AUTHOR’S NOTE

I was oblivious to Tulsa’s historic nightmare until that day in the winter of 2000 when Julie Heaberlin, my editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, stopped by my desk in the Features Department. It was then that Julie handed me a copy of a short wire-service story about the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which had been created a few years before to study a particularly deadly racial outbreak in 1921. As many as three hundred people had been killed in the catastrophe, the wire story said, most of the victims black. A uniquely prosperous community of African Americans, called Greenwood—thirty-five square blocks and literally thousands of homes, businesses, churches, and schools—had been obliterated by a white mob in Tulsa that numbered in the thousands.

When I read the story, my reaction was the same as my editor’s had been. How could we not have known about such a thing? If the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was as horrible as the wire story seemed to suggest, surely it deserved a place among the watershed moments in American racial history, alongside events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Brown v. The Board of Education; Little Rock; the March to Selma, and Rosa Parks’ historic resolve. Instead, the riot had never been mentioned in any history book I had ever read.

Julie dispatched me to Tulsa a few days later. There I interviewed a handful of elderly African Americans, people who remembered the terrible hours of June 1, 1921, when the whites swarmed over the railroad tracks separating white Tulsa from black. On that first trip I also met Oklahoma State Representative Don Ross, a veteran African American legislator who had grown up in Greenwood, and talked by telephone with a white historian named Scott Ellsworth, a Tulsa native who, like Ross, had devoted much of his life to restoring the Tulsa catastrophe to its proper place in history. My own article ran in the Star-Telegram on January 30, 2000, beneath the headline TULSA’S TERRIBLE SECRET. The dozens of Star-Telegram readers who called or wrote afterward, both black and white, young and old, had much the same reaction as my editor and myself. How could we not have known?

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In important respects, I was an unlikely candidate for such an assignment. I was born and raised in a small farming community in the north of Minnesota, where the only people of color were the Hispanic migrants who came up from Texas each summer to work in the sugar-beet fields. By and large, through the first twenty years of my life, television was the only place I saw a black face. Racial issues were wholly irrelevant to me then, and continued to be even after newspaper work took me to Texas, where I lived and worked for the first time with people from other cultural backgrounds. In retrospect, my lack of curiosity about those people and their experience in America was stunning. I will never forget my first night in Tulsa, having dinner with Don Ross in a quiet Chinese restaurant, and the look on his face as I asked questions such as, “What was it like for blacks after the Civil War?”

Ross was stunned at first, then angry. “How can you not know these things?” he demanded. Then, his voice rising to the point that others in the restaurant looked uncomfortably over at our table, he said, “And you’re one of the educated whites. If we can’t count on you to understand, who can we count on?”

For the rest of that night and for weeks thereafter, Ross called me “ignorant white boy.” I am pleased to say that Ross and I are good friends today. When my newspaper article appeared, he went so far as to dub me “an honorary Negro.” He has since retracted such blasphemy and in his more charitable moments, now calls me a “moderate” where racial issues are concerned. I’m not kidding myself, either. I am still ignorant. But after my recent journey into the darker corners of our past, one that began with my newspaper story and has continued with the research and writing of this book, I’m not nearly as ignorant as before. I will never be able to look at a black person the same way again. I think I’m beginning to understand.

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Until that night with Don Ross, I had never heard of historian John Hope Franklin (a native of Tulsa, as it turned out) or his book From Slavery to Freedom (McGraw Hill, 1994). At Ross’s suggestion, Franklin’s book became the launching point for my crash course into black history, and I’m now of the opinion that it should be taught in every American high school. Until reading Franklin’s book, I was only vaguely aware of the horrors of slavery. I was almost completely ignorant of the terror and hardship that came with emancipation—the murderous rides of the original Ku Klux Klan; the reign of Jim Crow; thousands of lynchings; racial hatreds that were not only tolerated, but widely condoned and endorsed at the highest levels of our society by people and institutions in the North and South alike; the revival of the KKK in the 1920s, and so on.

Not long into my research, I realized that what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was scarcely an isolated event. It might have been the worst incident of its kind in our history, but almost every month, American newspapers of that time carried new accounts of racial bloodshed in another town or city, new atrocities perpetrated against Negroes by mobs of whites. Rather than an exception, I learned, what happened in Tulsa was a metaphor for that period of our history, those particularly ugly years that followed World War I, and for the black experience in America in the century after the Civil War.

In addition to From Slavery to Freedom, several other books were especially helpful in my quest to understand that history and to place the burning of Greenwood in its proper context. Chief among them were Wyn Craig Wade’s The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Simon and Schuster, 1987); Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s, by Frederick Lewis Allen (Harper and Row, 1957); Joseph Cartwright’s The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (University of Tennessee Press, 1976); and The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I, by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri (Temple University Press, 1974). I also relied heavily on independent scholar Paul Lee, who is as knowledgeable and passionate about these matters as any individual I’ve encountered. I never failed to be inspired by our long telephone conversations, which often stretched far into the night.

