Meanwhile, armed white people started organizing around the city to meet the supposed threat head-on. They began trading ammunition and agreed to head into Greenwood as soon as the sun came up.
“Men, we are going in at daylight,” a white man declared to a group at Second and Lewis Streets that “Choc” Phillips, the white teenager who’d seen the Black man shot at the movie theater, estimated to be about six hundred in total.
“Be ready at daybreak,” another white man instructed. “Nothing can stop us.”
Approximately one hundred Oklahoma National Guard troops boarded a train to Tulsa at 5:00 a.m. on June 1, but several groups of armed white people—which some estimate were collectively as large as five to ten thousand people—were already planning their attacks. One group set up a machine gun on top of the Middle States Milling Company’s grain elevator off of First Street so that it could fire straight into Greenwood.
And then, at 5:08 a.m., some sort of signal sounded. Maybe a siren, or perhaps a whistle; it’s unknown where the sound emerged from and if it was an intentional signal for attack. Regardless, when the sound echoed throughout white Tulsa, hordes of white people with guns stormed across the railroad tracks and into Greenwood.
“With wild frenzied shouts, men began pouring from behind the freight depot and the long string of boxcars,” an eyewitness recalled. “From every place of shelter up and down the tracks came screaming, shouting men to join in the rush toward the Negro section.”
The men who had positioned the machine gun on top of the grain elevator began shooting north of Greenwood Avenue. The daybreak assault had officially begun—and Black Tulsans were terribly outnumbered. They had to make the difficult decision of whether to protect the homes and property they had worked so hard to build, or save the lives of themselves and their families and flee Tulsa.
Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish, who was with her daughter, Florence Mary, in her apartment at 105 North Greenwood Avenue, was one of those people. She finally decided to leave, later writing, “I did not take time to get a hat for myself or [my daughter], but started out north on Greenwood, running amidst showers of bullets from the machine gun located in the granary and from men who were quickly surrounding our district. . . . Someone called to me to ‘Get out of the street with that child or you both will be killed.’ I felt it was suicide to remain in the building, for it would surely be destroyed and death in the street was preferred, for we expected to be shot down at any moment.” Mary and Florence Mary eventually made it to the home of a friend who lived over Standpipe Hill.
Alice Andrews somehow managed to sleep through the early-morning chaos, “but my mother witnessed the riot and the aftermath. She said she sat at her living room window all night watching those people running down the [railroad] tracks, just running and running and trying to get away from the horrors of the riot. There were no paved roads in North Tulsa then. That is why the women and children were running down the railroad tracks, so they could keep out of the mud. The women were still in their nightgowns and they were holding their children’s hands and just dragging them along. The children were crying.”
Soon, the armed white Tulsans on the ground weren’t the only threat—the Greenwood District was being attacked from the sky. Planes, piloted by white men, were circling the neighborhood and flying low to the ground. City officials, pushing back against the idea that they had any involvement, would later maintain that the two-seater, single-engine aircraft were used to monitor what was happening below. But several survivors and witnesses remember the planes dropping explosives, adding to the fires that were being set throughout the district. There is evidence in at least one case of men tossing what was thought to be dynamite sticks from a plane, and it is likely there were also men in the planes firing rifles and pistols. The district’s first Black physician, the esteemed Dr. R. T. Bridgewater, remembered: “Aeroplanes began to fly over us, in some instances very low to the ground. A cry was heard from the women saying, ‘Look out for the aeroplanes, they are shooting upon us.’”
Attorney B. C. Franklin witnessed the planes, as well; he wrote, “From my office window, I could see planes circling in midair. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way Hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from the top. . . . Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues in the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”
Meanwhile, the white mob that had stocked up on ammunition and guns, and had been deputized by the Tulsa police, had invaded Greenwood. They yanked people from their homes, forcing them out at gunpoint. They stole guns or rifles they found on Black men, then led the men away to holding areas, often separating them from their wives and children, who were forced to flee to their safety alone. Then white looters—including women, who were seen carrying shopping bags—stormed into the Black-owned businesses and homes, stealing whatever they found to be of value and destroying what they knew would personally hurt the families and business owners. Finally, they set fire to the houses and buildings; the arsonists’ weapons of choice were torches and rags soaked in oil.
Men in khaki uniforms, likely veterans from World War I, were responsible for setting some of these fires. And Tulsa police officers were observed to be partaking in the violence as well, alongside the appointed “special deputies.”
Black Tulsan Carrie Kinlaw was thrown into the line of fire as she tried to rescue her sick mother. “My sisters and I gathered her up, placed her on a cot, and three of us carried the cot and the other one carried a bundle of clothes,” she remembered. “Thus we carried Mother about six blocks, with bullets falling on all sides. About six squads of rioters overtook us, asked for men and guns, made us hold up our hands.” She noted that “there were boys in that bunch, from about ten years upward, all armed with guns.”
