Root of the riot
BY RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Jan 30, 2000
1/20/13 at 8:51 AM
Top, the Greenwood district prospered in the years before the Tulsa race riot. Businessman John Williams
is pictured in a 1911 Norwalk automobile with his wife, Loula, and son Bill , in this 1912 photo.
Williams owned a garage on Greenwood Avenue and built a three-story brick building on the first floor,
where the family opened a confectionary on the first floor, according to historian Scott Ellsworth. Bottom, looking north down Greenwood Avenue at Archer Street before 1921.
W.D. Williams / Courtesy photo (top)
Tulsa Historical Society (bottom)
led to violence
Understanding the Tulsa riot of 1921 requires understanding the Tulsa of 1921.
The Chamber of Commerce called it the Magic City, and indeed it was. Tulsa had grown with
breathtaking speed, powered by breathtaking wealth.
Tulsa's population increased more than tenfold between 1910 and 1920. But not all of those
people were millionaires, and not all of them lived in mansions.
Beneath Tulsa's shimmering veneer lurked a rougher, tougher side revealed in an astounding
case log at the county courthouse. By one estimate, 6 percent of the city was under indictment
on the eve of the riot.
Amidst the churches and the civic clubs operated the vice and violence of an oil boomtown
multiplied by the graft and capricious law enforcement of Prohibition. Add a pinch of the Old
West, a dash of political vitriol and a generous portion of Jim Crow-
era race relations, and it's a recipe for dozens dead and millions in damages.
Which is what Tulsa got.
"These forces reached the place of unrestraint, broke loose on a pretense, and thus swept
down upon the good citizen with all the hate and revenge that has been smoldering for years,"
black Tulsan E.D. Loupe said shortly after the riot.
Racial tensions are nothing new
Tulsa was not the only place in America to reach the point of
Indeed, rioting in America goes back to at least 1712, when 20 blacks and nine whites were
killed in lower Manhattan.
Even riots started by other issues, such as the 1863 New York City draft riot, have had a
way of turning into race wars.
Large-scale racial violence increased dramatically, however, beginning in about 1898, when a
riot occurred in Wilmington, N.C. Others followed in New Orleans, Evansville, Ind., Atlanta
and Springfield, Ill.
East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917, witnessed a particularly deadly outbreak in which at least 48
people were killed. That same year black soldiers and white civilians fought at Brownsville,
Also in 1917, the black section of Dewey, Okla., -- about 20 homes -- was burned.
Racial conflict reached an apex in 1919, when 25 major riots were reported in places ranging
from Chicago to Elaine, Ark.
For every incident of mass mayhem were scores of individual violence.
Some 3,000 Americans, most of them black, were lynched between 1890 and 1920.
Many more were beaten, tarred and feathered and subjected to various other humiliations by
the vigilante groups that sprang up in the early 20th century.
The most prominent of these was the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan, organized in Atlanta in
1915. In Tulsa, the black-hooded Knights of Liberty took the cat-
o'-nine-tails to suspected reds, wife beaters and racial minglers.
Interestingly enough, though, while black lynchings were common in Oklahoma, none is known
to have taken place in Tulsa County.
In 1919, when three black men were arrested for killing a white man, 200 blacks went to the
county jail to guarantee the prisoners' safety.
Two years later, and after a white man in police custody had
been lynched, blacks again went downtown to make sure nothing happened to Dick Rowland, a
young black man accused of assaulting a white woman.
Such displays enraged certain whites, and it was this confluence of passions that touched
off the Tulsa riot.
The crusading journalist Walter White, who came to Tulsa after the riot, made note of this.
"Dick Rowland was only an ordinary bootblack with no standing in the community," White
"But when his life was threatened by a mob of whites, every one of the Negroes of Tulsa,
rich and poor, educated and illiterate, were willing to die to protect Dick Rowland."
White might not have been strictly accurate, but this defiance clearly pushed Tulsa past a
"place of unrestraint."
How it got there is as much a part the riot's story as the riot itself.
