May 29, 2021 • 23 mins
This 2014 episode covers the devastation of "Black Wall Street," which was a nickname for Greenwood, a vibrant suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was destroyed in a racist attack in 1921.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. We are approaching the centennial of the
Tulsa Massacre, which used to be more often known as
the Tulsa Race Riot. We are staying away from that
terminology because it's problematic. Uh. This started on May and
we have actually run our episode on the Tulsa Massacre
as a Saturday Classic once before. We did that in
(00:24):
November when it was playing a central role in the
HBO series Watchman. We haven't really rerun Saturday Classics the
second time before. But given that this is the hundredth
anniversary of the massacre and that the city of Tulsa
is planning to continue its search for bodies of the
massacres victims starting on June one of this year, we
(00:45):
thought it would be appropriate to make an exception this time.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trade B. B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And
(01:07):
today we have another frequently frequently requested episode. Lots and
lots of people have asked us to talk about the
destruction of black Wall Street. Black Wall Street was a
nickname for Greenwood, which was essentially a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma,
which was destroyed in a race riot in nine So
(01:28):
the name black Wall Street makes it sound kind of
like it was a business district, but Greenwood was really
a vibrant neighborhood of businesses and homes and schools that
even had its own hospital. And race riot also makes
it sound as though it was a fight instigated by
people of more than one race. But while Greenwood's destruction
(01:50):
was definitely the product of racial tensions, the actual event
was a whole lot more one sided than that. This
all happened during a period of ex stream racial tension
in the United States. Race riots and lynch ings and
vigilante justice were really widespread, and the Tulsa race riot
was one of the deadliest and most shocking events from
(02:13):
this era, and yet a lot of people knew nothing
about it until maybe twenty or thirty years ago. It
got brushed under the rug for a long time. And
to set the scene, the economy of Tulsa, Oklahoma, really
boomed during the nineteen teens thanks to the discovery of
oil in the area, and the population in this area
(02:34):
of Oklahoma grew very quickly, including an influx of African Americans,
many of whom were leaving the Deep South in the
hope that they could build a life in a less
pressive environment, and so Tulsa's population actually grew tenfold in
the span of ten years. Also growing during this time
in Tulsa where crime and lawlessness. A federal agent actually
(02:56):
conducted an undercover investigation in April of nine and found quote, gambling, bootlegging,
and prostitution very much in evidence at the leading hotels
and rooming houses. The bell hops and porters are pimping
for women and also selling booze. Regarding violations of the law,
these prostitutes and pimps solicit without any fear of the police,
(03:17):
as they will invariably remind you that you are safe
in these houses. And that's where the quote ends. And
in addition to that, automobile theft was so common that
insurance companies started just canceling all their policies in Tulsa.
And at the same time, the suburb of Greenwood was
really flourishing. By one there were about ten thousand African
(03:39):
Americans living in the Tulsa area, and the vast majority
of them were living in Greenwood. They fell all along
the economic spectrum, So you had everyone from doctors and
investors worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to families that
were living in extremely modest homes along dirt roads. Greenwood
itself was simultaneously the product of segregation and of black entrepreneurship. O. W.
(04:04):
Gurley and J. B. Stratford were two prominent African American
investors who really get a lot of credit for making
the town what it was. In the early nineteen hundreds, Gurley,
who was a real real estate developer, bought some land,
plotted it out, and then sold it to other African Americans.
Stratford built a fifty four room hotel that was also
(04:25):
home to a restaurant, a banquet hall, and other amenities,
and Stratford's hotel was one of the largest black owned
businesses in Oklahoma at that time. These and other businesses
became the seeds of a really robust community that was
also deeply segregated from the rest of Tulsa. Uh. It
in a way and a lot of ways, was really
(04:45):
self sufficient. It had two newspapers, the Tulsa Star and
the Oklahoma Sun. It also had its own library, branch, schools,
a hospital, theaters, and lots of small businesses that were
owned and operated by the black community. There were all
so many many churches, but most of its residents, while
they were living and conducting almost all their business in Greenwood,
(05:08):
worked for white employers elsewhere in the city, and this
was the case for a man important to our story
by the name of Dick Rowland. Dick Roland was a
young black man who worked in a downtown building shining shoes.
Restrooms at this point were segregated, and his workplace didn't
have a bathroom for black people, so his employer had
(05:29):
arranged for him to use one that was on the
top floor of the nearby Drexel Building. Sarah Page was
a young white woman who ran the Drexel Buildings elevator.
