For city’s darkest day, justice is still to be dispensed
A little more than 100 years ago, black residents of a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were subject to a vicious racial assault by mobs, estimated to have killed as many as 300.
“On May 30, 1921, I went to bed in my family’s home in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa,” Viola Fletcher, 107, told members of a congressional subcommittee in Washington in May. “I felt my sleep that night was rich, not just in terms of wealth but in culture, community and heritage. My family had a beautiful home, we had great neighbors and I had friends to play with. … Then a few hours (later), all of that was gone.”
Still being able to “smell smoke and see fire”, Fletcher, who has lived long enough to be called Mother Fletcher by all who come into her audience, had traveled all the way from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Washington, so her story could be heard, and the centuryold damage done to her and her people could be mended in the slightest possible way.
In searing detail, Fletcher recounted the killing of her people and the burning of her community by white mobs on May 31 and June 1 of 1921, as seen through the eye of a 7-year-old. Known as the Tulsa race massacre and perhaps the most horrendous racial violence against black people on US soil in the past century, the event led to the destruction of a 35-square-block neighborhood known as Greenwood District in North Tulsa. In the aftermath, more than 10,000 black Tulsans were left injured, homeless and destitute. It is estimated that as many as 300 were killed, the whereabouts of their remains largely unknown.
“I am 107 years old and have never seen justice,” Fletcher told her listeners on May 19, referring to the fact that no one has ever been held accountable and none of the victims compensated by any level of US government. She was joined in the US Capitol by her 100-yearold brother Hughes Van Ellis and through videoconference by their fellow black Tulsan Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106. All have spent their life in Greenwood.
Today it would be hard for anyone not there in the years leading up to this calamity to imagine how prosperous the community once was, without the moving images captured by a black Baptist minister and amateur filmmaker named Solomon Sir Jones (1869-1936). Under his lens, impeccably dressed pedestrians and stylish cars shared the bustling streets lined with clothing stores, movie theaters and hotels. Young workers loaded crates of beer onto the back of a van, in a life that after all was well worth toasting.
“The African American history in Oklahoma is deeply rooted in slavery and linked to land that became first available for black people in the late 1800s,” said Hannibal Johnson, author of the 2020 book Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples With Its Historical Racial Trauma.
A major black migration took place in the 1830s and 1840s when native American Indians were forcibly removed from the southeastern United States to what was to become the state of Oklahoma, he said. “Migrating with the tribes were both free and enslaved people of African ancestry, the latter owned by tribal members.”
After slavery was abolished in 1865, the federal government forced native Americans to provide land allotments for blacks. In the late 1800s Oklahoma had a number of land runs and land lotteries. The prospect of land ownership attracted blacks, including some relatively wealthy men who came to Tulsa and created the black community of Greenwood District, mainly by buying land and recruiting other people of African ancestry.
Booker T. Washington, a prominent African American of his era after whom the Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa was named in 1913, ostensibly called Greenwood “the Black Wall Street”, a name soon adopted by many others. Yet according to Johnson, the designation is a misnomer given the absence of banking and investment undertakings, and the community itself being “one of necessity” that was the product of state-sanctioned segregation.
In November 1907 Oklahoma, right upon its admission as a state, adopted racial segregation laws as its first order of business. Commonly known as Jim Crow laws, they targeted the black as well as other peoples of color, with measures to disenfranchise them and undo their political and economic gains.
Nine years later the city of Tulsa mandated residential segregation by forbidding black or white people from residing on any block where 75 percent or more of residents were members of the other race.
Abutting Tulsa, “Greenwood District is in essence black mainstream for those unable to participate in the white-dominated economy”, Johnson said.
For 70 years the city of Tulsa and its chamber of commerce told us that the massacre didn’t happen as if we didn’t see it with our own eyes . ... Our country may want me to forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors did not. Our descendants do not.”
Viola Fletcher, survivor
One result of this was that wealth created by black Tulsans had nowhere else to go but to stay within the 35 blocks, in the form of 200 blackowned businesses, and many affluent families, including four black millionaires. The discovery of oil and natural gas, which led Tulsa to proclaim itself the “Oil Capital” starting in the 1910s, also contributed to the phenomenon.
Greenwood became known across the US as a model of blacks working productively together and of economic independence. “What was happening in the Greenwood District wouldn’t be contained within the Greenwood District,” said Karlos Hill, associate professor of African American studies at the University of Oklahoma, in a previous interview. “Some individuals would be pressing for greater inclusion, political and civil rights.”
Yet what was seen by all African Americans, especially those from the racism-riven Deep South, as “a symbol of what was possible” — to quote Hill — was also “an anomaly”, according to Johnson.