Most of my research, obviously, focused on a particular moment in that wretched history, and my debt to those who helped me understand what happened in Tulsa cannot be overstated. Eddie Faye Gates, a member of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, took it upon herself to befriend many of the more than one hundred survivors of the burning that the Commission identified after being created by the State Legislature in 1997. Gates was also my tireless intermediary with those elderly people, both blacks and whites, who were burdened with their awful memories. Nonetheless, in every instance, I found the black survivors and white witnesses to be charming, gracious, and wholly accommodating. My profound gratitude goes out to black survivors George Monroe, Otis Clark, Eldoris Ector McCondichie, Veneice Sims, and Wilhelmina Guess Howell, and to white witnesses Lee Cisco, Clyde Eddy, Philip Rhees, Richard Gary, and Margaret Anderson.

From our first telephone conversation, historian Scott Ellsworth has never been anything but generous with his time and accumulated wisdom. Ellsworth is chief among the handful of individuals, many of them white, whose courage and doggedness have helped wrest the burning of Greenwood from the shadows of history, and thus made this book possible.

Ellsworth’s book Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (LSU Press, 1982) was the first scholarly examination of the event ever published, and an essential road map in my own attempts to reconstruct what had happened. Equally valuable were taped recordings of Ellsworth’s interviews, conducted more than twenty years ago, with riot survivors who were teenagers or young adults at the time. In almost every instance, those individuals are deceased. Their preserved recollections now reside on tape in the Special Collections Department of the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library, where I spent several fruitful days following in Ellsworth’s footsteps, eavesdropping on his conversations with survivors like Bill Williams, Seymour Williams, and Robert Fairchild. Also among the Ellsworth tapes was Wilhelmina Guess Howell’s 1989 address to a Tulsa community group, a speech that included her own riveting account of the burning, and a tour through her remarkable family history, dating to the Civil War.

It is my great privilege to congratulate Ruth Sigler Avery for her attempts to discern and disseminate the truth about Greenwood’s obliteration. In the spring of 1921, she was a little girl growing up in Tulsa in a wealthy white family. But she was old enough to be traumatized by what happened, and decades later, her lingering outrage inspired her to produce Fear, The Fifth Horseman: A Documentary and Anthology on the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. Included in that unpublished work are transcripts of more than fifteen interviews that Avery conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s with riot survivors, white witnesses, and a Klansman, all of whom are now dead. Avery’s work informs this book more than any other single source, having allowed me a glimpse into the life of Tulsa shoeshine-boy Dick Rowland, an insight into the prevailing attitudes of both whites and blacks, and having provided me with hitherto unknown details of the mind-numbing cruelty and horror.

I am similarly grateful to Ed Wheeler, whose 1971 magazine article broke Tulsa’s half-century of silence where the burning was concerned. Wheeler was equally generous with his time and recollections.

My research went on to include dozens of conversations with descendants of Greenwood residents, most notably Jack Adams and his brother Don, and Obera Mann Smith, and J. D. Mann, who shared family stories that had been passed down for generations, stories so crucial to my understanding of some of this book’s most prominent characters. My reporting also included an exhaustive review of the Tulsa newspapers of that time, as well as publications such as The New York Times and other major national newspapers and periodicals that covered the burning in the days and weeks after it happened. A graduate-school thesis written about the burning by Loren Gill in the 1940s was similarly valuable; as were several magazine articles; National Guard duty reports of that time; hundreds of pages of court transcripts and legal depositions, and the final report of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which was presented to Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating and the Oklahoma Legislature on February 28, 2001.

The story that follows synthesizes what I learned over the course of a year from hundreds of sources. In most cases, descriptions and dialogue that appear in the book are taken directly from the recollections of survivors and witnesses, from newspaper accounts, or legal documents. In some cases, I have taken the license of approximating dialogue for the purpose of maintaining the narrative. These instances are totally consistent with the character of the people involved as my research revealed them to be, and wholly true to the events as they unfolded in 1921.

For me, work on this book has been a life-changing odyssey. Early in the process, I began to suspect that a crucial piece remained missing from America’s long attempts at racial reconciliation. Too many in this country remained as ignorant as I was. Too many were just as oblivious to some of the darkest moments in our history, a legacy of which Tulsa is both a tragic example and a shameful metaphor. How can we heal when we don’t know what we’re healing from? I hope this book contributes in some small way toward that broader understanding. Such is the spirit in which it is written.

—TIM MADIGAN

March 2001

Arlington, Texas