15
“Black Wall Street” Rises
In 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois, then an upstart scholar and activist, organized a summit of black leaders near Niagara Falls. He was backed by Alonzo Herndon, a former slave from Georgia who was now the owner of the country’s largest black insurance company, Atlanta Life Insurance.* In a hotel room in Fort Erie, Ontario, more than two dozen attendees huddled together and laid out a plan for a movement that countered the overtly conciliatory politics of Booker T. Washington with a call for farm ownership, good jobs, and self-defense from lynching.
As a debate was beginning over the course of black America’s future in 1905, an accidental discovery provided an opportunity for many African Americans to escape the horrors of lynching and obtain better wages. One afternoon oil was found on a farm owned by a family of Creek Indians just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. The gusher and the subsequent discovery of other oil deposits in Tulsa created an oil boom in the city. More than a hundred oil companies were set up in Tulsa in response to the discovery. The oil barons and chambers of commerce sent out boosters on trains and traveling publicity teams with bands, Indians in full headgear, and cowboys, including the young Will Rogers, to recruit people to come to Tulsa to work in its oil fields, refineries, and shops to hopefully turn it into a boomtown.
Brown faces were among the first to show up in Tulsa after oil was discovered. When the African Americans arrived, the town was a small village with dirt streets, dotted with tanneries. There were butchers’ shops with warm animal carcasses hanging in the windows, mason shops, and a few homes, small churches, and a school in wood-framed buildings. The first years in Tulsa were difficult. The houses had no indoor plumbing system, and the town was hot and humid in the summer months. On hot nights, families often slept on mattresses outside their homes, where they were feasted on by mosquitoes and flies. Outlaws on the backs of horses, wearing cowboy hats, who had been in the city since the end of the war, periodically rode into town to terrorize its new residents, shooting out the windows of homes and churches just for the thrill of it and holding up shops and banks.
Nonetheless, wagons filled to the brim with African Americans, sharecroppers from the South on foot carrying carpetbags, and people on the backs of mules continued to arrive in Tulsa. African Americans from the Deep South flocked to Oklahoma as lynchings, terror, and race crimes worsened in the southern states. They hoped that across the Mississippi they would find a good job in the boomtown. But even in comparatively progressive Oklahoma, they couldn’t totally escape racism. The high-paying jobs in the oil fields were off-limits to blacks. Nonetheless, they sent word back home that Tulsa was integrated, safe, and there was plenty of work, even with the prohibition on hiring blacks for oil jobs. Boosters recruited African Americans to Oklahoma, promising them work and security. The immigrants from the South earned the nickname “Exodusters” as they set out for Oklahoma, where they hoped they could, at last, find the Promised Land.
Blacks took jobs in town, working side by side with whites. They worked in the homes of whites as domestics, as well as opened businesses, supervising both black and white employees. In the city’s early days, as the spirit of boosterism and unity muted racial tensions, blacks and whites sometimes lived next door to one another, ate at the same restaurants, and allowed their children to play together, as they worked to build the “Magic City,” as they liked to call it. Locals labeled the good feelings shared by blacks, whites, Jews, and Indians in early Tulsa “the Tulsa Spirit.” African Americans in Tulsa thought the good feelings would last, believing that whites in the city were too preoccupied making money in the oil boom to erect a social racial caste system.
Ottowa W. Gurley took notice of the oil boom in Tulsa from his home in Perry. Soon after the boom began, he sold his land in Perry and moved to Tulsa with his wife, Emma. He was now thirty-five years old and saw an economic opportunity in Tulsa’s multiracial population boom. In Tulsa he bought a 40-acre tract of land north of the train station and built a grocery store on a dirt road in the middle of the undeveloped swath of land that sat north of the train tracks that ran across the city. He also forged an informal partnership with another black businessman named John the Baptist Stradford. Stradford was tall and sinewy, with a prominent square jaw and piercing black eyes. Both men, with their families’ roots in enslavement, shared a distrust of white people and went by their initials, OW and JB respectively, instead of their first names. It was the custom in the South that men were addressed by their title or surname and boys by their first name. Black adult males were frequently called by their first names by white men as a form of emasculation.
OW was a subscriber to the philosophies of Booker T. Washington, while JB was a follower of the more radical W. E. B. Du Bois. Nonetheless, both believed that the racial harmony in Tulsa was temporary, and the two men began to develop an all-black district in the unincorporated stretch of land north of Tulsa’s train station. They subdivided the plots they owned in uptown Tulsa on the north side of a set of railroad tracks into housing and retail lots, alleys and streets that they made available only to other African Americans fleeing the lynchings and terror of the South for the economic opportunity of Tulsa’s oil boom. On a long street near the train tracks made of dry dirt and dust Gurley built boardinghouses in square two-story brick structures near his grocery store, naming the street Greenwood Avenue, after the town in Mississippi from which many of his first residents hailed. There he also built a colored school and an African Methodist Episcopal Church. Soon the entire north side of Tulsa was referred to as Greenwood.
