CHAPTER 15
WHAT DO YOU SAY NOW?
The Greenwood teenager named Don Ross flunked most of his high-school classes, achievement befitting a loud, skirt-chasing youngster who generally found the meaning of life at the end of a pool cue. Ross, in fact, probably would have had much in common with young Dick Rowland decades before. History courses were the exception to Ross’s shoddy academic record. Captivated by the past, he usually aced them. He also had a knack for stringing words together on paper, which partially explained his presence that day in the 1950s for the first meeting of the yearbook staff at Booker T. Washington High School. Ross also figured that yearbook work was a good way to meet girls.
The faculty adviser that year was a history teacher named Bill Williams, a graying man of about fifty who had been around Washington High longer than dirt. Mr. Williams began the meeting that day with a speech, something about the class yearbook being more than a chronicle of one year in a school. The yearbook also described the community at that time, he said, because school and community went together like mother and child. Then the teacher digressed.
“When I was a junior at Washington High, the prom never happened because there was a riot and the whites came over the tracks and wiped out Greenwood,” Mr. Williams told the students. “In fact, this building was one of the few around here that wasn’t burned, so they turned it into a hospital for colored folks. In those days, there were probably Negroes moaning and bleeding and dying in this very room. The whites over yonder burned Greenwood down, and with almost no help from anybody, the Negroes built it back to like it was. That’s one of the things I mean when I say ‘the story of a community’.”
Don Ross was daydreaming at his desk in back until Mr. Williams began talking about the burning. The boy’s older relatives had never mentioned a word about anything so terrible, and Ross saw nothing about the place that gave the slightest hint of such carnage. Thriving entrepreneurs still lined Greenwood Avenue in the 1950s. Some of the world’s finest blues and jazz musicians had gotten their start in the neighborhood. The nightlife at Greenwood and Archer was celebrated in song. So why would this teacher, a man held in such high regard by so many at the Negro high school and in Greenwood generally, tell such a ridiculous lie to a roomful of high-school students? Before he could catch himself, the impetuous teenager leaped from his seat.
“Mr. Williams, I don’t believe that,” Ross said. “I don’t think you could burn this town down and have nobody know nothing about it. My people have been here since twenty-four and they never said a word about no riot.”
“Sit down and shut up,” Mr. Williams responded.
Ross immediately did as he was told, regretting his act the minute his fanny touched the seat. That was not an era when a student stood up and called his teacher a liar, at least not without the most severe consequences. Those students were taken to the coatrack and whipped for their transgressions, then sent home to be whipped again by their parents, and Ross figured he would get it at least that bad for what he’d said to Mr. Williams at the yearbook meeting.
But Ross never received a whipping, at least not for that. Mr. Williams glared at him, sure enough, but otherwise never said a word when the teenager walked from the classroom that afternoon. It was the next day, after the yearbook meeting, when the other students started to leave, that Mr. Williams finally spoke to him.
“Fat Mouth,” the teacher said. “You stay here.”
Ross’s heart started pounding, anticipating the sting of Mr. Williams’s belt on his rear. But when the other students had gone, Mr. Williams pulled a thick scrapbook from the top drawer of his desk and handed it to the boy.
“Take a seat and see for yourself.”
Ross sat down at a nearby desk. His head began to spin the minute he opened to the first picture, which showed white men standing over the remnants of a charred body lying prone in the dirt. The next photograph was just like it. Then came another picture of Negro corpses stacked on trucks; another of Negroes marching down familiar streets with their hands in the air, guarded by armed white men in civilian clothes; another of flames shooting out of little homes and from big brick businesses along Greenwood Avenue; another photograph of a huge wall of black smoke. There were dozens of images in all, each of them more awful than the last. By the time the boy closed the scrapbook, his stomach was spinning just like his head. Mr. Williams had been watching from his desk.
“What do you say now, Fat Mouth?” the teacher said.
For maybe the first time in his life, Don Ross had no reply.