“Having thrived at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was incredibly active in Oklahoma, the community had, up to the point of the massacre, dodged bloody white-on-black violence that had erupted across the US in what’s known today as the Red Summer of 1919. All it needed was a sort of match, an igniter tossed on the embers.”
That trigger event took place on May 30, 1921, involving Dick Rowland, 19, a shoeshine boy, and Sarah Page, 17, a white girl who was an elevator attendant in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa.
“The boy went to the building, boarded the elevator, something happened and Sarah Page began to scream,” Johnson said. “They both ran out of the elevator. What happened there we’ll likely never know. But the next day, Rowland was arrested and taken to the court.”
That same afternoon, the local paper The Tulsa Tribune ran a highly inflammatory article with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator”, accompanied by an editorial titled “To Lynch Negro Tonight” — something that a white mob immediately sought to do, by gathering on the lawn of the city courthouse, where Rowland was in jail on the top floor, and demanding that he be handed over.
Outside the courthouse, the white mob clashed with a group of blacks who marched there to protect Rowland and ensure he at least received a trial. A shot was fired and “things sort of went south from that point”, Johnson said.
The white mob, armed and greatly outnumbering the blacks, shot its way through the Greenwood District, firing indiscriminatingly into businesses and residences. This was followed by looting and burning, which lasted for 16 hours until noon on June 1.
George Monroe, 5, was consumed by terror.
“All of a sudden my mother was excited because she saw four men coming toward our house,” Monroe recalled in the mid-1990s. “All of them had torches, lighted torches on their side coming straight to our house. When these four men came in, they walked right past the bed, straight to the curtains in the house and they set fire to the curtains. As a result, everything in and around was burning.”
All the time, Monroe was hiding under a bed with his older sister, who threw her hand over his mouth to stop him screaming when a rioter unknowingly stepped onto his finger.
Monroe waited for 75 years to tell his story: in 1996 the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, a state-sanctioned task force, was set up to investigate the massacre, and he was among the 108 survivors the commission ultimately located across the country.
Among other things, the commission found that the city had conspired with the white mob against its black citizens.
“We don’t know of any approved incident where law enforcement officers were murdering people, but what we do know is that they deputized some people in the white mob and provided them with weapons,” Johnson said. “The National Guard rounded up black people and put them in internment centers in the middle of the massacre. The stated purpose was to protect them, but we know from the survivors that what it did was to leave the Greenwood community largely defenseless.”
According to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, more than 6,000 black people were held at one point, some for as long as eight days. After the massacre it was official policy to release a black detainee only upon the application of a white person.
However, in a report issued by the Tulsa City Commission two weeks after the massacre, Mayor T.D. Evans was unequivocal: “Let the blame for this negro uprising lie right where it belongs, on those armed negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it.”
Last September a lawsuit was filed in the Oklahoma state court against the city of Tulsa by lawyers for the massacre victims and their descendants, including Fletcher, Ellis and Randle, whose appearance before the congressional subcommittee constituted part of that quest for delayed justice.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that a federal lawsuit seeking damages was barred by the statute of limitations, in effect telling the victims and their descendants that they were too late for any remedy.
Behind this prolonged fight is what many have called a conspiracy of silence.
Immediately after the massacre, all original copies of the issue of The Tulsa Tribune that seems to have incited the mob disappeared, apparently having been destroyed. The relevant page is even missing from the microfilm copy. According to a newspaper report at the time, Sarah Page, who left the town immediately after the massacre, later wrote a letter to the county prosecutor saying she did not want to press charges against Rowland.
In fact, the most powerful indictment of the murderous mobs is in the form of picture postcards taken, most likely by its members, and widely distributed after the massacre as souvenirs of the prowess of white supremacy. These images, never showing the need to restrain from depicting bloodstained bodies of black Tulsans, feature captions such as “Negro slain in Tulsa riot”, the word riot seen by many as an insidious effort to rewrite history by blaming the blacks.
Yet there is more to it. “If the damage was occasioned by riot or civil unrest, the insurance policy typically would not pay proceeds,” Johnson said. “That’s why labeling it as a riot was really important at the time.
“The push to change really took place two or three years ago, as people in the community wanted to sort of take back the naming rights for the event.”
While the word massacre captures the horror of the killing, he said, it may have failed to convey the active resistance put up by black Tulsans in face of the advancing mobs.
Back then with Tulsa the self-proclaimed oil capital still on its upward trajectory, the city fathers were only too eager to bury what they knew would severely tarnish its image. The victims themselves were too traumatized and too afraid to talk about it, and in fact with the entire community in ruins, many left Tulsa, never to return.
However, some chose to stay. Left to pick up rubble amid smoldering debris, these black Tulsans embarked on an arduous rebuilding, one that the city government often did its best to impede.