An incident passed between Roland and Page on May. Exactly
what happened is completely unclear. Her story changed at various points,
(05:50):
and there seems to be no testimony on record of
Dick Rowland. However, a clerk at a clothing store in
the Drexel building thought he heard a screen and he
saw Dick Roland hurrying out of the building, and he
called the police. The story that spread through Tulsa was
that Dick Roland had either raped or tried to rape
(06:11):
Sarah Page in broad daylight in the elevator. Roland was
arrested the next morning and held on the top floor
of the Tulsa Courthouse. The Tulsa Tribune, which was an
afternoon paper, covered his arrest on the thirty first, and
reported his crime as a physical attack, quote scratching her
hands and face and tearing her clothes. The paper also
(06:33):
reportedly published an editorial calling for Roland to be lynched. However,
no original copies of these articles exist. There are pieces
torn out of the bound copies of the paper that
were kept on record. The text of the story reporting
Roland's arrest is reprinted from a ninety six Masters thesis. Yeah,
there are multiple eyewitness testimonies of people who who saw
(06:57):
these articles in the newspaper, but the actual copies of
the note of the newspaper no longer exist. Before we
talk about how this turned the scene at the courthouse
to one of a mob scene, let's take a brief
moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand.
(07:21):
By about seven thirty in the evening on May the
thirty one, a lynch mob had started to gather outside
the Tulsa Courthouse and the mob was demanding that Roland
be turned over to them. The sheriff refused to do this,
and word spread to the Greenwood district about what was
going on. People were positive that Roland was going to
be lynched. There had been thirty three recorded lynchings in
(07:43):
Oklahoma between the time it had been declared as a
state in nineteen o seven and nine, and seven of
the victims of those lynchings had been black. They also
had ample reason to doubt that the courthouse was a
secure place to keep Roland safe. There had been a
couple of really dramatic jail breaks from the courthouse and
the months leading up to this event, and the black
(08:05):
community was quite positive that if they did not protect Roland,
no one would, and that he was going to be lynched. So,
with all of that in mind, about twenty five African
American residents, many of whom were veterans of World War One,
armed themselves and went from Greenwood to the courthouse to
offer their assistance in defending him. The sheriff refused and
(08:26):
insisted that Roland was safe, and so the men went
back to Greenwood. However, the arrival of twenty five armed
black men on the scene really stirred up a lot
of fear and anger among the white mob outside the courthouse.
Word got to Major James A. Bell of the National
Guard that things were starting to look really ugly, and
even though the sheriff told him things were okay, he
(08:48):
quietly sent word to the other National guardsmen in the
area to come down to the armory. This was fortunate
because some of the mob from the courthouse then went
to the armory to try to get rifles and amy
mission for themselves, and they were stopped by the National
Guard members that Major Bell had summoned. Tensions continued to
grow for another couple of hours. The crowd at the
(09:10):
courthouse got bigger and bigger. Small groups of Greenwood residents
started patrolling the streets, armed both as recon and to
try to show that Greenwood was not entirely defenseless, and
the white community began to fear that an uprising was imminent.
Soon rumor reared its head again. At about ten PM,
(09:31):
word got back to Greenwood that a lynch mob was
breaking into the courthouse, and so this time it was
about seventy five armed African American men who made their
way there to once again offer their aid in keeping
Roland safe. So again the sheriff refused their help, and
as they turned to go back to Greenwood, one of
(09:51):
the white men tried to disarm one of the black men,
and in the ensuing scuffle, a shot was fired. It
was this spark that started the r at in Earnest.
More shots were fired in front of the courthouse, with
as many as a dozen people being killed there, and
as the dust settled, the black men, who were vastly outnumbered,
began falling back to Greenwood in a fighting retreat, with
(10:14):
the white mob in pursuit. Once the men were back
in Greenwood, things continued to get worse. Car loads of
white men started driving through black neighborhoods, just shooting it
discriminately into houses and at people on the street. White
vigilantes also broke into downtown Tulsas sporting goods stores to
steal guns and ammunition. Others went to some of the
(10:36):
white neighborhoods all night cafes and started a plan to
invade Greenwood the next morning. The law enforcement's action at
this point and Tulsa was to begin deputizing people including
members of the original lynch mob. Soon the National Guard
was ordered to aid local authorities. They did this by
(10:57):
setting up a perimeter around the northern edge of Tulsa's
white neighborhood to defend it against a counter attack, a
counter attack which never actually happened. People started setting fires
in Greenwood at about one am, and then the mob
prevented the fire department from trying to put the fires out,
so the fires spread really rapidly throughout the night. Both
(11:20):
the National Guard and local law enforcement wound up responding
to false reports of shots fired by black people in
white neighborhoods all over Tulsa, and they were doing this
rather than responding to the real reports of violence and
arson that we're going on in Greenwood. At one thirty
six am, the Chief of Police sent a telegram to
the state capitol which read race riot developed here, several killed,
(11:43):
Unable handle situation, request that National Guard forces be sent
by special train situations serious. This telegram was signed by
the Chief of Police, the sheriff, and a district judge.