* * *
But Bill Williams’s lesson, his private tour through the darkest days in Tulsa history, had just begun. That same night after supper, Mr. Williams collected Ross in his car and drove him to the Greenwood home of another longtime history teacher named Seymour Williams, an older fellow, widely known as the taskmaster of the Washington High football teams.
“So this is the boy who doesn’t believe in the riot,” Seymour Williams said, smirking.
“Says it never happened,” Bill said. “Says nothing like that could have happened because he’d never heard about it. Ain’t that right, Fat Mouth? You hear about everything around here.”
Ross just shrugged.
“Well, sit down next to me on this porch swing,” Seymour Williams said. “And we’ll tell you about something that never happened.”
The two men talked for hours that night. Both were gifted storytellers who made a world from long ago come alive in all its sights and smells, down to the striped green awnings of the redbrick buildings along Greenwood Avenue. Bill and Seymour Williams at first described the magical era when Greenwood was transformed from a lonesome patch of prairie into a colored world within a world, a Negro paradise with its own doctors, lawyers, druggists, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, funeral parlors, roller rinks, and movie theaters. Remember the Dreamland Theater, the big old place on Greenwood Avenue? Well, Bill Williams’ parents owned that movie house, and a huge confectionary down the street, and an auto garage, too. Hundreds of colored folks bought tickets to the movies each night, and bought sodas in the confectionary, and strolled up and down Greenwood Avenue, singing, flirting, and carrying on. Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the best place for a Negro in America. Can you believe that, Fat Mouth?
“But that made the white folks jealous, didn’t it?” Bill Williams said that night on Seymour’s porch. “They figured the Negroes in Greenwood were getting too uppity, and if there was one thing a white couldn’t tolerate then, it was an uppity nigger. Then one night the whites got their excuse to do something about it. The police charged this Negro boy, this fellow named Rowland, with raping a white girl. In fact, the boy’s momma still runs a boardinghouse on Archer. A white lynch mob tried to get him at the courthouse, which happened all the time in those days, at least in other places. But Greenwood’s finest men, and my daddy was one of them, weren’t going to let that happen here. I’m telling you, Tulsa Negroes were a proud bunch. So they drove down to the courthouse to stop the lynching, and a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose, and the next thing you knew, thousands of whites came over the tracks, blazing away with their guns.
“I was a boy about your age when it happened.” My dad stood in the window at Greenwood and Archer as they came over. He was a crack shot, got a bunch of them as they crossed the tracks. I was standing right next to my daddy as he fired, and I saw the white hoodlums fall. I figure more white folks died than coloreds. We were winning the riot until the airplanes came.
“Yes, Fat Mouth, airplanes that roared in over Greenwood firing down at the Negro folks as they tried to run. Some of those planes dropped explosives onto the Negro buildings and that’s what finally turned the tide against us. The Negroes knew they were licked when those airplanes showed up.”
So the white mobs had their way, marching right up to every house in Greenwood, including Seymour Williams’s place on Detroit. Seymour said he planned to fix the mobsters when they arrived at his door, because he had a military .45 and damn sure knew how to use it. But that morning, his wife and her friends tripped him on his way to the door and stole his gun, or else he probably wouldn’t be sitting here, rocking on his front porch on a cool September night thirty-some years later.
“Instead of killing me, which they would have done if I had tried to get tough, those whites took me away and put me in jail, and I watched from the jail window while everything burned,” Seymour Williams said. “And I mean everything. Isn’t that right, Bill?”
“Every damn thing,” Bill Williams said. “Look around you, Fat Mouth. Everything you can see, for as far as you can see, was nothing but a pile of ashes when those whites finished with the Negroes down here.”
Bill and Seymour Williams rocked faster and faster on the porch swing as they talked, and as they did, it was as if ghostlike demons flew up out of their insides and into the cool night. Their spoken recollections seemed to lighten the burden on their souls. It was the same way the next night, when Bill Williams introduced Don Ross to the city worker named Robert Fairchild, who told his own terrible story. The night after that, Ross met George Monroe, that skinny fellow who delivered sodas, and who was only five when the mobster stepped on his hand as he hid beneath a bed in his home. Ross met an undertaker named Jackson, and Wilhelmina Guess Howell, and dozens of others in time, wondering how in the world so many folks could have kept such a terrible secret.