“The city passed an ordinance that you had to rebuild with nonflammable materials, which my grandfather thought was unfair and unreasonable,” said John Whittington Franklin, whose grandfather, Buck Colbert Franklin, was a lawyer in Tulsa in the first half of the 20th century. “He fought it successfully all the way to the state supreme court.”
The rebuilding resumed, with black Tulsans encouraged by Franklin to use whatever they could find, from old bricks to pieces of wood. For four years the man lived in tents, away from his wife and children, including his son John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), father of John W. Franklin and renowned African American historian.
“My grandfather moved 60 miles from the small town of Rentiesville to Tulsa and opened his law firm in February 1921,” John W. Franklin said. “My grandmother had planned to join him at the end of May, but the massacre changed everything. My father remembered learning how to fish from my grandmother, something young men usually do with their fathers. The family was reunited in 1925.”
The wouldbe historian attended public schools in Tulsa, including Booker T. Washington High School, one of the very few structures that had escaped destruction in the massacre. He may also have said his Sunday prayers at the Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, burned to the ground during the massacre before being rebuilt by black Tulsans the very next year. In the wee hours of July 1, 1921, as the fires burned away the floors above the ground, men, women and children found shelter in the church basement.
In 2015, eight years after John Hope Franklin and his son edited and published the late lawyer’s autobiography My Life And An Era, John W. Franklin was presented with his grandfather’s manuscript, discovered in a rented storage area.
“I wept, I just wept,” said the grandson, who first visited his grandfather in Tulsa in 1954, at the age of 2.
Within those 10 pages typewritten on yellowed legal paper, the lawyer, who had dreamed of becoming a novelist, told of one of the greatest tragedies of his era, through the true story of one man with whom he had crossed paths several times.
It begins in 1918, soon after World War I, when a young African American veteran named Ross feels angry and betrayed because of his treatment despite his military service. It proceeds to an account of Ross defending his black community in 1921 during the massacre, and ends 10 years later, with the man, who had lost both his eyesight and his mind in the fires that destroyed his home, sitting in a mental asylum staring blankly into space. Somewhere at a street corner in Tulsa sits Mother Ross with her tin cup in hand, begging alms of passersby.
In an article published on June 3, 1921, two days after the calamity, The Morning Tulsa Daily World, citing Tulsa County deputy sheriff Barney Cleaver, said “the negroes participating in the fight … were former servicemen who had an exaggerated idea of their own importance”.
“Exaggerated idea” was the expectation of black returnees from the war in Europe — 400,000 African Americans fought in the war — for civil rights, seen through the distorting prism of racism. Ellis, one of the massacre survivors who spoke in Washington in May, knows all about that expectation, and the crushing disappointment that follows.
Joining an all-black battalion in the highly segregated US Army and fighting in the China-Burma-Indian Theater of World War II, Ellis was asked to “stay at the very bottom of the ship” like his fellow black soldiers. “I put my life on the line for my country,” said the old man who at war’s end returned home to find himself denied all GI benefits due to the color of his skin.
Today, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, a museum for which John Hope Franklin served as the founding chairman of its scholarly advisory committee, the typewriter on which the historian’s father produced his searing eyewitness account is on view in a gallery dedicated to the memory of the massacre.
“Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes — now a dozen or more in number — still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of air,” B.C. Franklin wrote in his manuscripts in 1931, 10 years after the massacre. He was referring to the use of private aircraft by the white mobs, with the attackers either shooting from them or dropping incendiary devices onto the buildings of Greenwood.
The gallery, whose collection John Whittington Franklin has helped to build together with curator Paul Gardullo, also features a number of charred coins collected by young Monroe in the days and months after the massacre.
In an article written for the museum, Gardullo recounted how the boy was able to find solace from searching for coins left behind by the looters. The copper pennies, belonging to black families who preferred to keep their hard-earned wealth at home rather than in a white-owned bank, had withstood the heat of burning to offer a potent metaphor.
“The story is ultimately not about massacre but about the indomitable human spirit — perseverance, faith, hope and resilience,” Johnson said, referring to qualities that he clearly sees as transmittable, although the transmission of wealth itself between different generations of African Americans had often been impeded by racially motivated violence.
Imbued with a sense of righteous defiance, black Tulsans rebuilt their homes to such a degree that the National Negro Business League held its 26th annual convention in Greenwood in 1925, the year B.C. Franklin got together with his family. The community peaked in the 1940s.
In the meantime, despite common belief, there had been, from the very beginning, sporadic but equally heroic efforts from black Tulsans to save the memory for later generations. One of them was Mary E. Jones, who was compelled by the massacre to become a journalist and author, before writing about her experience and that of others in the 1923 book Events of the Tulsa Disaster.
“I had no desire to flee,” Jones said in her book. “I forgot about personal safety and was seized with an uncontrollable desire to see the outcome of the fray.”
