CHAPTER 2

LINCOLN’S DEVOTEE

The singular public voice of Richard Lloyd Jones had been silent for years by the time of his death in December 1963. Several years earlier he had turned the operation of his newspaper over to his children, and by 1958, the old man’s “Saturday Sermonette” a staple of the Tulsa Tribune for decades, had disappeared from the editorial pages altogether. But the previous forty years certainly had been time enough for Jones to erect a figurative monument to himself in his adopted city and state—Richard Lloyd Jones as trustee of the memory of Abraham Lincoln; Jones as intrepid political maverick and power broker; Jones as the self-appointed arbiter of white Tulsa’s conscience.

The Tribune, which Jones had purchased in 1919, thus chronicled his death as it would the passing of an American president, with bold, front-page headlines and a huge photograph of the paper’s late patriarch, a once-handsome man gone jowly late in life, whose luxuriant, curly brown hair had turned straight and white and thin.

The long page-one obituary was predictably reverential. “The career of Mr. Jones was one filled with the sharp, brilliant sparkle of a many-faceted diamond, yet also with a warm, compassionate humanism and dedication to public service,” it said. Alf Landon, former governor of Kansas and the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1936, was among those who eulogized Jones in the Tribune’s pages that day. It was Jones himself, Landon was quoted as saying, whose encouragement had inspired Landon’s presidential ambitions. “His vigor, his integrity and convictions,” Landon said, “and his lofty civic courage are an inspiration to all who knew him.” Oklahoma Governor Henry Bellmon bemoaned the loss of a “widely respected journalist and a great humanitarian.” Tulsa Mayor James Maxwell grieved for “a loyal, civic-minded citizen and a great leader.” Even U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois joined the sad chorus: “I was never so refreshed in spirit as when I could spend a few hours listening to him.”

To those with only a cursory knowledge of Jones’s life, the tributes would have seemed fitting enough. The son of a Union soldier and renowned Unitarian minister from the Midwest, Richard Lloyd Jones had been a lawyer, an actor, and a cowboy before indulging an abiding love of the written word by working as a magazine writer, then finally as editor and publisher of newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Tulsa. He had also inherited his father’s passion for pontificating and was never bashful about using his publications for that purpose. “I have always made my press my pulpit, and I preach,” he said once.

But the tapestry of his life was much richer still. As a young writer for Collier’s magazine, Jones played a key role in purchasing Abraham Lincoln’s Kentucky birthplace and erecting a national memorial there. In old age, his grandchildren heard him speak of the time he flew with Orville Wright. He had covered almost every national political convention for fifty-six years and was acquainted with most of the major political figures of his time, including several presidents. As a boy, family stories went, he had met both U.S. Grant and Jefferson Davis. As an adult, he had made the acquaintance of Mark Twain, had even hired the son of Samuel Clemens to work at Collier’s. As first cousin and friend of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, he was envious of Wright’s greater fame. Yet it was Wright whom Jones commissioned in 1930 to design his startling Tulsa mansion on Birmingham Avenue, with its huge windows, many competing angles, and notoriously leaky roof. “This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain,” Jones’s wife, Georgia, was once said to lament as water came rushing down onto her floors.

But missing amid the bouquets attending his death were the competing, far less savory realities of the man. Not one word in the newspaper, for instance, mentioned his famous stubbornness, and his hair-trigger temper that caused his editors to cower. There was no written mention of the scandal that engulfed Jones shortly after he moved to Tulsa, when private investigators and local members of the Ku Klux Klan took turns peeping through the keyhole of a downtown Tulsa hotel while Jones carried on a torrid affair with his female assistant at the newspaper.

And in Jones’s obituary, there was no mention whatsoever of what was known as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. In fact, though it later became regarded as the most terrible event of its kind in the history of the nation, scarcely a word of the tragedy ever saw print in the Tribune after the ashes of Greenwood had cooled.

Which, in retrospect, was not surprising. For it was not at all pleasant to recall that at the time of the riot, Jones might have been Tulsa’s most vocal racist. He was sympathetic to, if not actually a member of, the Ku Klux Klan, that legendary robed order of Negro-, Jew-, and Catholic-hating vigilantes whose ranks had begun to permeate the power structure of white Tulsa at that time. As such, Jones turned his notorious anger and his poison pen against Greenwood, Tulsa’s robust community of blacks, which existed on the north side of the Frisco tracks, just below the sixth-floor window of his newspaper office on Archer Street.

