CHAPTER 12

ASSIGNMENT OF A LIFETIME

Faith Heironymous never cared for baseball, so in her short time in Tulsa, she had never actually attended a game at McNulty Park. But she frequently walked or rode her bicycle past the stadium at Tenth Street and Elgin Avenue, and when she did, she was always pleased by the well-tended patch of green in the heart of the city; by the sight of eager young men in their baggy gray uniforms dotting the playing field, pounding their gloves and chattering expectantly; by the low hum of the crowds in the grandstand; by the smell of popcorn and cooking onions.

Which is probably why the sight of McNulty Park on that hot afternoon stunned her as it did, a contrast that amazed her to the point that the young newspaper reporter gawked at the scene for several minutes before remembering to take the pencil and notepad from her purse and start writing down some notes. The shouts of the National Guard soldiers were what finally jolted her back to her senses.

“Get back!” the soldiers shouted to the white curiosity-seekers crowded along the ballpark’s outer fence like patrons at a popular zoo. “Please get back!”

The whites dutifully retreated because the soldiers carried drawn pistols and had bayonets attached to their rifles. Another group of Negroes arrived just then on the back of a truck, guarded by armed white civilians, and shuffled into the park with their hands above their heads as the white crowd parted to let them through. And Faith Heironymous finally went to work.

This was her big chance, after all. Tragedy translated into opportunity for young reporters like her—the greater the heartbreak, the greater the occasion for journalistic glory. So she had scarcely believed her good fortune when she reported for work at the Tulsa World on the morning of June 1, 1921. Coverage of the previous night’s chaos downtown, and of the momentous battles and burnings in Greenwood that followed, had been reserved for the male reporters at the city’s largest newspaper. But now the fighting was over, Greenwood was completely burned out, and the paper needed a front-page piece to tug at the heartstrings, a story to support the outrage of World publisher Eugene Lorton, whose editorial for June 2 would compare Tulsa’s marauding whites with the German soldiers in Belgium.

“Members of the superior race,” Lorton wrote of the burning, “boastful of the fact, permitted themselves to degenerate into murderers and vandals; permitted themselves to deal their home community the foulest blow it has ever received in history.”

So the editors looked around the newsroom and picked Faith Heironymous. If anyone could capture the pathos of the moment, it was Faith. She was a woman, after all, thus sure to be more susceptible to the plight of thousands of homeless Negroes. She was also openly ambitious, primed for such an assignment, a woman in her late twenties who had come to Tulsa from the small paper in Enid, Oklahoma, the year before, desperate for the grittier journalistic challenges the larger city could provide. In the time since she’d been hired, Faith had demonstrated a nice knack for turning phrases, but her reporting had been limited for the most part to society news. That was about to change.

The city editor called Faith into his office late in the morning for a brief pep talk, said something about seizing the moment, about her story being part of history, about the necessity of capturing the small details that would make her writing come alive. Her heart pounded with a combination of anxiety and excitement as she rushed out of the newsroom. On the short streetcar ride south, Faith checked her purse three times to make sure she had sharpened her pencils, promising herself that she would do as her editor instructed—seize the moment, make her journalistic name. To think that she might never have to cover another debutante ball again. But then she jumped off the car a block from the ballpark and her resolve disappeared the minute McNulty Park came into focus, her youthful ambition melting away in an otherworldly sea of human misery.

*   *   *

Someone counted more than four thousand Negroes at McNulty Park that afternoon, three times more than had been interned at Convention Hall. Instead of eager young whites in baggy baseball uniforms that Faith had seen so many times before, thousands of Negro men and boys huddled in small groups on the diamond—one cluster on the pitcher’s mound, another around second base, another in the dirt around home plate. Some wore white shirts and bow ties and expensive hats, suit coats thrown over their shoulders. Others wore baggy overalls over denim shirts or stood without shirts or shoes, their dark skin glistening with sweat on an afternoon when the sun bore down through remnants of the smoke, boosting the afternoon temperature into the humid mid-nineties. Others lay dozing in the soft grass of the outfield. Women filled the shaded grandstand, sweating like the men, fanning themselves with straw hats, weeping, staring, trying to placate howling infants and confused toddlers, sliding over to make space on the wooden bleachers for refugees arriving on the latest trucks. Young children clutching tattered dolls wandered through the throng, wailing and calling loudly for mommas and papas they had not seen since the white onslaught began at daybreak.