“Because the killers are still in charge in this town, boy,” Bill Williams answered as they drove to meet another survivor. “Now you understand why anyone who lived through that once damn sure doesn’t want to have to live through it again. You ask a Negro about the riot, he’ll tell you what happened if he knows who you are. But everyone’s real careful about what they say. I hear the same is true for the white folks, though I suspect their reasons are different. They’re not afraid, just embarrassed. Or if they are afraid, it’s not of dying, it’s of going to jail.”
* * *
In 1946, a white Chicago native named Nancy Feldman moved South to take a job teaching sociology at the University of Tulsa, and not long afterward met a warm, intelligent Negro man named Robert Fairchild. When they met, Feldman was moonlighting as a sociologist at the Tulsa Health Department, while Fairchild, one of a handful of black municipal employees, organized recreation programs for Tulsa youth. The two quickly became friends, and Feldman was highly curious about Fairchild’s life as a Negro who had grown up in Tulsa. So it wasn’t long before the Negro man began recounting his days of shining shoes with the notorious Dick Rowland and of Rowland’s ultimate misfortune, and the cataclysm that happened because of it. Feldman was stunned as she listened. The way Fairchild described what had happened, the burning of Greenwood surely ranked among one of the nation’s worst racial atrocities, yet the young scholar could not recall a single mention of the catastrophe in any of her history texts.
Not that Feldman doubted Fairchild. Not at all. There was something in his manner that convinced her it had happened just the way he described it. She was so sure of it, in fact, that she decided to introduce the Negro’s horrifying recollections to her classroom. What better topic for Tulsa sociology students than the historic example of hatred’s handiwork that had occurred so close to home?
Feldman also was eager to get her white students’ perspective on the affair. But on the day she repeated Fairchild’s story in class, she was dumbfounded by the response. The students seemed surprised, or defensive, or they greeted her words with uncomprehending stares. None admitted to knowing about the burning, and a few argued that it was impossible that such a terrible thing could have happened in such a prosperous and tranquil city. To prove it to them, Feldman invited Fairchild to repeat his story to the students in person. He did so, but they remained stubbornly disbelieving. Many of Feldman’s students mentioned the classroom debate to their parents, who insisted that the burning was nothing but a lie. Not long after that, Feldman’s dean encouraged her to drop the subject entirely, a suggestion the new professor promptly ignored. She insisted on inviting Fairchild back to her class the next semester, but her students then were just as oblivious.
Where the burning was concerned, oblivion was a Tulsa-wide contagion, though it took some time after the event before the affliction fully set in. In the immediate months and years afterward, postcards depicting burning Negro homes and businesses and charred Negro corpses were bought and sold on Tulsa’s downtown streets, and white participants openly boasted about notches on their guns, earned during Greenwood’s obliteration, which initially was a widespread source of civic pride.
But by modern necessity, the events of 1921 became an embarrassment, something better forgotten. Tulsa much preferred to promote itself as a thriving city with an impressive skyline, tree-lined neighborhoods populated by spacious mansions, new art museums, and a growing degree of sophistication that belied the lawlessness of the early days. The burning was like an ugly birthmark in the middle of Tulsa’s cultural forehead that would forever disfigure the place. Unless, of course, it was covered up and forgotten. Those who could not forget meanwhile, consoled themselves with the notion that the burning had been the Negroes’ fault—the whites had merely acted to put down an uprising of uppity and lawless blacks.