It was one particular editorial diatribe printed on the front page of an early edition of the Tribune on May 31, 1921, that would ensure Jones’s place in history, more so even than his endeavors to preserve the Lincoln birthplace. For arguably, it was Jones and his editorial—Jones more than any other single person—whose actions precipitated the obliteration of America’s most thriving black community.

*   *   *

That would certainly be an ironic epitaph for the young magazine writer who, in 1905, shared a table in Louisville’s exclusive Pendennis Club with Colonel Henry Watterson, a well-known Kentucky raconteur and writer. That day early in the new century, when the writer was visiting Louisville on assignment, he told Jones about the neglected condition of Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, then a tumbledown farm near the town of Hodgenville, Kentucky. Watterson suggested to Jones that the right buyer might greatly profit by acquiring it, might even develop the site into a national monument to be revered through the ages.

Jones latched onto the idea like a drowning man to a life preserver. To think of it: buying the birthplace of the Great Emancipator himself! That deed alone might eclipse the many accomplishments of Jones’s esteemed father, the Reverend Jenkins Lloyd Jones, and it was an endeavor certain to gain for the younger Jones his father’s long-coveted blessing.

It was a blessing Richard Lloyd Jones had apparently sought unsuccessfully for most of his early life. His ancestors had immigrated to rural Wisconsin from Wales in the 1840s, and two decades later, fourteen-year-old Jenkins Lloyd Jones had enlisted as a Union drummer boy in the Civil War. The teenager quickly was promoted to artilleryman and was a decorated veteran of major Civil War campaigns in Tennessee and Georgia. His unique devotion to Lincoln dated from that time. In Chicago, the elder Jones, by then a well-known Unitarian minister, founded a place called the Lincoln House, a center to promulgate all things Lincoln, and often referred to the slain president in his front-page sermons printed weekly in the Chicago Tribune.

The Lincoln-loving minister indeed cast a large and daunting shadow for his son. As a boy growing up in Chicago, Richard Lloyd Jones was a talented tennis player, swimmer, skater, and horseman, with above-average intelligence. But he would later concede his early unhappiness and aimlessness. “I was in no wise [sic] proficient in any one line of intellectual endeavor. I was full of uncertainty and indecision,” Jones wrote in 1939. In fact, he said, he might have spent his life as a cowboy on a Nevada ranch, where he had worked happily for a year as a young man, but his family “felt in some fashion I should follow a white-collar life.”

So the younger Jones returned to Chicago and obtained a law degree, but quickly found the legal profession disagreeable. He then pursued his first love—writing—by reporting for and editing small newspapers in Connecticut. He simultaneously dabbled in the New York stage, where he landed acting roles with his “cultured voice, distinguished bearing and ruggedly handsome face,” according to Jones’s 1963 obituary.

His acting career apparently ended with the opportunity to write for Collier’s, then one of the nation’s most prestigious and crusading journals. Among Jones’s endeavors for the magazine was a campaign that, he later wrote, was partially responsible for getting the torch of the Statue of Liberty, which had been dark for years, relit through an act of Congress. But at Collier’s, it was with the name of Lincoln that Jones would make his greatest mark.

On August 28, 1905, with the backing of the magazine’s owner, Robert Collier, Jones purchased the one-hundred-acre Lincoln farm near Hodgenville at a courthouse auction. Jones and Collier then issued an appeal for public donations with which to establish the birthplace memorial. Within months, they had raised $400,000, mostly in twenty-five-cent contributions. On a cold, damp day in February 1909, the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, Jones stood proudly by as President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the Lincoln farm monument. President Howard Taft dedicated the memorial when it was opened to the public two years later.

“Here, over the log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born to free the slave and to preserve this union, a grateful people have dedicated this memorial to unity, peace and brotherhood among these United States,” read the words inscribed in the memorial’s granite facade.

Because of his early work, Jones was appointed by the government to oversee administration of the monument, and served on its board of trustees with such men as President Taft, Samuel Clemens, William Jennings Bryan, and his father, the Reverend Jenkins Lloyd Jones. For the rest of his life, Richard Lloyd Jones traded freely on Lincoln’s name and his own role in commemorating Lincoln’s birthplace.