White soldiers and Red Cross volunteers worked frantically, facing a challenge comparable to that of Jesus on the day of loaves and fishes. They hauled tub after tub of ice, water, lemonade, and coffee from trucks parked outside the gates, and vats of soup, and boxes of cheese, crackers, and sandwiches that were rushed to the front of the food line that stretched from the backstop behind home plate to the foul pole in the right-field corner.

Faith wandered through the mass of Negroes, trying to get her bearings, jotting down observations here and there, but eventually she felt embarrassed by her pencil and notepad. She wanted to reach out to the refugees herself, to help as the Red Cross volunteers were helping, at the same time feeling constrained by the necessity of journalistic detachment, the words of her city editor ringing in her head. Yet how could any person, ambitious young reporter or not, remain the least bit indifferent in such a place? The last of her emotional remove finally dissolved at the sight of one old woman seated on the steps of the dugout, a gray handkerchief tied around her weathered face. In her hand she held a ration of hot vegetable soup that was being doled out by the Red Cross, but the soup was ignored as she stared blankly toward the remaining wisps of white smoke in the sky, as if waiting for a message to appear there.

Faith couldn’t help herself. She sat down on the step next to the woman.

“Sister, why don’t you eat your soup?” she asked softly.

The old woman turned her attention from the sky and looked at Faith. Single tears trickled out from each hooded eyelid and slid down the old Negro woman’s face, tracing a crooked path through the dust on her skin.

“Oh, Lordy,” she moaned, rocking back and forth. “Me an old woman who’s worked so hard all her life, now everything gone. My house burned, my chairs burned, my chickens burned, my carrots and onions burned. Nothing I have but the clothes on my back. Oh, Lordy. That I should live to see such trouble come to me.”

A beautiful young woman stood nearby, and when she heard that lament, added one of her own, something about she and her husband saving for years to buy their place in Greenwood, and now it was gone, too, with everything else they owned but these rags they wore. Just then, her husband approached through the crowd, carrying half a loaf of bread.

“Here’s some bread, honey,” he said. “Can’t you eat it?”

The young woman angrily turned her back on him and crossed her arms in front of her chest, as if she blamed her husband for their predicament.

“Eat?” she asked. “And us paupers? I can’t eat!”

Faith rose from the side of the old woman, fighting the urge to drop her notepad and run, ashamed of having intruded on such despair. She felt dizzy as she walked away, but there was no escaping the evidence of the great evil that had descended upon Tulsa, a misery that closed in around her, swallowed her up, made her breathing difficult. A few yards down the grandstand, a Negro woman in a clean white maid’s uniform sat reading a Bible to a group of young children. The woman was one of the lucky ones—she lived in servants’ quarters with the whites on the south side—so she had come to McNulty Park to tend to the children of her burned-out friends and relatives. Next to her, a light-skinned woman cuddled a beautiful mulatto baby to her chest. The baby cooed and gurgled and happily kicked its little bare feet. The mother looked up at Faith and smiled.

“He don’t know what this is all about,” the woman said. “My husband and I left before daylight and we don’t know whether our home is standing yet or not. It doesn’t seem possible that this thing is happening in Tulsa, does it, sister?”

“No,” Faith said. “It doesn’t.”

Faith walked on for a few yards, then stopped to lean on the fence at the end of the grandstand. She noticed a group of shirtless Negro teenage boys throwing a football around on the outfield grass. With every passing minute, more whites drove up in limousines and long sedans, the men wearing crisp straw boaters and business suits, the women fine dresses and sunbonnets. They rushed from their cars into the park and began calling desperately at the top of their longs.

“Annie, are you here? Annie?”

Or—

“Luella? Where are you, Luella?”

Or—

“Aunt Lizzie? It’s me, Mrs. Thomas.”