A train was scheduled to leave Oklahoma City bound for
Tulsa at five am that morning, carrying about one hundred
additional National Guard troops during the night. A lot of
(12:05):
Greenwood residents stayed behind to try to defend their homes
and businesses, but many others fled. They took cards, taxis,
and other transportation north out of the city. Greenwood was
on the northern side of Tulsa, so the smith that
they didn't have to go back through Tulsa to try
to get away. Some people were able to take refuge
with their employers or other compassionate citizens on the Tulsa
(12:28):
side of town, but a lot of people were really
left mostly defenseless. Before the sun came up on June one,
an armed mob had gathered around the fringes of Greenwood.
Some of them were carrying weapons that had been provided
to them by public officials. In addition to the deputized
members of the lynch Mob, some of this crowd were
uniformed police officers and members of the National Guard. There
(12:52):
are also multiple eyewitness reports of airplanes in the skies
over Greenwood as the riot went on, although exactly what
was done from the airplanes is a little harder to substantiate.
There are reports that bombs are dropped that there's not
clear evidence to support that. It's pretty likely that there
were definitely people firing their guns from the airplanes though.
(13:13):
The train carrying the additional National Guard troops got to
Tulsa around nine fifteen am. These out of town troops
became known as the State troops, and this helps differentiate
them from the local National Guard that were part of
the rioting. But by that point most of Greenwood had
already been burned to the ground. Martial law was declared
at eleven nine am on June one, although by then
(13:36):
the riot had really mostly run its course. Once martial
law was declared, the State troops moved through Greenwood, putting
out fires, disarming the rioters who were still there, and
forcing them to go back to Tulsa. Order was restored
around eight pm on June one. The State troops also
took custody of African Americans who had been imprisoned by
(13:57):
vigilantes during the riot, but this was not exactly a rescue.
The State troops took every black person they could find
into custody in a mass arrest. People who had fled
the city were detained when they returned. It was supposedly
for people's own protection, but a clear part of the
motivation was the white community's ongoing fear of a black uprising.
(14:19):
In the end, about six thousand African Americans were held
at the convention Hall, and when they ran out of
room there at the fair grounds in the ball field.
Some black citizens were held for more than a week.
No one was released until a white person could vouch
for them and also take responsibility for their future behavior.
So before we talk about the aftermath of this riot,
(14:42):
let's take another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. So,
in this riot, Greenwood was virtually destroyed. They're five city
blocks were burned to the ground, and at least eight
(15:03):
hundred people sustained injuries that had to be treated. One thousand,
two hundred fifty six homes were destroyed, plus the hospital,
the library, some of the schools, and both of the
newspaper's offices. A couple of weeks after the riot, the
Nation reported that the damages totalled one point five million dollars,
(15:24):
although more recent estimates are multiple times higher than that.
And from the Tulsa Daily World the next day is
this quote. Personal belongings in household goods had been removed
from many homes impiled in the streets. On the steps
of a few houses that remained sat feeble and gray
negro men and women, and occasionally a small child. The
(15:45):
look in their eyes was one of dejection and supplication.
Judging from their attitude, it was not of material consequence
to them whether they lived or died harmless themselves. They
apparently could not conceive the brutality and fiendishness of men
who would deliberately set fire to the homes of their
friends and neighbors, and just as deliberately shoot them in
their tracks. Doctor Robert Bridgewater and his wife Maddie were
(16:09):
two of the fortunate few to have had their homes
spared by the fire, but they got to it to
find that their possessions had all been destroyed. Doctor Bridgewater
wrote quote, I saw my piano and all of my
elegant furniture piled in the street. My safe had been
broken open, all of my money stolen. Also my silverware,
cut glass, All of the family clothes and everything of
(16:32):
value had been removed, even my family bible, my electric
light pictures were broken. All of the window lights and
glass and the doors were broken. The floors were covered
literally speaking with glass. Even the phone was torn from
the wall, and there's actually a photo that's part of
the historical record of this event, and it shows massive
(16:53):
columns of smoke rising from the Greenwood District. Written across
it and misspelled is running the Negro out of Tulsa.
