Black Birds in the Sky

by Brandy Colbert

  Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921

  But before he went home, Williams decided to stop at his family’s movie theater on Greenwood Avenue to check in with his mother, Loula. Once he arrived, he found a group gathered inside, trying to figure out what to do about the white mob that had begun to assemble outside the courthouse.

  “We’re not going to let this happen,” a man said from the stage. “We’re going to go downtown and stop this lynching. Close this place down.”

  Black Tulsans gathered along busy Greenwood Avenue close to where it met with Archer Street. Nearby at the Tulsa Star offices, editor A. J. Smitherman held a meeting, a group of Black men that included prominent Greenwood businessman J. B. Stradford, other local leaders, and war veterans. They were trying to decide the best course of action. No Black person had ever been lynched in Tulsa. There was a close call in March 1919, when three Black Tulsans were locked up for the alleged murder of a white ironworker and rumors began to swirl that they would be lynched—but those rumors never turned into fact, as they had with Roy Belton nine months earlier. And the men in Greenwood were determined not to let it happen that evening, either.

  Of course, not everyone was on board with the plan to confront the white mob, including Greenwood cofounder O. W. Gurley, who thought his neighbors were heading into a fight they couldn’t win. He said the leader of the group, a World War I veteran, “came back from France with exaggerated ideas of equality.” But that didn’t stop the men who believed it was the best and most necessary course of action. Roy Belton had been lynched after being dragged from that very courthouse—and he was white. The men felt Rowland was in even more danger, and they had to stand up for him and the Black community before it was too late.

  Meanwhile, Greenwood resident Barney Cleaver had been telephoning Sheriff McCullough ever since the rumors started. Cleaver, the first Black police officer in Tulsa, had been promoted to deputy sheriff by 1921 and was somewhat of a liaison between the Black community and white law enforcement. He knew the men in Greenwood were planning to go down to where the mob was gathered and reportedly tried to talk them out of it, to no avail. He was trying to get a grasp on what was happening at the courthouse and offered to come down to help keep order. At first, Sheriff McCullough turned down Deputy Sheriff Cleaver’s offer of assistance but eventually agreed that he could join him downtown.

  Around nine that evening, about twenty-five Black men—including John Williams, Bill’s father and Loula’s husband—armed themselves with shotguns and rifles and drove over to the courthouse. They headed up the steps and announced they were there to protect the jail. The police officers on the scene told them they had things under control—that Rowland was safe and they could go home. However, that bold offer of protection further riled up the white mob, which had grown to more than a thousand people by that point. Once they saw armed Black men—a sight they’d consider a challenge any other day but particularly so under the circumstances—the enraged mob sought to arm themselves, as well. Some went home to get their own guns, while others headed over to the National Guard armory at Sixth Street and Norfolk Avenue. Their plan? To break in and steal rifles and ammunition.

  Major James A. Bell, a local National Guard officer, had smelled trouble, however, and already arranged for guardsmen to meet down at the armory in case their services were needed. “I went to the front of the building near the southwest corner where I saw a mob of white men about three or four hundred strong,” Major Bell later recalled. “I explained to them that they could not get anything here. Someone shouted, ‘We don’t know about that, we guess we can.’”

  The National Guard fought off the insistent crowd, but not without repeated attempts by the mob to get their hands on guns and ammo. Major Bell said the armed guard was able to break up the mob at the armory “by maintaining a firm stand.”

  Just a half hour after the couple dozen Black men had been turned away at the courthouse, the mob had nearly doubled in size, to two thousand people. By this time, there was no reasoning with them; they ignored pleas from local leaders to disperse. Police chief John Gustafson, the same chief who had let another angry mob kidnap and lynch Roy Belton the previous year, was no help; he failed to call in additional assistance from the police force and didn’t bother to stick around to help fend off the mob. Instead, he had returned to police headquarters by the time the crowd grew out of control.

