrictions that came with it. Smitherman went to college and then law school, a rarity for a black man at the time. He had a powerful voice in person and on the page. The saddest and bitterest time in the life of the American Negro

is that time each year when he is called on to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into the treasury of a government of which he has little or no reputation. He was unafraid to speak his truth, to speak his minds, to share his opinions, and he was bold and therefore considered dangerous in that regard. Kareesh Ali Lassana has been studying Smitherman for decades. Back when he was a young journalism student, He became fascinated by some of them in skill and versatility as a writer. And not only was he writing really, really forward-thinking, progressive op-ed pieces

about the state of law regarding race and class, but he was also writing poetry about everything from the law regarding land ownership to oil to guardianship to how our black veterans were treated upon their return from World War I. I ask no special favors, nor seek for mine the best. I simply plead for justice for my own with all the rest. What right have you to curtail me or I to hinder you? A right that's good for one should be for all, not a few. In 1913, A.J. Smitherman decided to leave small-town Muscogee,

and go to Tulsa. He wanted to start his own newspaper. It was like California during the gold rush. Oil found on native land was lifting up the entire region. And so the story goes, a black man bought a lot of land from a Cherokee woman. And that area was the beginning of Greenwood. When Smitherman arrives, the streets are loud and bustling,

crowded with people in wagons. In every few blocks, a family drives by, and their brand new Model T Ford. Children fill their bellies with candies and sodas at the Williams confectionery, while their parents puff on cigars and cigarettes. On Thursday nights, jazz bands play the latest tunes in the original Cotton Club.

Are reserved for church, family, and the best cut to meet. The Dreamland Theater features vaudeville shows and screen silent movies, featuring Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Another local jewel is the brand new Bookerty Washington High School, which rivals the best white schools in the state. For a young ambitious man like A.J. Smitherman, Greenwood is ripe with opportunity.

So on April 11, 1913, he publishes the inaugural edition of The Tulsa Star, one of the first Black Daily newspapers in the United States. Salutation. The star comes to the citizens of Tulsa full of its sense of duty and wide awake to the grave of responsibility devolved upon it.

We shall ask for and expect the cooperation of the best element of both races in our work here and shall endeavor to maintain the friendly relationship between the two races. The Tulsa Star launched just as Greenwood was becoming a destination for people all over the country. mostly black, but also white folks who were curious about the music scene, the food, or looking for the best mechanic in town. Greenwood Before the Massacre was a black community on the rise. That's how I would describe it.

My name is Victor Lukerson. I'm a journalist, an author. I'm living in Tulsa, working on a book about Black Wall Street. So what have you learned? How would you describe Greenwood? What was it like there? The story of Greenwood is so complex, and there's so much tragedy and trauma as part of it, but also so much inspiration. You saw all kinds of different businesses from barbershops to beauty salons, doctors offices, dentist offices. Smitherman opened his printing press with a loan from a local businessman. His new facility was worth more than $40,000, a pretty big accomplishment for the son of a coal miner. The Tulsa Star reported on the life of Greenwood and was a key booster in the community. Whenever a shiny new brick building went up, Smitherman would run a formal announcement.

He also printed ads from all the new and thriving businesses. Victor's been studying maps and going deep into the archives of the star. So it was always kind of fun to see those sort of more upscale businesses, like a croquet garden. Or, oh, they had like a furrier and a jeweler. On down to Williams Furniture Store. Even when you want furniture bad, you want it good. And if you're hungry, North Greenwood Grocery Store has fine staple groceries of all kinds. Or try Raglan and Ellis for waffles and plenty of other good things to suit the most fastidious.

In town for a visit, stay at the Stratford, the leading colored hotel of the Southwest. Then stop by Ideal Cafe with home cooking and good things to eat. Hello, I'm L.S. Neal, chiropractor and graduate of Chicago. University. Make an appointment for all your back pain needs. We're the Blue Goose Taylor Company, the place that satisfies everybody. S.Y. Woodward here, the shoe doctor. Bring your shoes to me. Hey there, come on by the Red Rose Cafe, a nice, cool place to wait on the jitney. Last but not least, I'm Sam Smith, the baggage man. I go while others stand. The Greenwood District occupied about 40 square blocks in northwest Tulsa, and its wealth climbed along with the rest of the city.