Thus Tulsa’s remarkable conspiracy of silence was born. Communities across the nation had struggled mightily to sweep their racial atrocities under the carpet, but in no other city were the horrors as great and the cultural amnesia so complete as in Tulsa. The burning would later be compared to the pogroms of Europe, or to ethnic cleansing. One scholar termed the burning the American Kristallnacht, referring to the night before World War II when the Nazis overran and terrorized Jewish neighborhoods. But the American Kristallnacht was not mentioned in an Oklahoma history book until 1941, and that first mention came in a single paragraph. Texts in the years to come generally described the catastrophe in passing, a footnote to what were described as greater historical events of the day.
Though it had generated front-page headlines around the world in the days after it happened, the tragedy also disappeared from Oklahoma newspapers, particularly those in Tulsa. On June 1, 1936, in its regular feature called “Fifteen Years Ago Today,” the Tulsa Tribune of Richard Lloyd Jones recalled that on the day of the burning, “Miss Carolyn Skelly was a charming young hostess of the past week, having entertained at a luncheon and theater party for Miss Kathleen Sinclair, and her guest, Miss Julia Morley of Saginaw, Mich.” The burning was not mentioned, nor did it come up in the paper on the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
That paper’s chief local rival distanced itself just as aggressively. In the spring of 1971, after seven months of research, a local writer named Ed Wheeler submitted his account of the burning to Russell Gideon, editor of the Tulsa World’s Sunday magazine. Wheeler had previously published several articles in the World’s magazine, but this time, Gideon told Wheeler that the newspaper needed to pass.
“This is a hell of a good article,” the editor told Wheeler then. “But there is an unwritten rule at this paper that we don’t touch this subject with an eleven-foot pole.”
By then, of course, Wheeler was not surprised.
* * *
Earlier in that spring of 1971, Ed Wheeler felt a tap at his shoulder one day while walking in downtown Tulsa and turned to see a white stranger, a man in his forties dressed in coveralls.
“Don’t print that article,” the man said before turning and walking casually down the street.
The phone calls began coming to Wheeler’s home at about the same time. There was no secret about what he was up to, interviewing scores of blacks and whites about the one topic in Tulsa that remained taboo. Many white Tulsans cringed when they heard about Wheeler’s work, envisioning a blow to the city’s reputation, or worse—overdue indictments for murder. Hence the threatening encounter on the street and the calls to his home, each of them with a similar message. “Don’t write that article,” the callers would say, always anonymously. “You have no business sticking your nose into that. Leave it alone.” Wheeler generally sniffed and hung up on those calls, which came increasingly in the spring of 1971. But Wheeler’s wife Marcia was not nearly so sanguine. On several occasions, she had been home alone and answered the telephone only to hear an ominous male voice at the other end. “Tell him not to write that article,” the callers said, causing Marcia Wheeler to shudder at the implied threat of what would happen—to her husband, or to her, or, most frighteningly, the couple’s two-year-old son—if Wheeler proceeded.
Then, on a day in early May, Ed Wheeler finally became concerned himself. That morning as he left his home for work, he found a message scrawled in soap across the windshield of his car:
“Best look under your hood from now on,” the words said.
Wheeler fumed while he quickly erased the scrawl before his wife could see it. He was a veteran of several dicey operations as a Military Intelligence officer in Vietnam, a hulking fellow who, over the next twenty years, attained the rank of brigadier general in the Oklahoma National Guard. In other words, Ed Wheeler did not frighten easily. But now the bastards had crossed the line. Wheeler would never back down. He would not be intimidated, and if anything, the threats only made him more determined. But he could no longer dismiss the threat to his family. That night he moved his wife and son across town, into the home of his wife’s mother, subsisting himself for the next month on canned food and frozen dinners while completing what became Tulsa’s first detailed account of the burning in fifty years.
* * *
The assignment had begun innocently enough in a casual conversation between Wheeler and Larry Silvey, editor of Tulsa’s Chamber of Commerce magazine. That night the two men had run into each other in the Tulsa Press Club and proceeded to discuss Wheeler’s popular local radio show, called The Gilcrease Story, named for the prestigious local museum that sponsored the program. Five days a week, Wheeler used radio sound effects to recreate moments in U.S. history. The show also occasionally depicted events from black history, which had earned Wheeler a large audience on the north side of Tulsa.