On February 12, 1921, in a speech to a group of Tulsa businessmen, Jones recalled his efforts in connection with the Lincoln farm memorial, in which he said it was “the only example in the history of our country where the nation has marked the place where a great life began.” In closing his remarks that day, Jones praised Lincoln as a man with “the wit of a philosopher and the courage of a soldier and the heart of a mother. His life has been the inspiration of more books than any other man, the Christ alone excepted … fifty-six thousand volumes written about this great American who saved the nation and freed the slaves.”

Later, Jones wrote: “It is time to put Mr. Lincoln to work. He is the symbol of American society. He is the symbol of the battle against the sins within. He is the symbol of all that is good in our country.”

Perhaps, in 1921, it never occurred to Jones that many of the slaves that Lincoln freed then were now living in Greenwood, only a few blocks from the Tribune offices. At the time, Jones and his paper referred to the Negro community as “Niggertown” or “Little Africa,” describing it as a veritable human cesspool that needed to be cleaned up. He had no quarrel with docile blacks, Jones was on record as saying, with Negroes who were polite and hardworking and respectful to whites. However, he wrote, “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. And all these four things are to be found in Niggertown, booze, dope, bad niggers and guns.”

Likewise, perhaps it never occurred to Jones that in 1871, the U.S. government, which then was dominated by the party of Lincoln, had banned a fraternal order formed after the Civil War called the Ku Klux Klan, declaring the Klan’s racist and terroristic practices in the South illegal. In 1915, the Klan had been reborn in Georgia, and on the Tribune front page of February 4, 1921, Jones’s paper published what amounted to a press release for the new KKK, a story that lauded the secret order’s ambitions to add chapters in Oklahoma. The new Klan, the story said, was to be a living, lasting memorial to the original Klan members who had saved the South from “a Negro empire [built] upon the ruins of southern homes and institutions.” Among the KKK’s principles, the Tribune story continued, was “supremacy of the white race in social, political and governmental affairs of the nation.”

By then, as Jones surely knew, the Klan was already entrenched in Tulsa, and such a press release for the order was highly unnecessary. Most likely, the Tribune’s fawning story was merely the newly arrived publisher’s attempt to curry favor with Klan members, whose ranks then included, or would soon come to include, Tulsa’s leading politicians, law-enforcement officers, judges, businessmen, even an Oklahoma governor and a U.S. senator.

Among the stories proudly passed down through the decades by Jones’s descendants was the one from his years in Madison, in which Jones invited Booker T. Washington to stay as his house guest because the famous Negro had been turned away by white hotels in the Midwestern city. Those descendants proffered that anecdote as proof of Jones’s equanimity in matters of race. But that trait, if it ever really existed, was little in evidence in Tulsa.

In 1920, when Jones arrived in the booming Oklahoma town, he was deeply in debt from his purchase of the Tribune and facing a bitter newspaper war with a superior rival, the Tulsa World. In his adopted town, he spewed racial hatred because in Tulsa of that time, racial hatred sold newspapers. And he would take his allies where he found them, even members of the KKK, whether Abraham Lincoln might approve or not.

*   *   *

In 1907, thirteen years before he moved to Tulsa, Richard Lloyd Jones had spent several weeks in Oklahoma researching a Collier’s article on the nation’s newest state. Oklahoma, he wrote then, “springs to life like Athena, full-grown and full facultied. She begins without diffidence or apology.” Tulsa, however, did not figure into that hyperbole. Oklahoma leaders whom Jones interviewed at the time didn’t consider the little town along the Arkansas River fit to even visit.

“What’s in the northeast part of the state?” Jones inquired of Robert L. Owen, a major Oklahoma politician.

“Nothing much, yet,” Owen replied. “Not a town of two thousand up there.”

Owen, it turned out, was badly misinformed. Even then, in 1907, Tulsa was in the midst of a remarkable transformation from a tiny village in Indian Territory to one of the world’s most robust petroleum capitals.

First incorporated in 1898, Tulsa’s population at the time of the 1900 census was still a sleepy thirteen hundred, a place still resembling its roots in the 1830s as a Creek Indian village. The name Tulsa, in fact, derived from the Creek word tullasi, or “old town.” In the 1830s, Tullasi and the vast rolling plains surrounding it had been the western terminus of the Trail of Tears, the tragic journey of the Creeks and other southeastern tribes forced from their lands by a federal government acting on behalf of encroaching white settlers.