There were at least three recorded millionaires and many more families worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. People started calling it Black Wall Street. Of course, it wasn't perfect. The entire city of Tulsa was basically lawless. This was definitely the Wild Wild Midwest. Raven Magia Williams, Smitherman's great-granddaughter. I mean, a lot of people talk about Greenwood and Black Wall Street and its success. But there was a lot of poverty there. There were a lot of, like, illegal businesses. It definitely had gangsters and those gangsters had casinos and or gambling houses, as they called them. They had prostitution houses. When A.J. Smitherman moved to Tulsa, he realized that he had only visited in the day. And he had not,

accurately assessed just the degree of corruption and the ill ways of Tulsa at night and how much the officials of the town were complacent and or participatory. As the publisher of a daily newspaper, he had his eyes and ears in every corner of Greenwood, and he took it upon himself to clean up the streets. He would literally put the address of a prostitution house in his newspaper and call out the commissioner, like, shut this place down. No man could fight or die for a cause nobler and purer and more righteous than the fight we are making for pure homes and better moral conditions along East Archer Street, especially in the

vicinity of the intersection with Cincinnati. This locality is a rendezvous for lewd women and their pimps. Tuesday afternoon, the editor of this paper had occasion to pass along the streets in this vicinity and to his unholy

expectation saw a woman drunk breaking the glass facing in the door and kicking the screen windows in while she accompanied these wild, weird gymnastic stunts

with language unfit for human ears. One day, some other men was walking down the street, and one of the gangsters he called out approached him. And the guy told him, if you put my name in your paper, you're going to be a dead man. And he said, oh, I'm going to put your name in the paper and the biggest print that I have tomorrow. So you must not know me like that.

Editor threatened with violence. The editor was halted on the street by one Charlie Gibson, who demanded to know who wrote the article which appeared in last week's issue. of the star about him. He drove that guy out of town and shut down his cart house, his gambling house, but it also let people know that he wasn't going anywhere, that if anything, they were going to go somewhere, and he was going to hold him accountable in print. The star is for a better and greater Tulsa. We are here to stay, and we will do our part to make this a better place to live in. Greenwood took care of itself.

It had to. People there were constantly lobbying the city of Tulsa for access to basic services, like paved roads and sewer lines, municipal resources that they had paid taxes for. At the same time, black wealth added to Greenwood's prosperity. A man named Eli Grayson, who's the former president of the California Muskogee Creek Association, explained it like this.

Back in those days, because of Jim Crow laws, black people could only spend money among black people. They couldn't go to the white store, Macy's. They had to spend it in the black communities. And that dine that they spent there on a Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon went into that community, stayed in that community, rotated in that community up to 19 times. Koresh Ali Lansana.

fact that O.W. Gurley lent J.B. Stradford money and Stratford loaned A.J. Smitherman money and that a dollar bill could start at O.W. Gurley's business at 101 North Greenwood at the corner of Greenwood and Archer at sunrise and travel all the way up to pine and back and be exchanged only by black hands. We can't do that now. I mean, that doesn't even happen in Harlem. You know what I mean? I don't know where that had happened in Bronzeville on the south side of shy. I don't know anywhere that that may be Atlanta, right? But that's an extraordinary thing that happened in Greenwood from 1905 to 1921, that we kept our money in our communities and the kind of wealth and economic independence born out of necessity, right?

Born out of the necessity of this Jim Crow segregation. While looking through old newspapers, I was amazed by the many giants of black history who visited Greenwood. People like W.E.B. Du Bois and Bill Basie, before people called him Count Basie. The artist and the thinkers who helped shape what Greenwood would become. A community so remarkable, so tenuous, constantly fighting for a fair shot, it wouldn't last. That's Callalia of the New Yorker Radio Hour reporting for Blindspot, Tulsa Burning, a new podcast series about the forgotten history of Tulsa in 1921.

And you can read Victor Luckerson's reporting from Tulsa at New Yorker.com. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Many of us have learned for the first time recently about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the destruction of an entire community, a thriving black district of homes and businesses. Greenwood was full of people who were striving for success, and there were many who had achieved it, who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps in the language of the time.

We're hearing more and more about this lately because it's the centennial now of the Tulsa massacre. And yet, well, this is going on. The state of Oklahoma just passed a law that bans schools from teaching lessons that could cause, quote, discomfort, guilt, anguish, or psychological distress, unquote, to students because of their race or their gender. It's a measure that could muzzle the teaching of basic realities of American history, some of which are unavoidably distressing. And Oklahoma is not alone in introducing this kind of measure recently. Our producer, Kalalia, has spent months working on a podcast called Blindspot, Tulsa Burning.