Every so often, Negroes answered the summons, and the whites rushed to embrace them, and after the happy reunion, walked the baffled-looking blacks to a table near the entrance where some soldiers sat. There the whites signed papers promising to look after the refugees and to keep them out of trouble, then dragged them from the stadium as if worried the authorities would change their mind and insist that their Negroes stay behind at McNulty Park with the others.

*   *   *

Sometime in mid-afternoon, the soldier pointed at Bill Williams where the boy sat on a folding chair at Convention Hall and said, “Young fella, you follow me.” Bill first thought he would be taken outside and shot as punishment for helping his father defend Greenwood. His heart thundered as he finished a bite of cheese and crackers the Red Cross had been distributing, rose from the chair and followed the soldier through the defeated multitude that filled the hall. But the friendly demeanor of the soldier, a young man with bright red hair and freckles, put him at ease.

“Looks like you could use some fresh air,” the soldier said to Bill, which was certainly true, because the heat in the hall had grown more oppressive as the day wore on.

They passed through the front door and into the commotion outside, then walked toward a truck loaded with Negro men and boys; a few white men stood among them, holding shotguns. “Hop on, young fella,” the soldier said, smiling cheerfully. “You’re gonna get to play some ball.”

So Bill climbed onto the back of the truck, squeezing in next to the rest of the Negroes, and in a few minutes, the truck rumbled off down Boulder Avenue to the south, back through the sea of white faces that still lined the road. A man slumped next to Bill on the truck looked vaguely familiar, probably from nights at the confectionary. He seemed to recognize Bill, too.

“Guess there wasn’t no lynchin’ after all,” the man said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Bill said.

“Nope,” he said. “No lynchin’ at all. Some deputies snuck that Rowland boy out of jail and drove him outta town about eight this mornin’. That’s what I heard. So all this for nuthin’. That’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” Bill said.

The truck pulled up to the front gate of a baseball stadium, and the whites ordered the Negroes off and marched them inside the fence. If anything, Bill saw more colored folks here than he did at the hall. Negroes filled the grandstand and milled about everywhere on the field, forming a long line for food and water. Bill wandered over to the outfield and sat down by himself, leaning on the fence, closing his eyes against the glare of the hot sun.

“Well, look who’s here,” said a familiar voice, laughing. “It’s Bill Williams, the rich boy himself.”

Bill opened his eyes to see a classmate named Archie standing shirtless above him with a grin on his face, juggling a football from hand to hand. “Guess we got plenty of time to throw the ball around some?”

“Don’t really feel like playin’ right now,” Bill said.

“Well, suit yourself,” Archie said. “But you know what coach says about practice.”

In a few minutes, Archie had found two other boys to play with him, yelling and throwing the ball back and forth between them while stepping around the Negroes lying on the outfield grass. Bill watched them for a few minutes, then closed his eyes again, thinking of his mother and father and Posey, wondering where they had gone, or if they were still alive at all. A giant sob built in his chest and he swallowed hard several times to force it back, then opened his eyes to watch the boys throw the football, trying to put his mind on other things.

He sat there until evening, when he saw a familiar white face come heading toward him across the field.

“Come on, Mr. Bill,” said Henry Sowders, the Dreamland projectionist. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Bill followed Henry through the crowd to a table by the front gate, where Henry signed papers handed him by some soldiers. The soldiers gave Bill a piece of green paper and told him to keep it with him at all times, because if he didn’t, he would end up right back here with the others. Then Bill followed Henry out through the front gate.

“Those boys stole my car outside the Dreamland last night, Mr. Bill,” Henry said. “You up to walking a spell?”

They walked to Henry’s house. On the way, the projectionist said there had been no word about Bill’s parents. That night, Bill put on clean clothes belonging to Henry, and Henry’s wife fed him dinner and breakfast the next morning. Then Bill thanked the couple and walked back downtown, where he took a job washing dishes during the lunch rush because his pockets were empty. He was paid two dollars for the chore, and he left the restaurant without knowing what to do next. He decided he would try to walk to Greenwood, thinking he might find his parents there. Just then, as he turned the corner on Main Street, he almost bumped into his mother, who was on her way to the office of her white lawyer, hoping the attorney could help her find Bill. The sobs the boy had stifled for two days could be denied no longer. Loula Williams swept her son into her arms and he buried his head on her shoulder and cried loudly, white people averting their eyes as they stepped around them on the sidewalk. Loula Williams wept, too, patting her son’s head, telling him that both his father and Posey were safe, staying with some relatives in one of the houses that hadn’t burned. The theater and the confectionary were gone, true enough, but they were all alive, and wasn’t that the important thing, after all?