  Back in Greenwood, the Black community was still anxiously awaiting news of what was happening at the courthouse, and though the first group of men who’d offered to guard the jail had been told to return home, that didn’t stop others from trying their luck. Several small groups headed downtown in cars, making sure people who were out and about could see that they were armed. They wanted to make clear that they were serious about preventing the lynching of Rowland and that they would not be intimidated.

  Shortly after 10:00 p.m., a group of seventy-five Black men, triple the size of the first group, drove down to the courthouse with their guns. For a second time, they offered to help the police officers guard the jail, and for a second time, their services were rejected. Deputy Sheriff Barney Cleaver was stationed at the courthouse by this time, urging his neighbors to head back home to Greenwood. Some say of these crucial moments before the massacre began that white people saw armed Black men not only as a general threat, but as an indication that they were starting a “Negro uprising.” This put the mob even more on edge, and as the Black men were leaving the courthouse, there was an altercation between a white man and a Black veteran, who held the gun he’d brought home from World War I.

  “Nigger, what are you going to do with that pistol?” the white man demanded, stepping to him.

  “I’m going to use it if I need to,” the Black veteran responded.

  “No, you give it to me.”

  “Like hell I will.”

  The white man attempted to grab the gun, a shot rang out, and, according to Sheriff McCullough, “the race war was on, and I was powerless to stop it.” Whether he truly didn’t have the ability to stop what happened next is debatable, but McCullough was right about one thing: this was just the beginning.

  A shootout ensued between the Black men and the white mob, reportedly leaving possibly a dozen people, Black and white, wounded or dead. The Black men had every intention of standing their ground and defending themselves, but they were vastly outnumbered at that point—by more than twenty to one. They began retreating back toward Greenwood, with members of the mob hot on their heels, guns loaded and ready. According to a white bystander, “A great many of [the people] lining the sidewalks were holding a rifle or shotgun in one hand, and grasping the neck of a liquor bottle with the other. Some had pistols stuck into their belts.”

  While this was a dangerous situation in itself, the Tulsa police force was about to make things a whole lot worse. A significant portion of the white mob had moved to the police headquarters on Second Street, where anywhere between four hundred and five hundred men were sworn in as “special deputies.” There were no background checks, and no prior law enforcement experience was necessary. The only requirement was to be a white man who wanted to exact “revenge.” Deputizing these men was a cover for the white mob—“authorization” they could later use as an excuse for the violence that was about to ensue. The Tulsa police gave the men badges and ribbons to validate their new roles, and, in some cases, the civilians were told in no uncertain terms to go out and kill Black people.

  The tone had been set. Members of the white mob without government-issued firearms began looting stores and pawnshops for guns and ammunition. According to one report, a Tulsa police officer handed out guns stolen from a sporting goods store across from police headquarters.

  Black people who had happened to be downtown that evening were some of the first victims of the mob. They were shot on sight. A white teenager named William “Choc” Phillips, who would grow up to become a Tulsa police officer, witnessed the violence at the Royal The
ater that evening. A Black man who’d been chased by the white mob burst into the theater, looking for a place to hide, and accidentally ended up onstage in front of the film that was playing. “One of [the men from the mob] saw the Negro and yelled, ‘There he is, heading for the aisle,’” Phillips recalled. “As he finished the sentence, a roaring blast from a shotgun dropped the Negro man by the end of the orchestra pit.”

  Although a smaller crowd had returned to the courthouse amid all the chaos, demanding “Bring the rope!” and “Get the nigger!,” their cries were not backed up by force. This was no longer about Dick Rowland and his alleged crime.

  War had been declared on any and every Black person in Tulsa.

  I was too young to personally remember details of the riot, but I heard my parents talk about the riot—how bad it was, how it destroyed so much property that Blacks had worked so hard to acquire.

  —Delois Vaden Ramsey,

  Tulsa Race Massacre survivor

  4

  Black Wall Street Comes Alive

  There would have been no Greenwood District without a man named O. W. Gurley.

