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

Prelude: In the Promised Land

Prelude In the Promised Land i Bill Williams once asked his father why he had come to Oklahoma. "Well," he replied, "I came out to the promised land." Indeed, when John Williams and his wife Loula came to Tulsa during the first years of the twentieth century, it was for them a place of promise. John was from Mississippi; Loula was a Tennessean. John had worked for a railroad in his home state, and his knowledge of steam engines helped him to secure a job in Tulsa at the Thompson Ice Cream Company, which used steam power to make its products.Although John and Loula Williams were by no means the first black residents of Tulsa, they came at a time when the city's black and white populations, though growing, were still relatively small. There was not a black doctor in Tulsa, then located in Indian Territory , in 1905 when Loula gavebirth to Bill. She chose to travel to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to a black physician there. John's work at the ice cream company paid well enough that the Williamses became the first black Tulsans to own a car. In those days, most automobile owners would repair their own cars, andJohn was very adept at working on his. As Tulsa's population climbed and more and more Tulsans purchased automobiles, many of them took their cars to John Williams for repair work. This extra source of income soon became so lucrative that John quit work at the ice cream company and opened a full-time garage of his own, along Green1 2 Death in a Promised Land wood Avenue, which soon became the center ofthe city's blackbusiness district. About 1912, the Williamses built a three-story brick building on the northwest corner of Greenwood and Archer avenues. On the first floor was a confectionary,complete with a twelve-foot fountain and table seating for nearly fifty people. If John had a mechanical mind, Loula had an entrepreneurial one, and the confectionary which she managed soon became a money maker. She sold ice cream, candy, and sodas, and this confectionary was one of black Tulsa's first commercial refreshment spots other than bootleg whiskey joints. On the second floor of the building was the apartment where the Williams family lived, while the third floor was rented out as office space to dentists, doctors, and lawyers. Greenwood, as the district was called, was fast growing into a thriving business center. Then, in 1914, John wanted a bigger garage for his growing automobile business, so the Williamses erected another building, a twostory brick structure, further up Greenwood Avenue. The second John, Loula, and Bill Williams, about 1912. Their automobile is a 1911 Norwalk. Courtesy of W. D. Williams Prelude 3 story was a twenty-one-room boarding house, and the first floor was 10 be John's new garage. John soon found out, however, that there was a city ordinance against having a rooming house abovea garage, so he decided to keep working at his old one. John and Loula were then faced with what to do with the empty first floor. The answer came when they read in a newspaper that a theater in Oklahoma City had gone bankrupt, so they purchased its equipment and created the Williams Dreamland Theatre, the first black theater in Tulsa. Silent movies, accompanied by a piano player, were shown and live entertainment was scheduled as well. Loula, assuredly the managerial family member, ran the theater. In the best American entrepreneurial tradition, the Williams family prospered. II On May 31, 1921, sixteen-year-old Bill Williams, together with some of his classmates at the Booker T. Washington High School, was busy decorating a rented hall on Archer Street for the senior prom which was to be held that night. Other students were rehearsingfor the graduation exercises not far away on Greenwood Avenue.But before young Williams and his classmates could finish their decorating , an adult came in and told them to go home. They were told that it looked like there might be some racial trouble that evening.Having read that afternoon's Tulsa Tribune, which carried the headline TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT,' Bill had already sensed this. But rather than go directly home, he headed for the Dreamland Theatre, where his mother was at work. Inside the theater, a man got up on stage and told the audience, "We're not...