*   *   *

O. W. Gurley knew the Negroes watched him, the pitiful old man with a bandage on his hand, a torn and bloody white shirt with silver cufflinks, fancy trousers with a hole in the knee. He was the richest man in Greenwood. For years, Gurley had cultivated that image. But the rain falls on the rich and poor alike, doesn’t it. What good did Gurley’s riches do him now? That’s what those people thought when they watched him stumble from the medical area at McNulty Park, where doctors had patched up his hand. That’s what the Negroes thought as they watched Gurley wander aimlessly across the ballpark, keeping his eyes to the ground. The mighty had fallen that day. Just like everyone else.

Then, in front of the grandstand, he heard that glorious noise.

“My Lord, it’s Gurley!”

It was his wife’s voice. Gurley squinted against the shadows of the grandstand, and in a second he made out Emma, hurrying down the bleachers in his direction. She was alive after all, and right this moment, rushing through a gate onto the field and into her husband’s arms. She had fainted that morning on Archer Street. That’s all. There wasn’t a mark on her, thank the Lord.

“Gurley, what did they do to your hand?” Emma asked him after they had embraced for a long time.

“It’s just a scratch,” he said.

*   *   *

For a long while, Faith Heironymous was lost in the ocean of faces at McNulty Park, seeing all of them, but seeing none of them. Then the intensity of a slender black woman in a white dress that was soiled with dirt and ash snapped Faith from her stupor. The woman stood near the gate leading into the grandstand, turning her head from side to side, desperately scanning the imprisoned throng. Faith observed her from a distance, then was drawn in the woman’s direction, fumbling for words along the way.

“Excuse me,” Faith said. “Did you lose something?”

She regretted the question the second the words left her mouth, knowing how ridiculous it sounded under the circumstances.

“Lose something?” the woman asked, turning to look at Faith fiercely. “You ask me if I lost something? I done lost my home. I done lost my clothes excepting these here on my back. And my shoes is burned.” The woman held up one charred shoe as proof. “And I ain’t seen my husband since we left this morning with our house a-burning.”

The woman’s anger gave way to weeping, then to a loud wail. She dropped the charred shoe and wrung her hands. “It seems to me,” she said between sobs, “that nothing would matter no more if I could just see my husband.”

Faith approached and touched her shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

The woman suddenly stopped weeping and looked at Faith. “There is if you can find my husband,” she said. “Figure you can do that, young miss? Of course there’s nothing you can do. Get away from me, if you please.”

Faith backed away as the woman buried her head in her hands and again began to sob. Faith felt ill then, dizzy, her stomach tumbling. She thought she might vomit as she stepped over and through the dark bodies that were standing and lying and sitting on the ballpark grass. She grabbed the fence at the edge of the field to steady herself, then staggered toward the gate where she might escape from the misery and breathe again. A tiny old Negro lady sat on a cot just before the exit. She smiled as the reporter neared.

“Darlin’, you look pale as a clean sheet,” the old woman said. “Come sit here a spell.”

She slid over, making room for Faith on the cot. Faith was baffled by the act of kindness, but in her condition, she had no choice but to sit.

“Take some of this,” the old woman said, offering a tin cup half full of cold water.

Faith took a small sip and handed the cup back.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better.”

“Surely, darlin’,” the old woman said. “That sun getting to you?”

“No, ma’am,” Faith said. “Not the sun.”

“What then?”

“All this, I guess,” Faith said, looking out at the ballpark. “All these poor people.”

“It is a vision, ain’t it, child?” the old woman agreed.

“I don’t know how this could happen,” Faith said.

“How could it not happen?” the old woman asked.