After the forced exodus, the Indians had Oklahoma largely to themselves for decades. Not until 1882, with the coming of the railroad to that section of Indian Territory, did the first permanent white settlers arrive in Tulsa. Seven years later, the first of the great Oklahoma land runs brought white and black settlers to the area by the tens of thousands, among them a group of Tulsa entrepreneurs determined to capitalize on the human influx in the manner of Guthrie in 1889. Shortly after 1900, those Tulsa boosters succeeded in luring three additional railroad lines through the village. In 1904, local businessmen opened a toll bridge across the Arkansas River, connecting the town to still-speculative oil fields on the other side of the water. Their timing could not have been better.

The oil rush came just a year later. Within months of the first gusher south of town, Tulsa celebrated the opening of the First National Bank, a five-story skyscraper boasting the town’s first elevator. A high-rise hotel was completed shortly after that. City leaders convinced the Frisco railroad to run a special train, known as the “Coal Oil Johnny,” to haul oil-field drillers and roughnecks on daily commutes to work from their homes in Tulsa. By 1907, the town’s population had grown to more than seven thousand, and to more than eighteen thousand by the census of 1910. By 1920, Tulsa was home to more than four hundred oil and gas companies, dozens of oil-field supply firms, tank manufacturers and refineries, numbers that could back up the new city’s boast of being the “Oil Capital of the World.” More than two hundred attorneys practiced in Tulsa by 1921, one hundred and fifty doctors, and sixty dentists. The population had ballooned to more than seventy-five thousand people. Roughly 10 percent of the city was black.

With the laws of statehood and new residents from across the nation there came at least a few civilizing influences. An imposing, four-story county courthouse was built in 1912 of gray, cut limestone at the corner of Sixth Street and Boulder Avenue. Two years later came the magnificent 3,500-seat Convention Hall on Brady. The equally impressive Central High School came to occupy a full block on Sixth Street between Detroit and Cincinnati Avenues. Dozens of churches crowded their way into the increasingly valuable real estate.

In other ways, white Tulsa was a mirror image of the robust Negro community that thrived just north across the Frisco tracks. Just as blacks filled the streets of Deep Greenwood on the maids’ day off, flocking into movies and restaurants and jazz joints, white crowds on the south side filled the heart of downtown Tulsa. Pedestrians dodged sedans and touring cars that clogged the newly paved streets, or the electric trolleys that clanged down north-and south-running lines through the city. White shoppers flush with oil money crowded into Lerner’s Department Store, or in the five-and-dimes, or at soda fountains. People flocked to the movies at the Majestic Theater, or the Orpheum, or the Rialto.

Yet those quainter pastimes were part of a thin veneer masking a much grittier, far more unseemly reality of life, both in the city and across the nation as a whole in the years immediately after World War I. For sheer nastiness, hatred, and paranoia, few other moments in American history could compete; it was a reign of terror and violence, born from the same rancid breeding ground that had inspired human atrocity since the beginning of man: Human beings were inclined to fear, and thus to hate, those different than themselves.

And never before had the young nation been confronted with such diversity. In the two decades after 1900, European immigrants flocked into the United States at a rate of two thousand a day. But these were not the English-language speakers of Britain, or even of Scotland and Ireland. These immigrants, more often than not, hailed from Germany, Italy, and Poland. They were Russians, Russian Jews and Czechs, people who brought with them different languages, customs, and religions, increasingly polluting the cultural landscape in America that white Protestants had come to revere as their exclusive domain.

“If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” said one leading commentator, Madison Grant, “and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”

Thus was born America’s “nativism” movement, whose progeny would include the modern version of the Ku Klux Klan. Cultural tensions further escalated with America’s entry into World War I and the widespread distrust of the “hypenated” Americans. “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready,” groused President Woodrow Wilson. Sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.” German music, especially Wagner’s, was banned from public concerts. Patriotic organizations sprang up by dozens, promulgating paranoia and intolerance as much as love of country. Jews and Catholics, groups ostensibly owing allegiances to foreign powers, were singled out as well. The verdict of an Indiana jury seemed to symbolize those ubiquitous passions. A murder defendant had been charged with shooting and killing an immigrant who had yelled, “To hell with the United States.” The panel took two minutes to find the shooter not guilty.