A photo of the charred body of one of the
victims was also used as a postcard. At the time,
official estimates put the death toll at nine white people
and twenty six black people, but pretty much immediately everyone
(17:16):
knew that those numbers were way too low. We'll never
really know the official number because birth records at the
time are incomplete, and many of the African Americans who
were killed were buried in unmarked mass graves or thrown
into the Arkansas River. Funeral Home records report burials of
many people identified only as quote unknown Negro in the
(17:37):
days after the riot. More recent investigations suggest that more
like three hundred people were killed, with the overwhelming majority
of them being African American, and the riot forced most
of Tulsa's African American population into homelessness. The city and
its residents made things hard on those who had lost
their homes in the hopes of forcing people to resettle elsewhere.
(18:00):
They even passed a fire ordinance specifically designed to keep
people from rebuilding, although it was overturned as unconstitutional about
four years later. Even so, Tulsa's black community set to
work rebuilding Greenwood, but it was a slow process, so
many of them spent the following winter living in tents.
With the exception of the Red Cross and white residents
(18:21):
of surrounding communities, the black community got very little help
in its rebuilding efforts. The city of Tulsa, as we mentioned,
actively discouraged the rebuilding effort. On the legal end of things, UH,
Dick Roland's charges were ultimately dismissed. A grand jury convened
to investigate what had happened UH, and they found Tulsa's
(18:43):
black population responsible for the riot. About seventy black men
were charged with inciting the riot, although none of them
were ultimately convicted. J. B. Stratford was one. He fled
Oklahoma for Illinois, eventually building a law practice in Chicago.
He died in five and in nine, following his family's
fight to clear his name, he was finally cleared of
(19:05):
all charges. No white person was ever tried for any
of the murders or arsons that took place or with
any other criminal act associated with the riot. Immediately after
the riot, the event was international news, and in the
weeks that followed, papers across the US published scathing editorials
condemning what had happened. Journalists called it both a disgrace
(19:27):
and a horror. But then it really fell from view
for pretty much everyone who did not directly live through it.
History books that were published in Oklahoma made no mention
of it for more than twenty years, and even then
it was very brief and glossed over. People began to
investigate and write about this riot following the Civil rights movement,
(19:49):
although the first people to blaze this trail were really
met with threats of violence. Eventually in the state of
Oklahoma formed a commission that was meant to investigate what
it had been and to create clear documentation of the riot.
The commission was also to make a recommendation of whether
reparations should be paid to the survivors and their descendants.
(20:13):
Calls for reparations had actually started almost immediately after the
riot was over. In one Judge Loyal J. Martin, who
had been the mayor, said quote, Tulsa can only redeem
herself from the countrywide shame and humiliation into which she
is today plunged by complete restitution and rehabilitation of the
destroyed black Belt. The rest of the United States must
(20:35):
know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this
inspeakable crime and will make good the damage so far
as it can be done to the last penny. The
report of the Oklahoma Commission to study the Tulsa Race
Riot of one called the event quote late to be
acknowledged and still to be repaired, and the commission's report
(20:55):
argued really strongly in favor of reparations, including direct reparations
paid to the survivors who were still living in their
descendants at this point, though many of the people who
had lived through the riot had died. When the commission
put out its final report, the riot was almost eighty
years in the past, but still alive were the children
(21:16):
and grandchildren of the people who had survived the riot
and of some people who had been killed. The state
legislature established scholarships, a memorial, and an economic development initiative
for Greenwood, but it declined to make actual reparations to
survivors and their descendants. As sort of a side note,
a lot of articles about the Tulsa race riot and
(21:38):
about the destruction of what was known as Black Wall
Street say that the riot was a result of clan activity,
and while the Ku Klux Klan had been re established
in Atlanta in nineteen fifteen and it was definitely growing
all around the United States, there's not really evidence to
suggest that the Ku Klux Klan specifically was active in
Tulsa or was part of the riot. However, one of
(22:02):
the consequences or the ramifications after the riot was that
the clan really started to flourish in Oklahoma once the
riot was over. We've had so many people request this
particular subject, and it's one that, unsurprisingly, based on having
learned that it was so conscientiously not discussed for so
(22:25):
many years, is one that I was not really familiar
with before doing research on it. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our
(22:46):
current email address is History Podcast at I Heart radio
dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at Missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
(23:10):
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday everyone. We are approaching the centennial of the
Tulsa Massacre, which used to be more often known as
the Tulsa Race Riot. We are staying away from that
terminology because it's problematic. Uh. This started on May and
we have actually run our episode on the Tulsa Massacre
as a Saturday Classic once before. We did that in
(00:24):
November when it was playing a central role in the
HBO series Watchman. We haven't really rerun Saturday Classics the
second time before. But given that this is the hundredth
anniversary of the massacre and that the city of Tulsa
is planning to continue its search for bodies of the
massacres victims starting on June one of this year, we
(00:45):
thought it would be appropriate to make an exception this time.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trade B. B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And
(01:07):
today we have another frequently frequently requested episode. Lots and
lots of people have asked us to talk about the
destruction of black Wall Street. Black Wall Street was a
nickname for Greenwood, which was essentially a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma,
which was destroyed in a race riot in nine So
(01:28):
the name black Wall Street makes it sound kind of
like it was a business district, but Greenwood was really
a vibrant neighborhood of businesses and homes and schools that
even had its own hospital. And race riot also makes
it sound as though it was a fight instigated by
people of more than one race. But while Greenwood's destruction
(01:50):
was definitely the product of racial tensions, the actual event
was a whole lot more one sided than that. This
all happened during a period of ex stream racial tension
in the United States. Race riots and lynch ings and
vigilante justice were really widespread, and the Tulsa race riot
was one of the deadliest and most shocking events from
(02:13):
this era, and yet a lot of people knew nothing
about it until maybe twenty or thirty years ago. It
got brushed under the rug for a long time. And
to set the scene, the economy of Tulsa, Oklahoma, really
boomed during the nineteen teens thanks to the discovery of
oil in the area, and the population in this area
(02:34):
of Oklahoma grew very quickly, including an influx of African Americans,
many of whom were leaving the Deep South in the
hope that they could build a life in a less
pressive environment, and so Tulsa's population actually grew tenfold in
the span of ten years. Also growing during this time
in Tulsa where crime and lawlessness. A federal agent actually
(02:56):
conducted an undercover investigation in April of nine and found quote, gambling, bootlegging,
and prostitution very much in evidence at the leading hotels
and rooming houses. The bell hops and porters are pimping
for women and also selling booze. Regarding violations of the law,
these prostitutes and pimps solicit without any fear of the police,
(03:17):
as they will invariably remind you that you are safe
in these houses. And that's where the quote ends. And
in addition to that, automobile theft was so common that
insurance companies started just canceling all their policies in Tulsa.
And at the same time, the suburb of Greenwood was
really flourishing. By one there were about ten thousand African
(03:39):
Americans living in the Tulsa area, and the vast majority
of them were living in Greenwood. They fell all along
the economic spectrum, So you had everyone from doctors and
investors worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to families that
were living in extremely modest homes along dirt roads. Greenwood
itself was simultaneously the product of segregation and of black entrepreneurship. O. W.
(04:04):
Gurley and J. B. Stratford were two prominent African American
investors who really get a lot of credit for making
the town what it was. In the early nineteen hundreds, Gurley,
who was a real real estate developer, bought some land,
plotted it out, and then sold it to other African Americans.
Stratford built a fifty four room hotel that was also
(04:25):
home to a restaurant, a banquet hall, and other amenities,
and Stratford's hotel was one of the largest black owned
businesses in Oklahoma at that time. These and other businesses
became the seeds of a really robust community that was
also deeply segregated from the rest of Tulsa. Uh. It
in a way and a lot of ways, was really
(04:45):
self sufficient. It had two newspapers, the Tulsa Star and
the Oklahoma Sun. It also had its own library, branch, schools,
a hospital, theaters, and lots of small businesses that were
owned and operated by the black community. There were all
so many many churches, but most of its residents, while
they were living and conducting almost all their business in Greenwood,
(05:08):
worked for white employers elsewhere in the city, and this
was the case for a man important to our story
by the name of Dick Rowland. Dick Roland was a
young black man who worked in a downtown building shining shoes.
Restrooms at this point were segregated, and his workplace didn't
have a bathroom for black people, so his employer had
(05:29):
arranged for him to use one that was on the
top floor of the nearby Drexel Building. Sarah Page was
a young white woman who ran the Drexel Buildings elevator.