White Tulsan Harold M. Parker recalled the “sheer cruelty” of the white rioters, some of whom fired bullets at the feet of the Black people they took prisoner, marching them to Convention Hall on West Brady Street to be rounded up. “Sometimes they missed and shot their legs,” Parker said.
A man is detained by the white mob on June 1, 1921, standing on the south side of the Frisco railroad tracks near North Cincinnati Avenue. The Oklahoma Pipe & Supply Company at 2 N. Cincinnati is pictured behind him, to the right.
A postcard depicting Black men being marched to Convention Hall on June 1, 1921
Cruelty certainly played a part in the death of famed Greenwood physician Dr. A. C. Jackson. White retired judge and former city commissioner John Oliphant recalled seeing his forty-two-year-old neighbor in the last few moments of his life. Jackson, who had worked until late in the night at Booker T. Washington Hospital helping those wounded from the massacre, returned to his home at 523 North Detroit around three in the morning. He’d sent his wife away once rumors of the mob violence had started.
Later that morning, Oliphant saw Dr. Jackson outside his house, standing in front of a group of armed white men in khaki uniforms. Dr. Jackson knew they’d been taking Black people to Convention Hall, and he had his hands in the air, ready to surrender.
“Here I am,” Dr. Jackson said. “I want to go with you.”
Oliphant tried to come to his defense. He told the white men who the doctor was, saying, “Don’t hurt him.” Oliphant pleaded with them to spare Dr. Jackson’s life. But one of the men “shot him twice and the other fellow on the other side . . . shot him and broke his leg.”
Dr. Jackson was taken to Convention Hall, where he later died from his injuries.
Armed white civilians, the Tulsa police force, and the local National Guard were all working in tandem to disempower the Black Americans fighting for their lives. They ig
nored the armed white people who were injuring and killing innocent Black children and adults. They ignored the blind, disabled Black man being dragged behind a car down Main Street with a rope around what remained of his amputated leg. They ignored the arsonists setting fire to Black businesses and homes, and instead worked to round up the Black community, taking them to internment camps where they were imprisoned solely because they were Black (though officials later claimed this was for their own safety). Firefighters were threatened by armed white people when they attempted to put out the fires in Greenwood, despite the fact that the plumes of black smoke rising in the sky over the African American neighborhood could be seen from miles away.
Though many Black Tulsans left town for their safety, Black veteran Seymour Williams was far from the only one who stayed to fight for Greenwood. Scores of residents put their lives at risk to defend their community.
B. C. Franklin came across the intersection of North Greenwood and East Easton and saw the home of a young Black World War I veteran, John Ross, was on fire. He had run into Ross earlier that day, who had returned to Tulsa from out of state, after “something within me told me that all was not well at home.” Ross had informed him, “I’m going back home to defend it or die in the attempt.”
Franklin wrote, “On the front porch stood Mother Ross, with outstretched and trembling hands, begging a mob that was approaching from the northwest to spare her home and family. . . . From within I could hear the report of high-powered rifles. I remembered the words of young Ross and knew he was making good on his threat. Every time there was a report of a gun from within, one of the members of the mob would fall, never to rise again. I somehow, felt happy. I cannot explain that feeling. I never felt that way—before nor since.”
Over on Elgin Avenue, a group of Black men climbed up to the belfry of the newly constructed Mount Zion Baptist Church, which had held its first services in the new building only a couple of months before. In the end, their efforts to save the church were futile. The white rioters had set up a machine gun across the way, and the bullets tore through the building, which was set on fire not long afterward. But the Greenwood residents had fought to save it, for as long as they could.
Mount Zion Baptist Church at 421 N. Elgin Avenue, set on fire by the white mob. The new building had been completed only two months prior to the massacre.
One of the greatest legends of the Tulsa Race Massacre is that of Horace “Peg Leg” Taylor, a Black World War I veteran. By one account, Taylor was single-handedly responsible for killing dozens of white rioters while stationed at Standpipe Hill for more than six hours. According to another, he was part of a group of men who gathered behind Paradise Baptist Church, formed a human chain, and headed out with guns to protect Greenwood. Still, others claim that he died during the massacre, although there is evidence from census records and a draft card from World War II that show he was still living in Tulsa in the 1930s and 1940s.
Though it’s unclear if there was any truth in the varying stories, Taylor’s fierce determination to defend his neighborhood no doubt made an impact on the survivors of the massacre. He eventually moved to Arizona, where he remarried a minister. According to his death certificate from 1973, he died in Phoenix as a minister himself.
The white rioters were large in numbers, but some white people did try to help Black Tulsans that day. Several Black people lived with their white employers, who knew what was happening and didn’t want them to be harmed. LaVerne Cooksey Davis, who worked as a live-in housekeeper for a white doctor, remembered those early-morning hours clearly: “I had gone to bed and after midnight, I got a telephone call from the doctor who was still downtown. . . . He told me not to go into Little Africa. . . . I thought that was strange for him to tell me that. I wouldn’t have been going into North Tulsa at that late hour anyway,” she said. “Well, later on the doctor called me again, and this time he was more urgent in telling me not to go into Little Africa. He said, ‘Hell has broken out in Little Africa. Don’t go down there!’”