War’s end did little to diffuse such tensions, for new grounds for hysteria had popped up in the national psyche. Many Americans and their leaders observed the triumph of Lenin and Bolshevism in Russia, terrified that the worker revolution would sweep over the United States as well. The growth of labor unions and the corresponding rash of strikes and strike-related violence fueled the nation’s first “Red Scare.” Laws guaranteeing civil liberties were either ignored or suspended as so-called radicals were rounded up and persecuted. Politicans often parroted the suggestion of one opinion leader who suggested the S.O.S. method of dealing with Reds—“Ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell.”

It was into this already volatile mix that Negroes such as W. E. B. Du Bois thrust their strident voices. Tens of thousands of black soldiers had fought and died for their country in the War and expected their patriotism to be rewarded with better treatment at home. When they returned to America, they found that life for their people had, if anything, gotten worse. Only now, white lynch mobs were likely to be met by Negro veterans bearing rifles and pistols, and the result was racial warfare unlike anything the nation had ever seen.

Civility, if it ever had really existed in the United States, had taken a long and bloody hiatus, and no place lived closer to outright anarchy than the bustling new oil city in the northeastern part of Oklahoma. Law enforcement of the time was nonexistent, ineffectual, or corrupt. As a result, the city became a famous haven for outlaws from across the country. Both north and south of the Frisco railroad tracks, whole streets were given over to speakeasies, drug dens, and brothels. “A vice ring consisting of newspapers and politicians operated a protection racket for illegal enterprises,” a University of Tulsa student wrote in his 1950 master’s thesis on early Tulsa politics. “Many crusades against open town conditions by newspapers in Tulsa’s boom years were said to result when the editors were denied their part of the payoff.”

But more than anything else, Tulsa life was distinguished by the same deadly cocktail of paranoia in the guise of World War I patriotism, by religious, ethnic, and racial hatred, and by officially sanctioned lawlessness that made the new city a mecca for vigilantes, even by the lawless standards of that day. And in boomtown Tulsa, whites often had as much to fear from the mob as Negroes did, as a group of labor organizers learned in 1917.

That year, twelve members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union then attempting to organize oil-field roughnecks, were arrested at their Tulsa headquarters and charged with vagrancy. The police raid apparently was precipitated by articles in the virulently antiunion Tulsa World, which implicated union members in the bombing of the home of a wealthy Tulsa oilman. No such evidence linking the Wobblies to the bombing was ever uncovered, but in the climate of the time, the World and the Tulsa mob, ancestor to the city’s KKK, were determined to claim a pound of flesh nonetheless. Unionization of the oil fields, according to a World editorial, threatened petroleum production, which in turn might jeopardize the ongoing war effort against Germany. While publicly opposed to organizations such as the Klan, Richard Lloyd Jones’s competitor, World publisher Eugene Lorton, often proved just as intemperate on other matters. The union question was certainly one of them.

“The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the I.W.W.’s. Kill ’em just as you would kill any other kind of snake,” a World editorial urged. “It is not time to waste money on trials and continuances like that.”

Tulsa Judge Thaddeus Evans, soon to become Tulsa’s Republican mayor, seemed to agree. Despite scant evidence, Evans not only found the twelve vagrancy defendants guilty, he had five defense witnesses arrested, tried on the spot, and convicted as well. Each was fined a hundred dollars and committed to the county jail. But the real punishment was meted out beyond the legal system, and in a most timely fashion. That same night, as police transferred the men to jail, about fifty men in black robes and black masks, a group calling itself the “Knights of Liberty,” intercepted the caravan. The seventeen prisoners were taken from the officers, bound hand and foot, and spirited away to a secluded ravine lit by the headlights of automobiles drawn in a circle. Each man was then stripped to the waist, tied to a tree, and whipped “in the name of the outraged women and children of Belgium,” in the words of one vigilante. One of the victims pleaded with the mob. “I have lived here for eighteen years, and have raised a large family. I am not an I.W.W. I am as patriotic as any man here.” But he, too, felt the lash and the hot tar and feathers on his bloody back. One union leader was whipped twice, the second assault leaving the tar embedded in his back.

“The number of blows was regulated by the chief of police himself, who was easily recognizable [beneath his robe] by six of us at least,” one tortured union member later said. “It was all prearranged. The police knew where we were going.”

When the torture was over, the seventeen men were ordered into the Osage hills, their dispersion hastened by gunshots. That same night, placards were posted at prominent public places around Tulsa that read: “Notice to I.W.W.’s. Don’t let the sun set on you in Tulsa.” The next day, the Tulsa World referred to the Knights of Liberty as a “patriotic body.”