Law and disorder
From its start in 1882, Tulsa was a haven for outlaws,
gamblers, prostitutes and assorted shady characters. The city had no formal local law
enforcement until 1898 and fairly erratic protection for decades after that.
By 1921, so many cars were being stolen in Tulsa that, according to one source, insurance
was hard to get.
A federal undercover officer reported vice was "very bad" and operated "without any fear of
Hotel porters frequently were nothing more than thinly disguised pimps, and cab drivers
made their real money making "deliveries" for bootleggers.
The Tulsa Tribune instigated a state investigation of the police force that concluded less
than two weeks before the riot.
The probe apparently did not result in any action, but it did cause Police Commissioner J.M.
Adkinson to remark that probably two-thirds of the force should be fired.
The Tribune claimed Greenwood, policed by a few black officers who were not permitted to
arrest whites, was home to the worst of the vice -- "a cesspool
of iniquity and corruption" frequented by all races.
This may have been hyperbole, but blacks also complained of lax law enforcement.
"Choc" joints -- bars serving the home-brewed "Choctaw beer" -- speakeasies, dance halls,
boarding houses and cheap hotels sat cheek-to-jowl with the cafes, laundries and other
businesses that fanned out from Greenwood Avenue along both sides of Archer Street, the
dividing line between white and black Tulsa.
"The lawless element of both races was so arrogant until it was dangerous for the best
citizens to make protest," said Loupe.
At least three chiefs were removed from office before 1921, including one who assaulted a
newspaper editor and then swore out a warrant for his own arrest. Another one of the three
subsequently served four years in prison for shooting to death two U.S. deputy marshals.
Even good police chiefs changed just about every time the mayor did -- usually every two
years -- as did a substantial portion of the force. Sheriffs answered to the whims of an
electorate more or less evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.
"Law enforcement" apparently included political and personal harassment.
The U.S. deputy marshals shot by the ex-police chief were attempting to search his house
without a warrant -- something they seemed to be doing on a regular basis.
In 1917, a number of organizers for the radical Industrial Workers of the World, arrested
and convicted on the flimsiest of charges, said they were taken out of town by police wearing
the black robes of the Knights of Liberty.
The Wobblies were then whipped and tarred and feathered.
Police reached the height of official ineffectualness in August 1920, when 50 masked men
took suspected murderer Roy Belton, who was white, from the third-
floor jail of the county courthouse and lynched him.
According to published re
ports, local law officers arrived at the scene well before Belton's death, but instead of
interfering began directing traffic. The police chief, John Gustafson, said there wasn't much
else they could do.
Politics as usual
When T.D. Evans died in 1948, newspaper stories did not mention
he was mayor of Tulsa during the riot.
Instead, they focused on his role in pushing the Spavinaw water project.
For most of its first 40 years, Tulsa did not have a reliable water supply.
The Arkansas River was, as they say, too thin to plow and too thick to drink, and wells
proved inadequate. By 1921 the city was depending on bottled water.
Two plans were brought forward to solve the problem. One, favored by Charles Page and other
civic leaders, involved building a dam on a stream near Sand Springs.
It was the cheaper of the two but would produce less water. The other plan, backed by Tulsa
World publisher Eugene Lorton, was more complicated -- and expensive.
Lorton advocated damming Spavinaw Creek, 90 miles to the northeast, and piping the water to
a city reservoir.
Evans was a Lorton ally. Prior to his term as mayor, Evans had been a judge with anti-labor
views similar to the World's. During his 1920 mayoral campaign, Evans promised to push the
Spavinaw project through, and he did.
In the months leading up to the riot, the Tribune -- recently merged with Page's Tulsa
Democrat -- relentlessly flogged Evans, a Republican, as well as Police Chief Gustafson and
Police Commissioner Adkinson.
The World defended them. When the Tribune used political connections to orchestrate an
investigation of the police department, the World countered with stories favorable to the
So, when the Tribune's now-famous report of Rowland's alleged assault appeared, it may have
been intended not so much
as racial provocation (which it nonetheless was), but as an attack on its business competitor
and political foes.