Faith looked over at her tiny face, where the skin was stretched tight across her fine old bones. She guessed that the old woman probably weighed no more than eighty pounds. How could it not happen? They sat silently for a few minutes, watching the people, passing the cup of water back and forth for small sips. The woman asked Faith her name, and what was she doing out amongst all these colored folks. Faith told her how she had moved to Tulsa the year before to work for the newspaper, which explained her notepad. The old woman said that was nice. Her name was Easter Smith, because that was the day she was born, a long, long time ago, though everyone called her “Auntie.” Would Faith believe that Auntie would be ninety-seven years old in a few weeks? But she was still as fit as a young filly. In fact, she had hiked that morning from the home in Greenwood where she lived with her son and daughter, led along with a band of captured Negroes to Convention Hall. Then she was trucked to McNulty Park because the hall was full. The white men let her ride in front because she was so old. She hadn’t seen her son and daughter since the burning began, but she had faith in the Lord they would turn up eventually so they could go home and start putting things back together. Auntie was impatient for that to happen.

“Me to be all stowed up like this,” Auntie said, shaking her head. “At home, I packed water and did washin’, even though my son and daughter both fussed at me. They says, ‘Auntie, you’re too old to be workin’ this hard.’ But I can’t sit and fold my hands after all these years bein’ so busy and a good cook. I began cookin’ in my eleventh year. I cooked all the days I was a slave. In a hotel, I cooked some of the time, then after the War. I don’t cook in hotels no more.”

The old woman paused and drifted off in remembrance. Auntie was obviously saddened that she no longer cooked in hotels.

“I was born in Georgia,” she said after a minute. “Did I tell you that?”

“No, ma’am,” Faith said.

“I was born in Georgia, but my master, he lived in Arkansas,” she said. “He was a nasty old man. Sold my mama and two of my brothers to this other fella in Tennessee. But I did his cookin’ and his washin’ ’cause I was told to. I was a young woman when they fought that war to set us free. That was something, let me tell you, child. The master comes and says, ‘You niggers go on. You don’t belong to me no more. Go on before I shoot you.’ But I stayed there in Arkansas until my son come down here to Tulsa ’cause he heard about all these colored folks getting rich. So I came, too.”

The woman paused again, took another sip of water and offered the cup to Faith. “I seen lots of trouble,” Auntie said. “But in all my born days, I never seen a day like this.”

“Me either,” Faith said.

Auntie looked over at Faith. The old woman began to quiver with laughter, her tiny frame shaking.

“No, darlin’,” Auntie said finally. “I don’t suppose you have.”

Faith rose from the cot, took Auntie’s cup and stood in line to have it refilled, then returned it to her. Both Auntie’s kindness and her laughter convicted Faith that afternoon, burdened her with a shame that lingered inside her for the rest of her life. She wept on the streetcar ride back to the newsroom, but walked around the block a few times before entering the newspaper building to make sure that her eyes were not still red.

Her story, which appeared on the front page of the Tulsa World on June 2, 1921, would be remembered as one of the most skillfully written, most heartrending articles ever published by the paper. But it was years before Faith could read it again herself.

That same day, the World’s rival, the Tulsa Tribune, published a front-page article that was every bit as masterful, but a story whose tone could not have been more different. If the Heironymous account in the World gave voice to the shame that many whites in Tulsa felt over what had been perpetrated on Greenwood, the Tribune story reflected a sense of triumph shared by many other whites in the city. And though the Tribune article ran without a byline, there was little doubt about the identity of its author. The poetic cadence, the keen eye for detail, the lyrical flourishes, exceeded the command of the typical Tulsa newspaper reporter. This was the work of an experienced writer trained at one of the nation’s best journals. The article was most surely written by Tribune editor and publisher Richard Lloyd Jones himself.

Blacks Taken Into Custody Form Motley Parade to Ballpark

Tulsa, a city of ninety thousand people, witnessed this most unusual spectacle this morning when a motley procession of Negroes, on foot and in every conceivable kind of vehicle, those later being reserved mostly for women, wended its way over the city’s most prominent thoroughfares and main streets to the ballpark.… The men walked. As they passed the city’s most traveled streets, they held both hands high about their heads, their hats in one hand, a token of their submission to the white man’s authority.… They will return not to their homes they had on Tuesday afternoon, but to heaps of ashes, the angry white man’s reprisal for the wrong inflicted on them by the inferior race.