Gurley also built three brick apartment buildings as well as five detached homes, which he rented out to blacks. His crowning project was the Gurley Hotel on Greenwood Avenue, which was valued at $55,000 and rivaled the best white hotels in Tulsa. OW and JB both became rich as the oil industry boomed on in Tulsa and hundreds of African Americans emigrated to Greenwood. In 1914, the local black newspaper, the Muskogee Scimitar, reported Gurley’s net worth to be as much as $150,000 ($3.6 million). He used his wealth to help start a black Masonic lodge in Greenwood and an employment agency, and he contributed to efforts to push back against black voter suppression in the state. Gurley was made a sheriff’s deputy by the city of Tulsa and charged with policing the black population in Greenwood. Gurley’s wealth and coziness with the white establishment in Tulsa created resentment of him among many black members of society, who saw him as having too much power in Greenwood. Many saw Gurley as an Uncle Tom. In the Tulsa Star, which was operated by a militant black columnist and publisher named A. J. Smitherman, Gurley was pejoratively referred to as the “king” of “little Africa.”
Following behind OW and JB, white developers began to buy up plots of land north of the railroad tracks and sell them to blacks. By 1905, the district had attracted a black doctor and a black dentist, who each established practices there. A second school, a newspaper, a Baptist church, and a hardware store were also built. Gurley and Stradford’s vision of an all-black district was taking shape. At the same time, informal segregation was occurring in Tulsa as blacks converged to the north of the tracks and whites to the south.
In the morning, dozens of Greenwood residents walked across the train tracks to domestic jobs in Tulsa; the remainder stayed behind, working at the new black businesses that were being developed in Greenwood. Alongside the professional businesses were juke joints, saloons, and gambling houses. Their black proprietors grew rich in Greenwood catering to white men’s vices.
When the Oklahoma territory achieved statehood in 1907 and segregationist Democrats, led by the white supremacist Bill “Alfalfa” Murray, took control of all levels of government, they passed laws against interracial marriage and prohibited blacks from working at high-wage jobs. In 1910, one of the first grandfather clauses preventing blacks from voting was passed. As OW and JB watched the state, led by Alfalfa Bill, who was now Speaker of the state house of representatives, enact Jim Crow laws, they knew they had been right all along not to rely on the Tulsa Spirit.
When blacks moved to Tulsa, they invariably ended up in Greenwood. The district swelled northward, with Gurley and Stradford buying up more land to expand its boundaries. As it grew, the streets filled with doctors’ offices, banks, funeral homes, saloons, clubs, and beauty salons. In 1909, Greenwood was annexed by the town of Tulsa, on the other side of the train tracks.
Black farming communities and black districts such as Greenwood existed across the country. In Atlanta, Alonzo Herndon helped found the Sweet Auburn District, an enclave of black politicians, professors, and deans from Spelman and Atlanta universities, and preachers such as Martin Luther King Sr. Tulsa was, however, different from places such as Memphis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, St. Louis, and Chicago; Greenwood was an affluent black enclave in a white city where blacks controlled no political institutions and could rely only on one another to protect themselves from racial hostility. Across the tracks, resentment simmered. There were talks of attacks on Greenwood. Literature was distributed declaring that there had been rapes of white women by black men. Blacks were also intimidated at voting polls. Blacks in Tulsa responded with public protests, raising racial tensions to a boiling point.
Greenwood’s population more than quadrupled from 1,959 to 8,000 under Gurley’s watch, as African Americans gravitated to the black town, drawn by its promise and prosperity. Greenwood’s growth was a source of frustration and paranoia for local whites, as Tulsa’s percentage of blacks ticked up from 10 percent to 12 percent and Greenwood’s economic prowess grew. Black migrants continued to stream in, and some whites feared they would eventually take over the entire town of Tulsa.
Their fear was perhaps fueled by the militancy of Greenwood’s black constituents. Greenwood was equal parts black mecca and Wild West. Both men and women frequently carried pistols with them, and disputes were often settled by street brawls and shootouts. Believing they had left hegemony behind in the South, Greenwood’s residents had little tolerance for racial violence. They were quick to respond to attacks or threats from whites with punches or bullets. In one such instance in 1909, J. B. Stradford was walking along Greenwood Avenue when a white deliveryman made a pejorative remark about his dark skin. Stradford jumped on the man and threw him to the ground. He then straddled him and beat him until his face was covered with blood. A group of black men came running up and pulled him off. “If you kill him, they’ll mob you,” one said. Stradford was charged for the beating but hired an attorney and was acquitted. Later, Stradford was kicked off a train in Oklahoma for riding in the first-class car, having purchased a first-class ticket. He was asked to move to the colored car but refused. He sued in an effort to desegregate Tulsa’s train cars but lost in court, to the chagrin of Greenwood’s residents. A few months after Stradford’s assault case, news of the death of black millionaire Robert Reed Church reached Tulsa; blacks who had known him or known of him mourned the death of the titan. Gurley, with his growing wealth and power, was a logical successor to Church as the South’s most powerful black man, but Gurley’s interests were local, as he was chiefly concerned with his own fortunes, as well as Greenwood’s.