Another example involves William D. Williams, whose remarkable story is recounted in Gardullo’s writing for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Williams, the son of a black couple who owned Greenwood’s iconic Dreamland Theater, lived in Tulsa in 1921. He later left for college, receiving letters from his mother telling him how hard it was to “pull out” and rebuild, physically and emotionally. The young man eventually returned to Tulsa to teach history at his alma mater, Booker T. Washington High School, where he developed his own curriculum on the massacre.
One of his students, Don Ross, later became an Oklahoma state representative and successfully lobbied to create the Tulsa Race Riot Commission.
Williams died in 1984 aged 78, having assembled over the years a scrapbook that includes an obituary notice for his mother. The lady, despite all her effort to “pull out”, died in a mental asylum in 1928, a victim of the massacre’s long-term trauma.
“At every juncture, white Americans have taken whatever opportunities and success and ambition that black Americans have earned and destroyed it,” said Jonathan Silvers, director of the documentary Tulsa: the Fire and the Forgotten, aired on the US channel PBS on May 31 to mark the massacre’s centennial. Speaking at an online discussion on the massacre, Silvers said he was prompted to do the movie by a news story about “mass graves possibly discovered in Tulsa” in October 2019.
“I’ve been in a lot of mass graves around the world, and I had no idea that mass graves could exist in our country,” said Silvers, a veteran journalist with strong interest in “international justice, conflict and human rights”.
Carried on intermittently since that initial discovery, the archaeological digging at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, in which lie the remains of only two official victims of the Tulsa massacre, has unearthed a total of 27 remarked remains. To determine whether or not they are related to the massacre, forensic scientists hope to, among other things, match the remains’ features — height, for example — with city records and World War I enrollment documents.
Some have hailed the excavation as carving “a path toward reconciliation” while others point to the continuing racial tension in a city in which the predominantly black North Tulsa is “messed-up” and “empty”, in the words of Randle, one of the three survivors.
Damario Solomon Simmons, the lawyer who spearheads the lawsuit against the city of Tulsa on behalf of the massacre victims and descendants, said more than 33 percent of residents in black North Tulsa live in poverty compared with less than 14 percent of residents in South Tulsa. Calling the current situation “the legacy of that violence” in an article for the Los Angeles Times, Simmons, born in Tulsa, clearly sees in his hometown “an aversion to making amends for systemic racism”.
Last October, barely five months after the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by the white policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a Black Lives Matter mural 75 meters high in Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa was removed by the city overnight.
A week later an anti-racism protest attracted numerous armed militia members carrying automatic weapons. The sight, captured by Silver’s camera crew, is agonizingly evocative for black Tulsans aware of the history of the massacre and for those who have lived with it for a century.
“I think about the horror inflicted upon black people in this country every day,” said Fletcher, who in 1921 found herself running past “black bodies … injured or dead … not able to get up and get out of the way of whatever was happening.”
“Recognizing our shared humanity”, Johnson said, is the only way toward reconciliation. “The Holocaust, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, the burning of Chinatowns in the 19th century and the rampant antiAsian hate we see now — all these things are connected. Part of the reason we have to study those things is to make sure that we understand what can happen in the absence of recognition of our shared humanity.”
In 1972 the mother of Dick Rowland, whose elevator encounter with Sarah Page “started it all”, to quote Johnson, gave an interview. “She suggested that the two knew one another and that they were actually having some sort of ‘illicit’ affair,” said Johnson, referring to the fact that in those days a romantic relationship between a white girl and a black boy could lead to shunning for the former and lynching for the latter.
Gardullo, the National Museum of African American History and Culture curator, believes that the stereotype of young black men raping young white women was used with great success from the end of slavery and into the middle of the 20th century.
“It was a formula that resulted in untold numbers of lynchings across the nation,” he said in a previous interview with Smithsonian Magazine. “The truth of the matter has to do with the threat that black power … posed to individual and … the whole system of white supremacy.”
Having had her childhood upended and her chance at education stolen from her by the massacre, Fletcher spent most of her life as a domestic worker “serving white families”, as she puts it. In the 1940s she worked briefly in the shipyards of California supporting her country’s World War II effort and saw, in those and subsequent years, six men in her family joining the US military service.
“For 70 years the city of Tulsa and its chamber of commerce told us that the massacre didn’t happen as if we didn’t see it with our own eyes,” she said.
“Our country may want me to forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors did not. Our descendants do not.”
The Holocaust, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, the burning of Chinatowns in the 19th century and the rampant anti-Asian hate we see now — all these things are connected. Part of the reason we have to study those things is to make sure that we understand what can happen in the absence of recognition of our shared humanity.”
Hannibal Johnson, lawyer & author