I
need you to imagine for a moment a scenario. The time period is shortly
after World War I. The place is an unspecified city, which is
segregated by law. There comes a time when tensions grow, and violence
sparks. There is a two-day event which occurs–without much warning–and
it destroys entire portions of the city. The destruction of specific
neighborhoods, and the shops and homes owned by the occupants of these
neighborhoods were looted and destroyed. The destruction left behind
damages costing nearly twenty-seven million dollars–current value with
inflation. [1] The members of the community were run out, shot, or
wrangled up like cattle and placed in interment camps.
If I stopped here–and assuming the title didn’t clue you in–there is a likely chance that you would think that I am referring to Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht is a two-day pogrom which
occurred in Nazi Germany and occupied Austria. This event was
orchestrated to drive out Jews from the area, to allow the Jewish
properties to be looted and sold to support the German army, and to
strike fear into the Jews all throughout Europe.
What
you may not know is that years before this, America had their own
“Kristallnacht.” The year was 1921, and the place was Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was Memorial Day, and boy and girl were involved in what some people
believed could have been a lover’s quarrel, others believed the event
was as innocent as boy tripping and stumbling into girl, and there were
those that believed that boy tried to rape the girl.
The
real issue is that girl was white, and boy was black. The city had lots
of racial tension, and due to Jim Crow laws, the city was racially
segregated. The city’s ordinance stated that whites nor blacks could
live on any block where three-fourths or more of the residents were of
the other race. The entire story of the boy’s activities and the city’s
protection over the next day goes back and forth. They are rumors
quickly spreading of lynching mobs, and within hours, mobs did ascend on
the boy. The residents of “black Wall Street” gathered up all available
weapons, and armed to the teeth, headed to defend him.
Initially,
the boy in question, Dick Rowland, was arrested and placed in the main
jail. When the Sheriff’s Office started to receive calls threatening the
life of Rowland, he was moved to a more secure jail over the
courthouse. Sensationalist newspaper headlines quickly lit a fire
underneath both blacks and whites. “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an
Elevator” and “To Lynch Negro Tonight” were popular headlines of the
day.
White
mobs arrived at the courthouse demanding that Rowland be turned over to
them. The sheriff, Sheriff McCullough, stood by what was right and had
his deputies strategically placed in the courthouse, determined to
protect Dick Rowland.
An
important factor to remember about the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is that
it was full of men that had just come home from war. These men, both
black and white, were trained in combat and had access to weapons. A
small group of black men, roughly thirty men in size and all former WW I
veterans, gathered up their rifles and shotguns. These men were
determined to protect Rowland and prevent a lynching. Upon arriving to
Rowland’s aid, they were sent away by Sheriff McCullough. He assured
them of the boy’s safety, and the men went home. The one-thousand whites
congregated around the courthouse saw these black men arrive with
weapons and responded in kind. The whites saw this small band of blacks
as a threat and assumed the worst–a Negro uprising!
So what did they do?
You
guessed it…the white men ran home and got their guns. Within a couple
of hours, the lynch mob had doubled. Now more than two-thousand whites,
armed with weapons, were requesting Rowland’s head.
Check back tomorrow when I cover the last event that sparked a riot that has been described as:
…perhaps the costliest incident of racial violence in American history. At the same time, it is perhaps the most marginalized, being almost forgotten until this decade. [2]
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