An incident passed between Roland and Page on May. Exactly
what happened is completely unclear. Her story changed at various points,
(05:50):
and there seems to be no testimony on record of
Dick Rowland. However, a clerk at a clothing store in
the Drexel building thought he heard a screen and he
saw Dick Roland hurrying out of the building, and he
called the police. The story that spread through Tulsa was
that Dick Roland had either raped or tried to rape
(06:11):
Sarah Page in broad daylight in the elevator. Roland was
arrested the next morning and held on the top floor
of the Tulsa Courthouse. The Tulsa Tribune, which was an
afternoon paper, covered his arrest on the thirty first, and
reported his crime as a physical attack, quote scratching her
hands and face and tearing her clothes. The paper also
(06:33):
reportedly published an editorial calling for Roland to be lynched. However,
no original copies of these articles exist. There are pieces
torn out of the bound copies of the paper that
were kept on record. The text of the story reporting
Roland's arrest is reprinted from a ninety six Masters thesis. Yeah,
there are multiple eyewitness testimonies of people who who saw
(06:57):
these articles in the newspaper, but the actual copies of
the note of the newspaper no longer exist. Before we
talk about how this turned the scene at the courthouse
to one of a mob scene, let's take a brief
moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand.
(07:21):
By about seven thirty in the evening on May the
thirty one, a lynch mob had started to gather outside
the Tulsa Courthouse and the mob was demanding that Roland
be turned over to them. The sheriff refused to do this,
and word spread to the Greenwood district about what was
going on. People were positive that Roland was going to
be lynched. There had been thirty three recorded lynchings in
(07:43):
Oklahoma between the time it had been declared as a
state in nineteen o seven and nine, and seven of
the victims of those lynchings had been black. They also
had ample reason to doubt that the courthouse was a
secure place to keep Roland safe. There had been a
couple of really dramatic jail breaks from the courthouse and
the months leading up to this event, and the black
(08:05):
community was quite positive that if they did not protect Roland,
no one would, and that he was going to be lynched. So,
with all of that in mind, about twenty five African
American residents, many of whom were veterans of World War One,
armed themselves and went from Greenwood to the courthouse to
offer their assistance in defending him. The sheriff refused and
(08:26):
insisted that Roland was safe, and so the men went
back to Greenwood. However, the arrival of twenty five armed
black men on the scene really stirred up a lot
of fear and anger among the white mob outside the courthouse.
Word got to Major James A. Bell of the National
Guard that things were starting to look really ugly, and
even though the sheriff told him things were okay, he
(08:48):
quietly sent word to the other National guardsmen in the
area to come down to the armory. This was fortunate
because some of the mob from the courthouse then went
to the armory to try to get rifles and amy
mission for themselves, and they were stopped by the National
Guard members that Major Bell had summoned. Tensions continued to
grow for another couple of hours. The crowd at the
(09:10):
courthouse got bigger and bigger. Small groups of Greenwood residents
started patrolling the streets, armed both as recon and to
try to show that Greenwood was not entirely defenseless, and
the white community began to fear that an uprising was imminent.
Soon rumor reared its head again. At about ten PM,
(09:31):
word got back to Greenwood that a lynch mob was
breaking into the courthouse, and so this time it was
about seventy five armed African American men who made their
way there to once again offer their aid in keeping
Roland safe. So again the sheriff refused their help, and
as they turned to go back to Greenwood, one of
(09:51):
the white men tried to disarm one of the black men,
and in the ensuing scuffle, a shot was fired. It
was this spark that started the r at in Earnest.
More shots were fired in front of the courthouse, with
as many as a dozen people being killed there, and
as the dust settled, the black men, who were vastly outnumbered,
began falling back to Greenwood in a fighting retreat, with
(10:14):
the white mob in pursuit. Once the men were back
in Greenwood, things continued to get worse. Car loads of
white men started driving through black neighborhoods, just shooting it
discriminately into houses and at people on the street. White
vigilantes also broke into downtown Tulsas sporting goods stores to
steal guns and ammunition. Others went to some of the
(10:36):
white neighborhoods all night cafes and started a plan to
invade Greenwood the next morning. The law enforcement's action at
this point and Tulsa was to begin deputizing people including
members of the original lynch mob. Soon the National Guard
was ordered to aid local authorities. They did this by
(10:57):
setting up a perimeter around the northern edge of Tulsa's
white neighborhood to defend it against a counter attack, a
counter attack which never actually happened. People started setting fires
in Greenwood at about one am, and then the mob
prevented the fire department from trying to put the fires out,
so the fires spread really rapidly throughout the night. Both
(11:20):
the National Guard and local law enforcement wound up responding
to false reports of shots fired by black people in
white neighborhoods all over Tulsa, and they were doing this
rather than responding to the real reports of violence and
arson that we're going on in Greenwood. At one thirty
six am, the Chief of Police sent a telegram to
the state capitol which read race riot developed here, several killed,
(11:43):
Unable handle situation, request that National Guard forces be sent
by special train situations serious. This telegram was signed by
the Chief of Police, the sheriff, and a district judge.