That night at the Press Club, Silvey wondered if there was a piece of history that Wheeler would not dare tackle.
“I suppose there is,” Wheeler said after thinking for a moment. “I wouldn’t want to do a story on the Tulsa Race Riot. I’d be afraid I might create another Orson Welles effect.”
Silvey could see Wheeler’s point, but quickly thought of an alternative.
“Would you be interested in doing it for print?” he asked.
Wheeler, who had written several articles for local newspapers, was intrigued with the idea, especially when Silvey kept talking. The fiftieth anniversary of what was known as the Tulsa Race Riot rapidly approached, and in Silvey’s estimation, a story about the event would be a positive thing, demonstrating the city’s progress in race relations. Who could object to something like that, especially a half-century later?
Wheeler thus agreed to embark on a long and surprising odyssey, realizing within weeks that the horror of what had happened in 1921 transcended anything that had been publicly discussed in Tulsa for decades. He knew this after the first few interviews with black survivors in meetings he was able to arrange because of his visibility in the Negro community. Their fear remained palpable, even five decades later. None would allow Wheeler to use their names in his story. Most insisted on meeting only at night, in the sanctuary of their churches and with their pastors present. Wheeler was glad to agree.
As winter turned to the spring of 1971, he became a familiar sight in Greenwood, crossing over the tracks night after night to meet another aging survivor who was always waiting in the pews with his or her family and their preacher when Wheeler arrived. Grandchildren accompanied some of the survivors, and the white writer knew by the shocked look on their faces as they listened that the young people were hearing the story of the burning for the first time.
Word also quickly spread to the white side of town about Wheeler’s work, about his interviews with Tulsa whites, and about the hours he spent in the public library poring over old newspapers. Like the blacks, Wheeler’s white sources insisted on anonymity. Among them were two remorseful Klansmen who said they had merely tried to teach the Negroes a lesson, a lesson that had gotten out of hand. A third Klansman whom Wheeler interviewed said his only regret was that more Negroes weren’t killed, that more Negroes’ buildings had not been destroyed. The anonymous phone calls to Wheeler’s home intensified; then came the overt threat on his windshield as the writer stubbornly plowed ahead to finish what he had begun.
“This is the story of a race riot,” read the first sentence of Wheeler’s story. “It is not a pretty story, and it is not told for its shock value or to reopen old wounds. It is presented because it happened fifty years ago to another generation whose story is pertinent to this generation.
“The blame for the riot was heaped upon ‘Negroes of the lower class—gamblers and bootleggers and a group of Negroes who had been worked upon by a lawless element of white agitators, reds and bolshevists.’ But this was hogwash,” Wheeler wrote. “Prejudice, suspicion, ignorance and hate caused the riot. Intolerance, anger, rumormongering and fear fanned its flames. Such elements were prevalent in abundance on both sides of the racial fence.”
They were courageous words for a white writer in 1971 Tulsa. But by the standards of stories printed two decades later, the piece that followed was restrained and understated. After estimating the death toll at three hundred, and describing the internment of thousands of homeless blacks, Wheeler recounted the tragedy hour by hour, beginning with Dick Rowland’s arrest, followed by the outbreak at the courthouse and the attack on Greenwood by thousands of armed whites. The report seemed based more on 1921 newspaper stories than on the writer’s own interviews. No white or black participants were implicated by name.
Wheeler’s restraint no doubt contributed to Larry Silvey’s delight when he read Wheeler’s article for the first time. Silvey immediately made plans to publish the piece in the Chamber magazine opposite an essay on local race relations written by one of Tulsa’s black ministers. The Chamber’s general manager, Clyde Cole, however, was much less enthusiastic.
“This article will start a race riot,” Cole told Wheeler. After seven months of work without pay, Wheeler’s story was rejected.
A few days later, Wheeler pitched the piece to Larry Gideon at the Tulsa World, but with the same result. Wheeler began to realize that his only hope of salvaging the months of work that had brought such pain and dislocation to his family was a print outlet in the black community, desperation that spawned an unlikely alliance between Wheeler—the white military officer, radio personality, and freelance writer—and a black magazine publisher named Don Ross.