  The child of a formerly enslaved couple, Ottowa W. Gurley was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on December 25, 1868. When he was eight years old, he moved with his family to the majority-Black town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he attended public schools but was primarily self-educated. Gurley graduated from Pine Bluff’s Branch Normal College, an institution founded to train Black educators to teach at Black schools within segregated Arkansas.

  In addition to teaching, Gurley held a job with the United States Postal Service. He also worked in a position appointed by President Grover Cleveland, though the details of what exactly that position entailed have been lost to history. Gurley resigned from this job in 1888 for better opportunities; he wanted to leave the South, as he felt he would never be able to achieve his goals for success there, given the color of his skin. He married a woman named Emma Evans, and together they traveled from Arkansas to Oklahoma to try to secure land during the era of the famous land runs.

  In September 1893, Gurley participated in the Cherokee Strip, or Cherokee Outlet opening, which was the fourth and largest of the land runs, with more than 100,000 people partaking from all over the United States and even other countries. Gurley was serious about creating new opportunities for himself, and he ran fifty miles before he claimed land in what would become the town of Perry, Oklahoma.

  O.W. and Emma settled in nicely in their new town, which was about eighty miles outside of Tulsa. With his background in education, Gurley was well-suited to his appointment as superintendent of the town’s schools. Later, he opened a general store, which he operated for the next ten years. But despite his success in Perry, Gurley wanted to move on to bigger and better things. More specifically: oil. The oil boom in Tulsa had begun, and like many entrepreneurs at the time, Gurley was looking to capitalize on it. He sold his store and purchased forty acres of land on the north side of Tulsa’s Frisco railroad tracks, where he and Emma moved in 1906.

  Gurley had a plan for the neighborhood from the moment he moved there. He wanted to build a community where other ambitious, “upwardly mobile” Black people could put down roots, and he rightfully anticipated that freedmen and people who longed to escape the South, like him, would migrate to Tulsa. Sure enough, Tulsa soon became known as the oil capital of the world, and thousands of people were moving to the area for new opportunities—including Black Americans. Though it wasn’t easy for Black people to secure jobs in the oil fields, they knew they’d be able to find work in service jobs for the influx of Tulsa residents, such as housekeeping, groundskeeping, and working in restaurants.

  Gurley’s first business was a grocery store; he built it on a street he called Greenwood Avenue, which got its name from a town in Mississippi. Gurley’s vision for this new Black community was vivid from the start: he separated his land into lots for both businesses and housing before any of it had been built. However, although he was an enterprising businessman, Gurley didn’t develop Greenwood all by himself. Shortly after he and his wife moved to Tulsa, he met a like-minded man named J. B. Stradford.

  Stradford’s father, J.C., had been enslaved, gaining his freedom when he escaped to Stratford, Ontario, and worked to raise money to legally free himself and his family. J.C., short for Julius Caesar, likely changed his family’s last name to a version of this town’s name to commemorate their freedom, and because the family that had enslaved him had never given him a last name—not even the slaveholder’s surname, which was custom. His son J.B., short for John the Baptist, was born in 1861, the same year the American Civil War began.

  Not much is known about his childhood, but J. B. Stradford began making his ambitions known from a young age. He earned an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College—where he met his wife, Augusta—and a law degree from Indiana University. After he completed his education, Stradford and Augusta moved around the Midwest and the South, where they opened various businesses, such as boardinghouses, pool halls, and shoeshine parlors. In 1899, they moved to Tulsa, and Stradford began working informally with O. W. Gurley to build up a prosperous Black community.

  Both Gurley and Stradford owned eponymous boardinghouses on Greenwood Avenue, with Stradford’s property claiming the title of the largest Black-owned hotel in the country at the time. The Stradford Hotel boasted fifty-four rooms, along with a restaurant, a saloon, a pool hall, and a place to gamble. Stradford spared no expense, as he wanted his hotel to rival the lodging for white people across the train tracks in Tulsa. By today’s standards, the property would be valued at $2.5 million.