Before the break, we were hearing about the editor of the Tulsa Star, one of the first black daily newspapers in the country. Let's pick it up there. A.J. Smitherman came to Tulsa in 1913, and the city was thriving, but it was also a time when the U.S. was gripped by racial violence in the years leading up to the massacre. Even as young black men signed up to fight for America and World War I, answering Woodrow Wilson's call to make the world's safer democracy, white people would terrorize and lynch their black neighbors. It was widely known and feared. soldiers boarded trains in Oklahoma City and waved banners out the windows that read Do not lynch our relatives while we are gone

The request would not be honored The violence actually intensified The destruction was sometimes directed at entire neighborhoods Oftentimes when I'm lecturing about this I have to talk very slowly Because I'm trying to not break into tears That's how bad it is Mika Makalani

is a historian at the University of Texas, Austin. Just to give one sense of how systematic they were with the violence, is that they would start fires in the back of homes and then shoot people as they came out of the front door. And that's probably the least graphic description that I can give you of some of the things that they did in East St. Louis. East St. Louis, Illinois, July 1917. Over three days, whites ravaged a black neighborhood in the city,

looting, assaulting, and killing people in horrific ways. Estimates varied, but it's believed they murdered over 100 and maybe as many as 250 African Americans. And some 6,000 fled the city. East St. Louis, like Greenwood in Tulsa, had been a community on the rise. Smitherman, the crusading newspaper publisher in Tulsa, wrote a telegram to the governor of Oklahoma, denouncing an attack on a small town about 50 miles north of Tulsa,

called Dewey. Dear Governor, Sunday night, August 11th in Dewey, Oklahoma, the homes of 21 colored American citizens were destroyed by incendiary flames at the hands of a mob and the colored inhabitants of that same town driven out by the same mob. At this time of our national crisis, while our black boys, alongside our white boys, are fighting, bleeding, and dying on the shell-plowed

battlefields of France for the principles of democracy, surely we will not desecrate the cause for which they are giving their life blood by permitting the mob rule which is worse than Kaiserism to steal from us here at home all the essence of a true democracy. The governor responded to the telegram and launched an investigation, but Smitherman also traveled to Dewey to report on the incident. I called three different research centers to ask if they had the issue of the newspaper with his investigation. I'm looking for some archives.

I'd read about Smitherman's article in a book. Oh, one second. But none of the archives had that particular issue. The only thing we have is... They said it was missing from the microphone. You don't have actual newspaper archives either. And what's even more... remarkable to me, is that I learned that this sort of thing is pretty widespread.

Accounts of racially motivated attacks, literally snipped out of archives and libraries, universities, and other collections. Like so many other stories about this period, we're just left with a gap in the record. But we do know that Smitherman's work brought visibility to what happened in Dewey, Oklahoma, and it led to something pretty incredible at the time. The arrest of 36 members of the members, members of the mob, including the mayor. Not everyone was as connected or powerful as Smitherman, and efforts like his would not be enough. Around the end of the war,

clan membership exploded to around 100,000 members. And in 1919, whites lynched around 80 people in the U.S. 13 of them were African American veterans. The month of April to November of 2019, were so bloody that the poet James Weldon Johnson of the NWACP named it the Red Summer. April 13th, a white mob burns a black church in Jenkins County, Georgia, and congregants try to escape. At least four people are killed. May 10th, a group of white sailors attack a black man who allegedly did not step off the sidewalk

for them in Charleston South. May 15th, a black man named Lloyd Clay is pulled out of jail, lynched, and burned. A 72-year-old black man named Barry Washington is lynched by a mob. Burn a courthouse. Linch a black man named Will Brown. Attempts to lynch a man named Rob Ash. A riot follows. A black man is merged.

Any black person they see using Brits. Local law enforcement in Bisbee, Arizona plan an attack. Homecoming celebration for African-American veterans is attacked. A series of attacks between white and black sailors. Three black churches and one community building is burned down. They shoot him over 1,000 times. A stone's death. by a group of whites, New York, turns into a race rioting mob of 300.

The right is spoiled in Baltimore. Between 100 and 250 black residents of Elaine, Arkansas are killed by white supremacist, vigilantes, and federal troops. If you've ever lost a loved one or someone special, you're aware of the hurt and pain that comes with death, especially unexpected death. So just for a minute, imagine the people whose lives were irreversibly impacted by all the violence and hatred in 1919. And this list reflects only a small selection of the killings that made it in the news.