Two horse-drawn wagons, one a wobbly, non-descript affair on wheels drawn by a decrepit burro, were features of this strange procession. In the vehicles the occupants had evidently hastily piled all their earthy belongings. There were shabby worn trunks, boxes, articles of furniture, even young chickens. On the tailgate of one wagon there rode a dingy boy of seven or eight who surveyed the menacing guards and sidewalk throngs and tried vainly to figure out what it was all about. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp. Through the dusty streets the prisoners strode, ever under the watchful eye of the white man’s authority and the white man’s gun. Negro women, more brazen and unafraid than their men folk, tried at first to put a bold front on the entire affair, but as they ruefully gazed on the unfriendly street throngs, they seemed to sense it was a most serious epic in their lives, and most of the bravado had left them by the time they [reached] the ballpark.

Yes, the bravado had been squashed out of even the defiant women; Tulsa Negroes had been taught a lesson that they would never forget, a lesson for American Negroes everywhere; the events in Tulsa had convincingly affirmed the superior race—all of these developments were heralded in print by the paper of Lincoln devotee Richard Lloyd Jones, who wrote and otherwise directed the Tribune’s coverage of the historic episode, pausing from time to time for assignations in his room at the Tulsa Hotel with his assistant, Amy Comstock.

Little matter that from the moment the ashes began to cool, most authorities blamed the Tribune’s reckless and inflammatory coverage of Dick Rowland’s arrest for inciting the courthouse confrontation and the much larger tragedy that came of it. Within hours of arriving in Tulsa, General Charles Barrett of the National Guard concluded that the conflagration was caused by “an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl and a yellow journal.” In a World story published a few days after the burning, James Patton, Tulsa’s chief of detectives, said officers investigating Sarah Page’s accusations were doubtful that the case against Rowland would come to much.

“If the facts in the story as told to the police had only been printed, I do not think there would have been a riot what so ever,” Patton said.

In a front-page story a few days after the riot, the Tribune defiantly denied any role in the catastrophe. But clearly, the paper and its publisher were not chastened in the least. If anything, Jones’s racism became even more publicly virulent in the days immediately after the burning.

Never one to miss an opportunity for national exposure, Jones had somehow found time to write a long freelance account of the burning for the New York Post, which ran on June 2 under his byline that also noted he was “formerly of Collier’s Weekly.” In that story, Jones assured his Eastern audience that there are “good Negroes … who are kind and courteous. They are helpful, and the Southerner has an affection for them.” Then he went on:

But there is a bad black man who is a beast. This is a physical fact that the traditional New Englander, for instance, does not know and cannot comprehend. That bad black man is a bad man. He drinks the cheapest and the vilest whiskey. He breaks every law to get it. He is a dope fiend. He holds life lightly. He is a bully and a brute.

Once again, Jones called forth the stereotype of the Negro buck Gus from the Birth of a Nation, the blockbuster film endorsed six years before by President Wilson as well as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was that type of Negro who had arrived at the Tulsa County Courthouse on the last night in May, Jones wrote, using the threatened lynching of a Negro boy as a pretext to make trouble. It was that type of Negro who bore the responsibility for the cataclysm that came afterward.

Jones did not mention, of course, that his own Tulsa publication had largely inspired the lynching threat, or that the contingent of blacks attempting to thwart it was made up of Greenwood’s most affluent, literate, and respected citizens, hardly the choc-drinking malingerers to which Jones referred.

Little matter. The burning had heated Jones’s blood to an editorial froth. Two days after the New York Post article was published, he struck an even more bellicose note with his local audience. In a June 4 Tribune editorial, he urged Tulsa to seize the opportunity presented by the catastrophe. In effect, he said, the white mob had succeeded where Tulsa police and other city leaders had failed. The mob had cleaned up Niggertown, and he wrote:

Such a district as old “Niggertown” must never be allowed in Tulsa again.