None of this went unnoticed by the Negroes in Greenwood. The incident, referred to in one white paper as the “Tulsa Tar Party,” revealed “how disastrous the consequences could be for a group of Tulsans if the power of an influential newspaper, the city government, and the local courts and police was brought to bear against them,” historian Scott Ellsworth later wrote. “More than that, it revealed just how dire the results could be even in such a situation when the defendants were white and when the official charge lodged against them was no more serious than vagrancy.” An even more instructive example of vigilante violence, an even more chilling window into boomtown Tulsa’s soul, came three years later, and again it involved a white. He was an eighteen-year-old named Roy Belton, who was arrested by Tulsa police in 1920 for the murder of a cab driver named Homer Nida. Belton had confessed to shooting Nida, according to newspaper accounts, but had told police that his gun had discharged accidentally. Belton would not have the chance to plead his case before a jury. Late on a Saturday night, shortly after Nida’s widow issued a teary plea for revenge in the local press, a mob that quickly grew to a thousand men and women assembled in front of the county courthouse, where Belton was held in a jail cell on the top floor. Mob representatives soon entered the courthouse and insisted that the sheriff, a man named Wooley, turn Belton over.

“Let the law take its course, boys,” the sheriff replied. “The electric chair will get him before too long, but you know this is no way to interfere with the law.”

The vigilantes responded by disarming the sheriff and forcing him to release Belton, who was spirited down from the jail and placed in his victim’s taxi that waited outside the courthouse. In a caravan stretching for more than a mile, Belton was driven by the mob to the place just southwest of Tulsa where Nida had been shot. Tulsa police, who arrived after the fact, helped direct traffic. As a huge crowd of spectators roared its approval, the vigilantes led Belton underneath a large billboard. A rope secured from a nearby farmhouse was thrown around Belton’s neck. The mob allowed him to smoke a cigarette before he was lynched.

When Belton was cut down, “Sudden pandemonium broke loose,” the World reported. “Hundreds rushed over the prostrate form to get bits of clothing. The rope was cut into bits for souvenirs. His trousers and shoes were torn into bits and the mob fairly fought over the gruesome souvenirs.… An ambulance finally pushed through the jam of automobiles. The body was carried to the car, late arrivals still grabbing for bits of clothing on the now almost nude form.”

Tulsa Police Chief John Gustafson said afterward that while he didn’t normally condone mob violence, the lynching “will prove of real benefit to Tulsa and vicinity. It was an abject lesson to hijackers and auto thieves, and I believe it will be taken as such.”

Such sentiments were echoed on the editorial pages of the city’s dominant newspaper. To the Tulsa World, Belton’s lynching was a “righteous protest. There was not a vestige of mob spirit in the act of Saturday night,” the World said. “It was citizenship outraged by government inefficiency and a too tender regard for the professional criminal. We predict that unless conditions are speedily improved, [Belton’s lynching] will not be the last by any means.”

The only public protest of Belton’s murder came from the north side of the railroad tracks. “There is no crime, however atrocious, that justifies mob violence,” Andrew Smitherman wrote in the Tulsa Star. The black editor later gave voice to the fears roiling in so many Negro souls. “The lynching of Roy Belton,” Smitherman wrote, “explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on the top floor of the Courthouse from mob violence.”

*   *   *

Just a few months before Belton’s murder, Richard Lloyd Jones had arrived in town as the new editor and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune, and where the mind-set of his readership was concerned, Jones proved to be a quick study. After another characteristic spate of Tulsa lawlessness, Jones offered this solution in an editorial.

“Every unemployed man in town should be questioned, and if the answer should be unsatisfactory, should be ordered out of town,” Jones wrote on December 23, 1920. “At least one thousand reputable and trustworthy citizens should be sworn in as deputy police and given firearms with the orders to shoot to kill anyone found in the act of holdup or robbery. Bad men are better off dead. Let’s get rid of them.”

So on the fateful day of May 31, 1921, was Jones’s reasoning not obvious? Bad men were better off dead. And where bad men were concerned, who could be worse that a shiftless, Negro shoeshine boy who had the temerity to assault a teenage girl in a downtown elevator in midday? What act was more worthy of swift retribution?

