Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Foreword

Foreword In the spring of 19211was only six years old, but the events in Tlilsa in late May and early June were permanently etched in my mind.For some years my family had been living in Rentiesville, an all-Negro village some sixty-five miles south of Tulsa. I was born there, in the post office, where my father was postmaster, the justice of the peace, president of the Rentiesville Trading Company, and the town's only lawyer. Therewasnot adecent living in all thoseactivities; and when my father left in February, 1921, to open a law office in Tulsa, the family was to follow in the summer. As my mother completed her teaching stint in Rentiesville that spring, I was as anxious as my brother and sister (our older sister was away in a Tennessee boarding school) to move to the big city. Then it happened! Tulsa was burning! The news of the Tulsa riot reached the little village slowly and piecemeal. In 1921there were no radios or television sets, of course. And Rentiesville had no telephones , or even a telegraph to connect it with the outside world.We had to depend on news of the riot that was relayed from Tulsa to Muskogee, where it was printed in the Daily Phoenix, which was dropped off at Rentiesville by the Katy Railroad mail and passenger train. Black Tulsa had been destroyed, burned out, we learned. Many blacks had been killed. But the paper did not say who they were, and we had no word from my father. Our mother put the best interpretaxv xvi Foreword tion on the news, trying to allayour fears. It seemed like years before we learned a few days later that my father was safe. In 1921 and for the next few years, the significance of the Tulsa riot to me was that it kept our family separated. The assets that my father had accumulated in those few months in Tulsa were destroyed in the riot, and our move there had to be postponed indefinitely . Meanwhile, my father was busy fighting city ordinances that seemed designed to obstruct black Tulsa's efforts to rebuild. In that he was successful, but success in bringingthe family together again came more slowly. His clients were poor people, and it took time to collect the small fees they could afford. Finally, on Thursday, December 10, 1925, my mother, who had quit her teaching job,packed our belongings and moved to the home in Tulsa that my father had rented for us. Everyone who experienced the race riot in Tulsa or was touched by it in some way,as Iwas, had his own view ofwhat happened,what was the aftermath, and what were the long-range consequences. When I arrived in Tulsa, at ten years of age, the collective wisdom in the black community had made certain conclusions about the riot. One was that Dick Rowland, whose allegedlyimproper advances toward a white girl precipitated the riot and who was later acquitted, was, along with all the black Tulsans, the victim of "riot fever" raging in the white community. Another was that many more whites were killed during the riot than any whites were willing to admit.If one went to court regularly, as I did with my father in the late twenties , one would be interested to hear cases involving the estate of some white person who died on or about June 1, 1921. One was always tempted to conclude that the deceased lost his life in the riot. Another view was that whites looted the homes of Negroes before burning them. Rumor had it that following the riot, Negro women would encounter white women wearing clothing or carrying some item recognized by the Negro women, who would simply claim the property and take it. These conclusions seemed necessary for the continued self-esteem of Tulsa's black community. Whether or not the conclusions were valid, they had the desired effect. The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flour- Foreword xvii ished, and they simply had no fear of whites. After 1921, an altercation in Tulsa between a white person and a black person was not a racial incident, even if there was a loss of life. It was just an incident . Such an attitude had a great deal to do with eradicatingthe fear that a Negro boy growing up in Tulsa might...