It was a cesspool of iniquity and corruption.… This old “Niggertown” had a lot of bad niggers and a bad nigger is about the lowest thing that walks on two feet. Give a bad nigger his booze and his dope and a gun and he thinks he can shoot up the world. Now these four things were to be found in Niggertown, booze, dope, bad niggers and guns. The Tulsa Tribune makes no apology to the police commissioner or the mayor of this city for having pled with them to clean up the cesspools.

Events in Tulsa in the following weeks and months, a time when the Negroes struggled to rebuild their devastated community with almost no assistance from the whites, demonstrated the degree to which whites shared Jones’s sentiments. The publisher had again demonstrated his talent for capturing the zeitgeist of both Tulsa and the nation. He survived and eventually prospered in the newspaper business, in large part because he was not afraid to give voice, with considerable literate polish, to the hateful racist miasma clouding so many American souls. In that regard, Jones could legitimately argue that his own hatred, opportunism, and journalistic recklessness had not caused the great burning, but merely tapped into the racist jingoism so prevalent at that time. Many others would contend, also with some merit, that if it hadn’t been for Dick Rowland and the Tribune’s incendiary coverage of the case, something else would have come along to ignite Tulsa, just as atrocities had been ignited in cities and towns across the nation in the several years previous.

Among them was Oklahoma Attorney General S. Prince Freeling. In Tulsa to oversee the grand jury investigation of the burning, Freeling said in a mid-June speech to Tulsa business leaders that “the cause of the riot was not Tulsa,” and that—

It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have broadcast thoughts of equality. Then came the war and the army and the Negro learned the value of organization. So with the continued tirades against the white race launched by Negro publications throughout this nation, the Negro has come to look upon the white man as his oppressor, and so they have, in a large way, become organized since the war, and in this organization there lies a force that is liable to start trouble any minute.

In a comparatively short time … Tulsa and the world will forget the difficulties and Tulsa will have been aided by the occurrence, for it will mean stricter enforcement of the laws, and from the ashes of the Negro section will come a better Tulsa.

Mayor Thaddeus Evans, speaking at a City Commission meeting a few days after the burning, was equally sanguine. The catastrophe was probably inevitable, Evans agreed, adding that the belligerent Negroes were to blame. If so, he continued, “I say it was good generalship to let the destruction come to that section where the trouble was hatched up, put in motion, and where it had its inception.”

So Richard Lloyd Jones’s eloquent and unabashed hate-mongering resonated deeply, not only in the hearts of Tulsa’s oilfield roughnecks, bootleggers, and the city’s assorted white ruffians, but among its political leaders, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and businessmen, who, in the months after the burning, enlisted by the hundreds in the Ku Klux Klan.

Tribune readers also appreciated the paper’s willingness to move beyond the hand-wringing caused by the burning, its insistence to once again write about life as it had been before the great event, its ability to even find some humor in the ashes. On June 22, for example, the paper detailed the quandary of James O’Bannon, “a coal-black senegalan [sic] with an old-fashioned German name.” O’Bannon’s marriage license had burned up with the rest of his belongings, the story said, leaving him without proof of recent vows with the “dusky maiden,” Mattie Harris. Thus O’Bannon arrived at the courthouse one day demanding to know from officials there whether “he am or he ain’t.”

The burning otherwise was soon replaced on the Tribune’s front page by more-pressing local concerns. Jones abandoned his rants against “Niggertown” to take up controversies involving street paving and the city’s water supply. A year later, when the publisher’s affair with Comstock was exposed during the street-paving controversy, the burning had disappeared from the newspaper altogether, and would not be mentioned again in those pages for fifty years.

It was, in fact, just five days after the burning that the dominant photograph on the Tribune’s front page did not concern the event at all, but featured the winner of the newspaper-sponsored beauty pageant. The coronation of Mrs. Irene Moise, office secretary for a group of architects, had been delayed for a few days by all the trouble. But newspaper readers could not be kept in suspense any longer.

“I’m feeling a little dazed right now,” the triumphant beauty queen said after her crowning. “I’ve never had this sort of thing happen before. It’s fine to think of the future as having possibilities for me. I guess I’m building air castles already.”