Some of the Black people who worked in white homes still lived in Greenwood, and so they fled to the south side of the railroad tracks when the violence began to seek out safety in those homes. While plenty of domestic workers were rounded up at gunpoint by the white rioters and taken downtown, others were protected by their white employers, who hid them or straight up refused to let the rioters kidnap them.
White Tulsan Mary Jo Erhardt hid a Black porter named Jack who worked at the YWCA Building on Fifth Street and Cheyenne Avenue, where she lived. She pushed him into the walk-in refrigerator and remembered, “Hardly had I hidden him behind the beef carcasses and returned to the hall door when a loud pounding at the service entrance drew me there.” Three “very rough-looking middle-aged white men” were standing on the stoop, trying to get at the porter.
“I was so angry I could have torn those ruffians apart,” she said. “Three armed white men chasing one lone, harmless Negro. I cannot recall in all my life feeling hatred toward any person, until then.” Erhardt told them, “I’m not letting anybody in here!” And she didn’t, ultimately saving Jack’s life.
Maria Morales Gutierrez, a Mexican immigrant, is another hero from that day, saving two young Black children from airplanes swooping down on them in the street. She was later confronted by armed white men, who told her to give up the small children, but she said no, and as her daughter Gloria Lough later remembered, “Somehow or other, they didn’t shoot her.” Because of Gutierrez, the children were not harmed.
And a Jewish family, the Zarrows, who owned a grocery store at 1427 East Sixth Street, also acted selflessly that day. Henry Zarrow, who was a child at the time, said, “I remember we hid people in our basement. My mother hid some of the little kids under her skirts.”
The Oklahoma National Guard finally arrived in Tulsa by train, at about 9:15 a.m. But the damage was already done. The Greenwood District had been severely burned, white people were still looting the homes and businesses they hadn’t yet torched, and dozens of people, both Black and white, were dead or injured. The Black survivors had either successfully made it outside of Tulsa to rural areas, or had been imprisoned at one of the internment centers at Convention Hall on Brady Street, the fairgrounds at Twenty-First Street and Yale Avenue, or McNulty Park’s baseball field at Tenth Street and Elgin Avenue. People who thought it was safe to come out of hiding were quickly rounded up, as well.
The state troops finally declared martial law at 11:29 a.m. and began disarming white people and forcing them out of the Greenwood District. Like the local National Guard, the state troops were all white, but according to witness Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish: “They used no partiality in quieting the disorder.” However, she added, “It is the general belief that if they had reached the scene sooner, many lives and valuable property would have been saved.” The state troops were joined by guardsmen from other parts of Oklahoma that day, and shortly thereafter they were able to clear all the white rioters from the streets. The troops instituted a curfew in Tulsa, mandating all businesses to close by 6:00 p.m., and ordering everyone except military, local authorities, relief workers, and physicians to stay in their homes after 7:00 p.m.
At 8:00 p.m. on June 1, the Tulsa Race Massacre was officially over.
In all this commotion, my grandmother didn’t know where I was. I was missing from her for two days and she was so worried. She was just sick with grief. She thought I had been killed. A few days after the riot, blacks were released from detention and most were reunited with their families. But some people were not reunited. Some were never heard of again, like the [family] who took me to safety in their wagon pulled by the two mules. My grandparents tried and tried to locate them after the riot, and when I grew older, I tried to locate them, but they were never heard of again. I wonder if they were buried in some secret place.
—Simon R. Richardson,
Tulsa Race Massacre survivor
6
The Aftermath
What might have felt like a nightmare to Black survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre was, unfortunately, a horrific reality. And once the smoke cleared, things didn’t look any better.
Forced into internment centers after their homes and businesses were destroyed, Black Tulsans were refugees in their own town. The detainees had first been marched to Convention Hall on Brady Street, but after that building filled to capacity, the rioters began using other locations, including the fairgrounds and the minor league baseball stadium at McNulty Park. The National Guard also took part, delivering Black Tulsans who had made it to the countryside or who’d hidden out at Golden Gate Park to the internment camps.
James T. West, an educator at Booker T. Washington High School, remembered that “people were herded in like cattle” to Convention Hall, saying, “The sick and wounded were dumped in front of the building and remained without attention for hours.” The Black residents, who had been forced to walk to the internment centers—many of them at gunpoint, with their hands in the air like prisoners—were further humiliated and abused when some white rioters stole whatever items they’d managed to bring with them before their homes were burned to the ground.
Black Tulsans walking in downtown Tulsa on the morning of June 1, 1921
Some Black people were lucky enough to escape the camps altogether, heading to nearby towns such as Claremore and Bartlesville. Others made their way to Missouri, where they were safe in Kansas City. And others left town without a trace, never to be heard from again.
Black Birds in the Sky Page 11