A train was scheduled to leave Oklahoma City bound for
Tulsa at five am that morning, carrying about one hundred
additional National Guard troops during the night. A lot of
(12:05):
Greenwood residents stayed behind to try to defend their homes
and businesses, but many others fled. They took cards, taxis,
and other transportation north out of the city. Greenwood was
on the northern side of Tulsa, so the smith that
they didn't have to go back through Tulsa to try
to get away. Some people were able to take refuge
with their employers or other compassionate citizens on the Tulsa
(12:28):
side of town, but a lot of people were really
left mostly defenseless. Before the sun came up on June one,
an armed mob had gathered around the fringes of Greenwood.
Some of them were carrying weapons that had been provided
to them by public officials. In addition to the deputized
members of the lynch Mob, some of this crowd were
uniformed police officers and members of the National Guard. There
(12:52):
are also multiple eyewitness reports of airplanes in the skies
over Greenwood as the riot went on, although exactly what
was done from the airplanes is a little harder to substantiate.
There are reports that bombs are dropped that there's not
clear evidence to support that. It's pretty likely that there
were definitely people firing their guns from the airplanes though.
(13:13):
The train carrying the additional National Guard troops got to
Tulsa around nine fifteen am. These out of town troops
became known as the State troops, and this helps differentiate
them from the local National Guard that were part of
the rioting. But by that point most of Greenwood had
already been burned to the ground. Martial law was declared
at eleven nine am on June one, although by then
(13:36):
the riot had really mostly run its course. Once martial
law was declared, the State troops moved through Greenwood, putting
out fires, disarming the rioters who were still there, and
forcing them to go back to Tulsa. Order was restored
around eight pm on June one. The State troops also
took custody of African Americans who had been imprisoned by
(13:57):
vigilantes during the riot, but this was not exactly a rescue.
The State troops took every black person they could find
into custody in a mass arrest. People who had fled
the city were detained when they returned. It was supposedly
for people's own protection, but a clear part of the
motivation was the white community's ongoing fear of a black uprising.
(14:19):
In the end, about six thousand African Americans were held
at the convention Hall, and when they ran out of
room there at the fair grounds in the ball field.
Some black citizens were held for more than a week.
No one was released until a white person could vouch
for them and also take responsibility for their future behavior.
So before we talk about the aftermath of this riot,
(14:42):
let's take another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. So,
in this riot, Greenwood was virtually destroyed. They're five city
blocks were burned to the ground, and at least eight
(15:03):
hundred people sustained injuries that had to be treated. One thousand,
two hundred fifty six homes were destroyed, plus the hospital,
the library, some of the schools, and both of the
newspaper's offices. A couple of weeks after the riot, the
Nation reported that the damages totalled one point five million dollars,
(15:24):
although more recent estimates are multiple times higher than that.
And from the Tulsa Daily World the next day is
this quote. Personal belongings in household goods had been removed
from many homes impiled in the streets. On the steps
of a few houses that remained sat feeble and gray
negro men and women, and occasionally a small child. The
(15:45):
look in their eyes was one of dejection and supplication.
Judging from their attitude, it was not of material consequence
to them whether they lived or died harmless themselves. They
apparently could not conceive the brutality and fiendishness of men
who would deliberately set fire to the homes of their
friends and neighbors, and just as deliberately shoot them in
their tracks. Doctor Robert Bridgewater and his wife Maddie were
(16:09):
two of the fortunate few to have had their homes
spared by the fire, but they got to it to
find that their possessions had all been destroyed. Doctor Bridgewater
wrote quote, I saw my piano and all of my
elegant furniture piled in the street. My safe had been
broken open, all of my money stolen. Also my silverware,
cut glass, All of the family clothes and everything of
(16:32):
value had been removed, even my family bible, my electric
light pictures were broken. All of the window lights and
glass and the doors were broken. The floors were covered
literally speaking with glass. Even the phone was torn from
the wall, and there's actually a photo that's part of
the historical record of this event, and it shows massive
(16:53):
columns of smoke rising from the Greenwood District. Written across
it and misspelled is running the Negro out of Tulsa.