In Oklahoma, the forces of segregation were gaining strength. Housing segregation was legalized, banning blacks from living in white neighborhoods. The segregation of Tulsa, ironically, strengthened Greenwood’s black business district. The dollars earned by Greenwood’s black professionals as well as the black domestics who made money on the white side of town seemed never to leave Greenwood. Merchants boasted that a black dollar circulated through the black community twenty-six times before it left. As Jim Crow laws were passed throughout the country, the economic effects experienced in Greenwood were replicated, as black communities became economically independent and black merchants and businesses marketed to a captive and loyal market.
Greenwood was thriving as segregation spread across the state and the country. On Thursday nights, Greenwood was the place to be for men and women of color, as well as whites, who would slip across the train tracks without being seen by their neighbors. On Thursdays and Sundays, domestics had the day off, and on Thursday nights they came together to party late into the evening. The cooks, butlers, chauffeurs, and laundresses who worked in the white section of Tulsa took to the streets of Greenwood to dance. The dingy roads, which the white politicians in city hall neglected to pave or light, came alive as vendors lined the sidewalks with stands that offered candy, peaches, and watermelons. Men dressed in navy blue and black suits with off-white shirts and gold pocket watches, and women in silk dresses that hugged their midsections and hips, flowed into the streets as the sun went down. There was no music, no band, just the sound of people’s feet sliding on the dirt roads. Together they moved to their own internal rhythm, hollering, shaking, swirling down the streets in a communal strut like the second line of a New Orleans parade. “It was like a pantomime, people just moving up and down,” remembered the historian John Hope Franklin, who grew up in Greenwood. “They were going in and out of restaurants and they were just there to be seen. They were dressed in their finest, and they looked beautiful to me.”
Greenwood was not the richest black town in the United States, not even close. Annie Malone’s industrializing St. Louis, Bob Church’s blues-filled Memphis, and Alonzo Herndon’s Atlanta, filled with black colleges and businesses, all had a much larger black professional class than Greenwood did. What made Greenwood special was that it was a place a sharecropper, an ordinary person, could go to and have a respectable life, find decent-paying work, and hope for a better life for his children. With oilmen relocating to Tulsa, the resulting high demand for domestics enabled blacks to attain unheard-of wages. Maids earned $20 to $25 ($500 to $625) a week; chauffeurs earned $15 ($375); gardeners made $20 ($500); janitors, shoe shiners, and porters earned around $10 ($250). Domestics made up almost two-thirds of Greenwood’s population, the remainder being professionals and business owners, whom the maids and chauffeurs hoped their children could imitate one day. The children of Greenwood’s professionals attended Columbia Law School, Oberlin College, the Hampton Institute, the Tuskegee Institute, Spelman College, and Atlanta University. Greenwood’s culture prided itself on education; the area had one of the lowest black illiteracy rates in the country and a high school graduation rate above 50 percent. This was unheard-of in other areas of the country. Tulsa was indeed a Magic City for African Americans.
THE STORIES OF GREENWOOD’S PROSPERITY BECAME LEGEND IN black America. Annie Malone set up an office to sell her hair products in the enclave and it became known as one of the country’s most economically stable black districts. Booker T. Washington gave Greenwood a new name, “Negro Wall Street” (which later became “Black Wall Street”).
AS GREENWOOD GREW PROSPEROUS, GURLEY, ITS ARCHITECT AND LAWMAN, continued to be accused of being too moderate and racially conciliatory. That changed for a night when he had an encounter with three white men in Tulsa. That cool evening in the winter of 1916, he was forced to confront the race problem when it arrived at his doorstep. Three white men entered the Gurley hotel and encountered O. W. Gurley’s wife, Emma, on the second floor of the hotel. “We’re looking for good time girls,” one of the men told Emma. Moments later, OW arrived to find the men harassing his wife. “What is your business here?” Gurley asked them. The men didn’t answer, and Emma spoke up and told OW what the men had said. Gurley rushed at the men and knocked all three of them to the ground with a series of punches. The men climbed to their feet and ran toward the stairs to escape but were sent tumbling down them by kicks from OW as he gave chase. At the bottom of the stairs Gurley tried to get the men to stand and fight, but instead they bolted for the exit and ran away into the night. Beating three white men made Gurley a hero in Greenwood, but it begged the question: if the racial conservative Gurley had resorted to using violence against whites, was there any hope for lasting peace between Greenwood and white Tulsa?