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

1. Boom Cities

Chapter 1 Boom Cities i Tulsa was a boom city in a boom state. Between 1890 and 1920, the population of the land which became the state of Oklahoma increased seven and one-half times; the total population in 1920 was over two million. Thirteen other states and territories, primarily in the West, more than doubled their populations during this period, but Oklahoma's rate of increase was by far the largest. And of these states, only Texas, with its much larger land area, surpassed Oklahoma in the number of people added to her population during these decades. Byfar,the greater part of Oklahoma's population boom was due to immigration. But unlike the forced immigration of Native Americans which began in the 1830s, the new immigrants' move was a matter of choice. Most of them came between 1890 and 1910, an era marked by land runs and statehood (1907).' They came for a variety of reasons and from a variety of places, but for many Oklahoma was a place to start life anew. Tulsa's growth during the first years of the twentieth century was even more dramatic. Located along a bend in the Arkansas River in a verdant area where the oak-laden foothills ofthe Ozarks slowly melt westward into the treeless Great Plains, it had been a Creek settlement known as "Tulsey Town" during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The first permanent white settlers did not arrive until the early 1880s; Tulsa's population in 1900 was estimated at Boom Cities 9 1,390. During the next two decades, the city's population skyrocketed . In 1910, the Census Bureau listed Tulsa's population at 18,182; in 1920 at 72,075. In that latter census, Tulsa ranked as the ninetyseventh largest city in the United States, comparablein size to such cities as San Diego; Wichita; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; and Troy, New York. City directory estimates, it should be added, werehigher than those of the federal government, and the 1921 directory recorded Tulsa's population as 98,874.2 The primary reason for Tulsa's rapid growth was oil, and as one writer in the 1920s remarked, "the story of Tulsa is the story of oil." Petroleum had been discovered in 1897 near Bartlesville,IndianTerritory , some fifty miles north of Tulsa, and in 1901the Southwest oil boom seriously got under way with two noted petroleum discoveries : the Spindletop strike near Beaumont, Texas; and the strike at Red Fork, Indian Territory.3 The hamlet of Red Fork was located directly across the Arkansas River from Tulsa, and its strike was an important early contributor to the city's growth. Tulsa had been incorporated only three years prior to the Red Fork gusher, and had but few characteristics to distinguish it from other towns in the northeastern part ofthe territory. It had, however, a hotel of some form as early as 1882, and a local Commercial Club, established in 1902, raised enough money to convince officials of the Missouri, Kansasand Texas Railroad that their line should pass through Tulsa in 1903. A year later, three entrepreneurs opened a toll bridge which they had constructed across the Arkansas River, thus making the Red Fork field more accessible to the business and laboring communities in Tulsa.4 Tulsa was growing, but the event which ushered in the city's most spectacular growth did not come until 1905. In the fall of that year, the Ida Glenn No. 1oil well gushed some fourteen miles from Tulsa. The area near Sapulpa where the strike was made became known as the Glenn Pool, considered to be "the richest small oil field in the world."' A veritable forest of derricks was constructed in the area during the next two years, and from some of Glenn Pool's five hundred producing wells flowed more than two thousand barrels of oil per day. Other big oil discoveries followed that of Glenn Pool, and by 1907, the year of statehood, Oklahoma led the nation in oil produc- 10 Death in a Promised Land tion. Six years later, Oklahoma was producing one-quarter of all the 011 produced in the nation, and by 1915, the young state wasproducing up to 300,000 barrels of oil per day. Oklahoma rode on top of its oil boom, and Tulsa more and more became the city associated with the boom, the oil industry, and the vast Mid-Continent oil...