*   *   *

Richard Lloyd Jones cut a dashing figure in Tulsa, a newcomer who would have warranted notice even without his outrageous Tribune editorials, which ranged in tone from sanctimony, when discussing moral matters, to vitriol when the topic was ineffectual law enforcement or local and state politics. He was a handsome man with sharp features, six feet tall and athletic-looking even in his forties. His long, curly brown hair, parted down the middle, puffed flamboyantly into wings on either side of his head as he strode quickly down the street. Jones always wore the nicest suits, and often was seen rushing from his office with an expensive overcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape.

The Tribune was housed in a handsome six-story, red-brick building on Archer at the northern edge of downtown Tulsa. Jones’s spacious corner office was on the top floor, one floor above the newsroom, two above his advertising department. Bookcases covered the walls of his office, filled with works of history, politics, science, and fiction, reflecting the publisher’s voracious reading tastes. An oxbow from a farm in Illinois hung from one wall, what Jones thought a quaint reminder of America’s humble rural past. From another wall a portrait of a beardless, brooding Abraham Lincoln stared out at visitors. A conference table occupied one end of the room, while Jones’s massive wooden desk commanded the other, beneath windows overlooking the Frisco tracks and the community of Negroes to the north.

But the desk seemed largely decorative, for Jones rarely did his most important work sitting down. Instead, he paced the length of his office every morning, dictating to his secretary that day’s editorial, rambling with the inflection of a Shakespearean actor or an overheated evangelist, jutting his jaw angrily, pounding his fist into his hand, working himself into a lather as the words flowed. In Madison, where Jones had purchased the Wisconsin State Journal in 1911, those editorials had earned him the enmity of a legendary Wisconsin politician named Robert La Follette, who had formed a rival newspaper to fire back at the irascible publisher.

It was the prospect of a bloody newspaper war in Wisconsin that inspired Jones to seek a paper elsewhere, and he nearly purchased an Indianapolis daily. But at the last minute, a friend from Wisconsin, a man who had made his fortune in Oklahoma oil, urged Jones to consider Tulsa, where a paper called the Tulsa Democrat happened to be for sale. The logic was simple, the temptation obvious. Where there were riches to be made in oil, there were riches to be made in print. Sleepy Indianapolis could offer no such inducement. In November 1919, Jones bought the Democrat and moved his wife and three children to the Southwest.

He immediately renamed the paper the Tribune, and attempted to wage war with the more conservative World with such promotions as newspaper-sponsored beauty pageants. Lurid crime stories and local controversies became staples of the paper’s news coverage. On the editorial page, it quickly became obvious that Jones had not been cowed in the least by the repercussions of his editorial outspokenness in Madison.

Tribune readers were treated to large doses of his moral prescriptions. “He knew all that was to be known about Abraham Lincoln and no doubt fancied that he possessed many of the virtues of that most wonderful man,” John R. Woodard, one of Tulsa’s early lawyers and a well-known Jones opponent of that time, wrote of the new publisher. “Morals and righteousness were his main themes and consuming passions.… Others were devoid of honor, save him. Historians, authors and poets were at his command. He raided their storage houses in order to satisfy his vanity. He made use of Holy Scriptures to weave his cloak.”

When not pontificating, Jones fired repeated and highly personal broadsides at any local politician with whom he disagreed, particularly at the new Republican mayor and former judge, Thaddeus Evans, whom Jones accused of being soft on crime. Jones otherwise insisted on injecting himself into local controversies concerning the eventual source of the Tulsa water supply, and he alleged malfeasance in the way the city allocated local street-paving contracts. It was the street-paving issue that nearly ended Jones’s stay in Tulsa only two years after it had begun.

In March 1922, street-paving contractors, weary of being bruised by the Tribune in print, hired Tulsa private investigators to look into rumors that Jones had become overly familiar with his top assistant at the newspaper, a woman named Amy Comstock. It was commonly known that Jones and Comstock often worked together in Room 500 of the Tulsa Hotel, which the publisher had rented as a private office. The investigators took out the room next door, bribed a maid to conceal a Dictaphone in Jones’s quarters, then took turns listening and squinting through the keyhole. Over several days, they listened as Jones dictated his editorials. They listened as he and Comstock considered writing a scathing and anonymous letter to discourage a school-board candidate whom Jones opposed. They listened as Jones and Comstock discussed threats against Jones’s life. They listened as Jones attempted to fend off angry creditors by promising to send an interest payment on his overdue bank loan. They listened as Jones and Comstock proclaimed their love for each other.

Indeed, only hours after the surveillance began, investigators observed behavior they had hoped to see. At one point, after what seemed a lovers’ spat, the room fell silent, except for squeaking bedsprings.