Among other curious sidelights is this: blacks in 1921 were still more likely to vote
Republican than Democratic, especially in Oklahoma.
In theory, that put them in Evans' camp, although Evans does not seem to have acted in black
Tulsans' best interest.
Nevertheless, for whatever it's worth, one of the city's few prominent black Democrats,
publisher A.J. Smitherman, wound up taking the brunt of official blame for the riot.
Separate but unequal
William ``Alfalfa Bill'' Murray, principle author of
Oklahoma's constitution and first speaker of the state House of Representatives, said his
primary objective was to protect the new state from "The Three C's."
These stood for carpetbaggers, corporations and a racial epithet derived from the truncated
name of a certain forest animal.
Such open racism was typical, both in 1907 when Murray helped write some of the nation's
most rigid racial laws and in 1921 when "Little Africa" was white Tulsa's polite name for
Greenwood but a cruder appellation -- one that today might cause a riot all by itself -- received
more common use.
The Oklahoma City Times, after the riot, summed up what seems to have been prevailing white
sentiment. It warned blacks to remember "there is but one dominant race in America."
Such thinking reached the highest levels. Woodrow Wilson, who as president of Princeton
resisted the admission of blacks, segregated the federal government as president of the United
Before that, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act and sanctioned
segregation with its 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Eugenics -- the notion that some ethnic groups are inherently superior to others -- gained
wide acceptance, even among scientists, and lent an air of legitimacy to exclusionary
immigration policies and discrimination against non-white citizens.
Against this rose ever louder and more articulate protests.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- the NAACP -- was founded in
1909, followed by the Urban League in 1910, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History in 1915 and the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1916.
W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White and others inspired blacks and frightened
whites with their speeches, essays and reporting. In 1916, William Pickens published "The New
Negro," a collection of essays encouraging blacks to secure "full citizenship of this
In Tulsa, blacks had long en
joyed an unusual degree of autonomy.
Greenwood's first developer, for instance, had been a black man, O.W. Gurley. By 1921,
perhaps 10,000 blacks lived in the area bounded roughly by the Midland Valley Railroad tracks
on the east, Archer on the south, Detroit on the west and Pine Street on the north.
Greenwood had its shadowy side, too.
Something called the African Blood Brotherhood may or may not have advocated violent
insurrection at about the time of the riot.
The group never seems to have had a large following, though, and in any event Greenwood
residents seemed to find their greatest pride in independence and self-reliance.
A city ordinance formally segregated Tulsa in 1916. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down such
laws a year later, but Tulsa remained divided.
Yet for all the racial isolation and bigotry, toleration and even acceptance were not
Many blacks were housed and protected by whites, some of whom were complete strangers,
during and after the riot.
If white Tulsa was slow to respond to the needs of black Tulsans as a group, evidence
indicates that assistance came to them on a personal level.
Charles Page helped rebuild the homes of black residents. Architect J.C. Latimer was
released from detention only after a young white man Latimer did not know identified Latimer as
Unfortunately, such examples of "brotherhood" were far too rare.
Although attempts to exclude blacks from their old neighborhood were foiled and Greenwood
soon returned to its former glory, the memory of the riot and aftermath lingers.
A grand jury investigating the riot blamed blacks and recommended stricter segregation of
the races rather than any sort of attempt at reconciliation.
In April 1922, more than 1,700 robed and hooded Klansmen marched for more than an hour
through the streets of Tulsa. In 1923, Gov. Jack Walton placed the city under martial law
because of Klan activity.
Only two people were convicted of any crime stemming from the riot.
Gustafson, who was among 87 indicted by the grand jury, was found guilty of dereliction of
duty and an unrelated charge and removed from office.
Garfield Thompson, a black man, spent 30 days in jail for carrying a concealed weapon.
At least 32 other people, all white and all charged with grand larceny, went free.
According to Loren Gill, who wrote a 1946 master's degree thesis on the riot, all other
charges were dropped "to alleviate the humiliation of the citizenry."
Randy Krehbiel, World staff writer, can be reached at 581-8365 or via e-mail at