Ross was the same Greenwood pool shark whose life had been transformed in the 1950s by Bill Williams’ grim history lesson. He had joined the civil rights movement a decade later and by the spring of 1971, had begun publishing a black magazine called Oklahoma Impact, a publication he hoped would someday tell the real story of the Tulsa burning and who was to blame. He could scarcely believe his good fortune when Wheeler walked into his office on an afternoon in May 1971, completed manuscript in hand. Ross’s opportunity to wrest the burning from the shadows of history had come sooner than he could have dreamed, and there could be no more credible writer than a man like Wheeler, who went around town in his captain’s uniform of the Oklahoma National Guard, a man who was a celebrity with whites and Negroes alike because of his radio show.
In 1971, the cover of the June/July edition of Oklahoma Impact was a wreath of flames around the large headline: PROFILE OF A RACE RIOT. Wheeler’s story took up most of the pages inside; the article was wrapped around grisly photographs of the burning that were published for the first time. The magazine printed five thousand copies, twice its normal press run, which were swept up by black Tulsans the moment they hit the newsstands. Within hours, Negro readers flooded Ross and Wheeler with calls of congratulations. The secret of the burning was finally out. Copies also made their way across the tracks to white Tulsa, where they were passed from hand to hand and read surreptitiously, and some of those who called to compliment Wheeler were whites. Other white Tulsans grumbled, chastising Wheeler particularly for what they believed was his inflated estimate of the dead. But for the most part in white Tulsa, the article was publicly ignored. Wheeler had not named names, which was a relief, and the threatening calls to his home ended. Two weeks after publication, his wife and son returned home. Wheeler stuck his notes into a file cabinet and returned to work on his radio show.
Remarkably, the event, which had briefly escaped the shadows, was immediately allowed to return to limbo. The white press, both in Tulsa and around the nation, ignored Wheeler’s article and the historic nightmare it described. The burning remained deprived of its place in contemporary history books. In the years to come, only occasionally would white or black writers attempt to continue the process Ed Wheeler and Don Ross had begun.
Among them was Ruth Sigler Avery, the same person who, as a little girl, had watched Klan members torture a Negro man in a hilltop cross-burning ceremony, the woman who would never forget the face of the dead boy whose body was piled with the others on the truck that rumbled past her window on the morning of the burning. By the 1970s, Avery had taken on the burning as her personal crusade, spending much of that decade interviewing black survivors and white witnesses for what she envisioned as a book that would finally tell the whole truth of what had happened. Avery’s book was never published, but transcripts of her interviews became a crucial resource for journalists, authors, and historians a quarter-century later.
By the mid-1970s, a white college student named Scott Ellsworth had also begun his own long investigation into the event; it consumed much of his life for the next two decades. Ellsworth, who was born and raised in Tulsa’s white, middle-class neighborhood, remembered hearing about the burning as a teenager from black busboys and waiters, his coworkers at local restaurants. Later, while attending college in Oregon, he chose the burning as his topic for an undergraduate thesis, astounding professors with what he had written, first in Oregon, then at Duke University, where he was a graduate student in history. In 1982, with the encouragement of his teachers, Ellsworth published Death in the Promised Land. The book drew on the young scholar’s own interviews with survivors such as Bill and Seymour Williams, Robert Fairchild, and Wilhelmina Guess Howell, plus a thorough review of court records and contemporary newspaper accounts from around the nation. What resulted was the most withering indictment yet of the racial climate of the time, and of white Tulsa’s role in Greenwood’s obliteration, a book that remained definitive on the topic for most of the next two decades.
But Death in the Promised Land enjoyed only modest sales and generated only occasional feature articles in the national press. Once again, white Tulsa endeavored to ignore the reminder of its dark past. Surprisingly, as the decade of the 1980s drew to a close, the city remained safe with its terrible secret.