“Several groans were plainly heard from Miss Comstock,” private investigator Sam McCanee later testified in a sworn deposition. “Then as the shaking of the springs which increased gradually in speed, or rapidity, and decreased gradually in speed, some more moaning could be heard.”

The paving contractors, upon hearing the report, were undoubtedly elated. The repercussions for Jones, a married man making a local newspaper career as a reforming moralist, were obvious. What’s more, there could be no more blatant contradiction of moral tenets as espoused by the Ku Klux Klan, an order that in addition to white supremacy, was also devoted to the honor of women and the sanctity of the home. The detectives were, in fact, concerned that they would not be believed in such a volatile matter, and they convinced several local members of the Klan to take their turns at the keyhole. One of the recruited observers, a Tulsa photoengraver, testified that he had watched through the keyhole as Jones pulled Comstock’s skirt over her waist and placed his head between her legs.

“She was like the old maid’s cat,” the photoengraver said of Comstock’s expression then. “She looked a little bit tired, and very much satisfied.”

On March 21, 1922, when confronted with evidence of his extramarital liaison, Jones responded defiantly, publishing a front-page editorial attacking unnamed rumors that he said were circulating about him. The rumors were merely an attempt at character assassination caused by his crusade for good government, he argued. If need be, Jones promised to edit his paper with a pistol.

Privately, he also convinced Tulsa Klan leaders that the newspaper offices and his home had been targeted for attack.

“All of this must have been a figment of his own imagination because the contractors and those associated with them had no such ideas or contemplation in mind,” Woodard wrote. “Anyway, the Klan threw a force of men around Jones to guard him against all imaginary dangers or physical violence.”

When a city attorney later issued warrants against Jones and Comstock, charging them with lewd conduct, Klan members intervened to keep the warrants from being served. A Tulsa KKK leader also urged Woodard to desist in his efforts to expose the publisher, because Jones had been a “friend to the Klan.”

Woodard soon learned of another, equally important Jones ally, Robert Brewer, president of the Exchange National Bank in Tulsa. While Jones’s conduct with Comstock was unfortunate, Brewer told Woodard, “The contractors would not be able to run him out of town because the bank could not afford to let him go; that the Tribune and Mr. Jones owed the bank a lot of money and that it did not have satisfactory security for the indebtedness.”

Eventually, the scandal fizzled. Jones and Comstock, who reportedly fled from the city after learning of the warrants issued against them, returned to Tulsa. The “Saturday Sermonette” appeared as before. Comstock went on to become the Tribune’s associate editor and a member of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame for Women.

The sex scandal, however, was telling in several ways. Jones’s conduct with his aide revealed once again the strain of contradiction and hypocrisy woven throughout his public life. And it gave some clue to the financial pressures bedeviling the overextended publisher after he arrived in Tulsa. It might be expected that with a man like Jones, those pressures would inevitably lead to editorial expediency and recklessness, if such things would sell newspapers and keep the lenders at bay.

So it was in late May of 1921. The Tulsa populace was already inflamed by a series of local jailbreaks on the day when the Tribune police reporter brought back word of the alleged assault by a black shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland on a teenage girl in an elevator of the Drexel Building downtown. The charge was highly suspect from the beginning. Rowland had been arrested, but even investigators considered the accusation dubious.

Which did not stop Richard Lloyd Jones, whose paper, on May 31, 1921, printed an inflammatory account of the elevator incident and of Rowland’s arrest. And Jones himself would weigh in on the matter

Precisely what his front-page editorial said might never be known. Jones’s editors finally prevailed on him to remove his inflammatory piece after only a few hundred copies had been published. No complete copies of that edition are known to exist today. In the archival copy of that day’s paper in the Tulsa Public Library, the editorial has been torn away. Decades later, the Oklahoma Historical Society issued a reward to anyone who could produce a copy of the infamous editorial, but none turned up.

Yet the headline, if not the exact words of the editorial, was easy to remember. No one who read it in those tense hours preceding America’s most tragic episode of racial violence could forget it. They were the words undoubtedly bellowed from the lungs of newsboys who hawked the paper on the street corners of downtown Tulsa on that sunny afternoon of 1921. North of the tracks, the paper was passed from person to person along Greenwood Avenue, the sickening headline staring up at them like a call to arms.

TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT, is what it said.