There were more, hundreds more, that were never reported, never even investigated. And every death causes a ripple effect. The people who suffer the loss of their husbands, mothers, children, neighbors, not to mention, in the physical and psychological wounds, trauma from which some do not recover. And then to be told, there will be no funeral, no justice, no therapy,

deal with it, or get out. If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and pinned in an inglorious spot, while round does bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accursed lot. The summer of 1919, made it clear that the violence wasn't going to end, not without a fight. And so a quiet

conversation began to get louder. If we must die, oh, let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us, though dead. This is Professor Makalani reading a poem by Claude McKay. It's called If We Must Die. O kinsman, we must meet the common foe. Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave. And for their thousand blows, deal one death blow. What though before us lies the open grave. Like men will face the murderous cowardly pack,

pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back. This is a really defiant poem. And it's one that's really critical of the nature of white America at this time. And he's calling the white world that is engaging in this cowardly. He's saying they aren't men. But it is kind of reflective of the sentiment of the period, this defiance, this refusal to merely accept racial violence, but also a refusal to accept the society that says this kind of violence is appropriate if you don't follow the protocols that we've laid out. In black publications across the country, there were more calls to fight against the violence and oppression at home.

Adrian Lent Smith, a professor at Duke University, talk with me about a powerful essay by W.E.B. Du Bois called Returning Soldiers. Where he basically gives that clarion call for the militancy that black folks will need to fuel this freedom struggle, where he says, you know, we return. to a country that lynches and degrades and abuses us, we return from fighting, we return fighting. And then he says, make way for democracy. We saved it in France and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States or know the reason why. Which. Yeah, that's it. That captures it. It still gives me chills. It is a beautiful piece of polemical writing. I read it not too long ago and I felt the same like, wow. And even A.J. Smitherman, the publisher of the Tulsa Star, was urging his readers to defend themselves. No man should arm himself except for

the purpose of self-protection or to uphold the majesty of the law. And when he is thus armed, no officer has any right to divest him of his arms and he is a coward who would surrender his arms under such circumstances, regardless of the number against him. The Tulsa Star is unalterably opposed to mob violence regardless of the color of the men composing the mob. And while we recognize the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword, we have had some actual experience with the cowards who compose mobs, which has convinced us that two or three determined men armed for the occasion can thwart the purpose of any mob if they act in earnest and december.

in time. Which brings us to May 30th, 1921. The day a young African-American shoestiner named Dick Rowland got onto an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a young white woman. What happened in the elevator is up for debate. The details don't seem to matter. Greenwood's fate was sealed. And here's another detail lost from the historical archives.

that on the day of Roland's arrest, the White-owned Tulsa Tribune ran an article with the headline to lynch a Negro tonight. It's missing from every record of that day's paper. Like, cut out. But we know about it because witnesses have described it. Smederman helped organize a group of men

to go to the courthouse and try to protect Roland. When they got there, they spoke to the sheriff. Go home, he told them. He'd personally keep Dick Rowland safe. But the growing crowd of white people outside the courthouse suggested otherwise. They were screaming threats and getting more agitated with each passing minute. Smitherman and the others knew what would happen next. A few hours later, an even larger group of armed black men returned to the jail.

Again, the sheriff declined their offer and sent them home, back to Greenwood. According to one eyewitness, just as they were marching away, a white man stepped out from the mob and tried to take a black man's gun away from him. The two men struggled over the weapon, two sets of hands, one white, one black, cursing one another and wrestling. And then someone fired off a shot. Call it what you like. A race war, a riot, a massacre. But it had begun. Blindspot, Tulsa Burning, tells the story of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921.

It's hosted by Kalalia, who's a producer for our program, and it was produced by the History Channel and WNYC Studios in collaboration with KOSU in Oklahoma City and Focus Black Oklahoma. You can find Blindspot on any podcast platform. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. See you next time. The Blind Spot team includes Caroline Lester,

Alana Casanova Burgess, Joe Plored, Emily Mann, Jenny Lawton, Emily Boutin, Karech Aaliyah, Bracken-Clar, Rachel Hubbard, Anacwa Gemina, Jamie Floyd, and Cheryl Deval. The executive producers at the History Channel are Eli Lerer and Jesse Katz.

Raven Magia Williams is a consulting producer. AJ Smitherman was played by Maurice Jones. The music is by Hannes Brown, Amari Ford, Isaac Jones, and Chad Taylor. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.