  Though his focus was local, building up Greenwood with Gurley, Stradford never lost sight of the broader fight for racial equality. In December 1908, J.B. and Augusta were arrested for disobeying Jim Crow laws when they refused to ride in the Black railroad car on a train headed from Kansas to Bartlesville. They were snatched off the train and arrested in Bartlesville, per a report in Kansas’s Iola Daily Index, which also stated that Stradford and his daughter had been arrested on similar charges the previous year. Eight years later, Stradford relentlessly fought a Tulsa city ordinance that blatantly enforced housing segregation; he led a protest of hundreds at Greenwood’s Dreamland Theatre and petitioned the Tulsa mayor, though the law was upheld even after the Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned the ordinance the next year. Stradford, an attorney by training, also worked to prevent lynchings by representing potential victims in court and gathering with other armed Black men to intimidate white mobs.

  Meanwhile, Gurley and Stradford continued to grow Greenwood. In addition to rental properties, Gurley operated his grocery store, started an employment agency, and built a Masonic lodge. He was eventually named a sheriff’s deputy, with the primary task of overseeing the city’s Black residents. Gurley and Stradford were also heavily invested in the real estate business, buying and selling land and loaning money to entrepreneurs like themselves, who helped develop Greenwood. While some white people owned land in the district, the focus was on building up and supporting Black businesses and professionals.

  These Black business owners came from a variety of backgrounds: Some had been born into slavery in the South, or had been formerly enslaved by citizens of the Native Nations forced to relocate to Indian Territory, but the majority of Greenwood’s residents had sought out Tulsa as a place of promise, during the beginning of its oil boom in the early twentieth century. Some of them had made stops in Oklahoma’s smaller towns, including some of the all-Black communities, where they gained experience creating and building their own businesses, then brought that entrepreneurship to Greenwood.

  Emma Buckner’s sewing shop, located at 1120 N. Hartford Avenue, photographed shortly before it was burned down by the white mob

  By 1921, Greenwood was home to a Black hospital, a Black public library, two Black schools, two Black newspapers, two theaters, three fraternal organizations, five hotels, eleven boardinghouses, and about a
dozen churches. The main intersection was Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, which was a block away from the railroad tracks that served as the line between Black and white Tulsa. Greenwood Avenue extended north for more than a mile, and it was unique: while other streets in Tulsa ran through both the Black and white neighborhoods, the titular avenue started just north of the Frisco railroad tracks and did not spill into the white areas of town.

  The commercial district, known as Deep Greenwood, consisted of several blocks that included the southern end of Greenwood Avenue and its side streets. Lined with redbrick buildings, some of which stretched to three stories, one could find just about anything they needed in Deep Greenwood, with reportedly six hundred businesses within its thirty-five city blocks by 1921. You could shop at Elliott & Hooker’s Clothing Emporium at 124 North Greenwood, then cross the street for tailoring at H. L. Byars’s shop; Hope Watson’s dry cleaning business was conveniently located at 322 Archer Street, just around the corner. William Anderson was the neighborhood jeweler, while Henry Lilly’s shop was there for all your upholstery needs. And anyone who needed to have professional photos taken could visit A. S. Newkirk’s studio. Black businesses continued to pop up in the rapidly expanding community, including a roller-skating rink, more grocery stores, a post office substation, women’s clubs, and a YMCA.

  Food, which has always been a significant aspect of Black culture, was an important part of Greenwood, too. People gathered at barbecue joints, sandwich shops, or the Little Café, where they “lined up waiting for their specialty—chicken or smothered steak with rice and brown gravy.” Rolly Huff, Greenwood’s first portable ice cream vendor, owned a confectionery with his wife, Ada, on Archer Street between Detroit and Cincinnati Avenues, where they served customers cold drinks such as Coca-Cola and sarsaparilla, a root beer–like soda. Doc’s Beanery and Hamburger Kelly’s were popular places to grab a bite, and if you were in the mood for a home-cooked meal at 2:00 a.m., Lilly Johnson’s Liberty Café was the late-night spot to hit up.