A photo of the charred body of one of the
victims was also used as a postcard. At the time,
official estimates put the death toll at nine white people
and twenty six black people, but pretty much immediately everyone
(17:16):
knew that those numbers were way too low. We'll never
really know the official number because birth records at the
time are incomplete, and many of the African Americans who
were killed were buried in unmarked mass graves or thrown
into the Arkansas River. Funeral Home records report burials of
many people identified only as quote unknown Negro in the
(17:37):
days after the riot. More recent investigations suggest that more
like three hundred people were killed, with the overwhelming majority
of them being African American, and the riot forced most
of Tulsa's African American population into homelessness. The city and
its residents made things hard on those who had lost
their homes in the hopes of forcing people to resettle elsewhere.
(18:00):
They even passed a fire ordinance specifically designed to keep
people from rebuilding, although it was overturned as unconstitutional about
four years later. Even so, Tulsa's black community set to
work rebuilding Greenwood, but it was a slow process, so
many of them spent the following winter living in tents.
With the exception of the Red Cross and white residents
(18:21):
of surrounding communities, the black community got very little help
in its rebuilding efforts. The city of Tulsa, as we mentioned,
actively discouraged the rebuilding effort. On the legal end of things, UH,
Dick Roland's charges were ultimately dismissed. A grand jury convened
to investigate what had happened UH, and they found Tulsa's
(18:43):
black population responsible for the riot. About seventy black men
were charged with inciting the riot, although none of them
were ultimately convicted. J. B. Stratford was one. He fled
Oklahoma for Illinois, eventually building a law practice in Chicago.
He died in five and in nine, following his family's
fight to clear his name, he was finally cleared of
(19:05):
all charges. No white person was ever tried for any
of the murders or arsons that took place or with
any other criminal act associated with the riot. Immediately after
the riot, the event was international news, and in the
weeks that followed, papers across the US published scathing editorials
condemning what had happened. Journalists called it both a disgrace
(19:27):
and a horror. But then it really fell from view
for pretty much everyone who did not directly live through it.
History books that were published in Oklahoma made no mention
of it for more than twenty years, and even then
it was very brief and glossed over. People began to
investigate and write about this riot following the Civil rights movement,
(19:49):
although the first people to blaze this trail were really
met with threats of violence. Eventually in the state of
Oklahoma formed a commission that was meant to investigate what
it had been and to create clear documentation of the riot.
The commission was also to make a recommendation of whether
reparations should be paid to the survivors and their descendants.
(20:13):
Calls for reparations had actually started almost immediately after the
riot was over. In one Judge Loyal J. Martin, who
had been the mayor, said quote, Tulsa can only redeem
herself from the countrywide shame and humiliation into which she
is today plunged by complete restitution and rehabilitation of the
destroyed black Belt. The rest of the United States must
(20:35):
know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this
inspeakable crime and will make good the damage so far
as it can be done to the last penny. The
report of the Oklahoma Commission to study the Tulsa Race
Riot of one called the event quote late to be
acknowledged and still to be repaired, and the commission's report
(20:55):
argued really strongly in favor of reparations, including direct reparations
paid to the survivors who were still living in their
descendants at this point, though many of the people who
had lived through the riot had died. When the commission
put out its final report, the riot was almost eighty
years in the past, but still alive were the children
(21:16):
and grandchildren of the people who had survived the riot
and of some people who had been killed. The state
legislature established scholarships, a memorial, and an economic development initiative
for Greenwood, but it declined to make actual reparations to
survivors and their descendants. As sort of a side note,
a lot of articles about the Tulsa race riot and
(21:38):
about the destruction of what was known as Black Wall
Street say that the riot was a result of clan activity,
and while the Ku Klux Klan had been re established
in Atlanta in nineteen fifteen and it was definitely growing
all around the United States, there's not really evidence to
suggest that the Ku Klux Klan specifically was active in
Tulsa or was part of the riot. However, one of
(22:02):
the consequences or the ramifications after the riot was that
the clan really started to flourish in Oklahoma once the
riot was over. We've had so many people request this
particular subject, and it's one that, unsurprisingly, based on having
learned that it was so conscientiously not discussed for so
(22:25):
many years, is one that I was not really familiar
with before doing research on it. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our
(22:46):
current email address is History Podcast at I Heart radio
dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at Missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
(23:10):
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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