CHAPTER 9

THE NEGRO ALAMO

God and Satan waged a long and spirited tussle for Greenwood’s soul, and what with the prostitutes who tempted from the shacks along First Street and the folks who were dazed on opium and the drunk young men who brawled up and down Greenwood Avenue on Thursday nights, it often seemed that Beelzebub had gained the upper hand.

But the faithful folks in Tulsa’s Negro quarter were also up to the fight. In 1913, one particular group of Baptists bought a large vacant lot at the corner of Easton and Elgin, just below Standpipe Hill, with the intention of building a sanctuary so imposing that the devil himself would cower when it was done.

Come to think of it, maybe it was the devil that made their journey so long. Why otherwise would it have taken those Baptists eight full years to build their grand tabernacle, eight years of gathering for Sunday services in a converted dance hall near the church property, or on an empty lot outside when the weather was nice? Eight years of slipping pocket change into the collection plate, or taking ten percent of the profits from the family store, or from the money earned doing a white family’s laundry, and adding it to the building fund of what would be called “Mount Zion Baptist Church.”

The congregation no doubt would have faltered somewhere along the way had it not been for Pastor R. A. Whitaker. He was their Moses guiding them through the wilderness with his vision of grandeur and his oratorical gift. Lord, that man could preach. Brother Whitaker could stand with his Bible on a street corner in hell to proclaim his vision of Jesus’ love on one hand and God’s righteous vengeance on the other, and within ten minutes, all the fallen angels would be ready to reenlist in the army of the Almighty. Some Sunday mornings in Greenwood, Pastor Whitaker climbed atop the back of a truck and began his sermon to the curious crowd that was sure to gather. Once Brother Whitaker had them hooked with his words, he’d slyly signal to the driver and the truck would slowly pull away. The glassy-eyed converts followed like they were a bunch of ducks and Brother Whitaker was leading them along with bread crumbs. The next thing those ducks knew, they were inside the converted dance hall, firmly in the clutches of Jesus, and soon after that, adding their ten percent to the Mount Zion building fund.

As the years passed, and the lot at Easton and Elgin continued to sit empty, and the congregation grew frustrated and doubtful, Pastor Whitaker offered them a few more bites of rhetorical manna to keep his flock in step, turning up the volume of his preaching to help them keep faith with the dream of worshiping in the finest Negro sanctuary in all the Southwest.

And so, eventually, it was. In nickels, dimes, and dollars, the Mount Zion congregation saved about forty thousand dollars in seven years, only half of what was needed to complete the sanctuary, but enough to convince white lenders to kick in the rest. So beginning in 1920, the Mount Zion faithful finally watched beautiful red bricks mounted one atop another and marveled at the new bell tower that stretched toward heaven, and rejoiced at how sunlight played through the stained-glass windows imported from someplace in the East.

On the morning of April 10, 1921, new varnish on the pews smelled like heaven itself when 856 Greenwood people crammed into the pews of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, along with the dozens of others who fanned themselves while standing in back because all the seats in the pews were filled. That Sunday morning, the congregation knew the euphoria of Moses’ people on their first glimpse of the Promised Land, for the Mount Zion people had wandered nearly as long, and the fruit of their efforts seemed just as sweet.

On that spring morning, Pastor Whitaker’s words first echoed from the rafters of the new sanctuary. His people clapped and swayed and raised their hearts and their hands to heaven, and sang Negro spirituals and gospel music that spilled out onto Easton and Elgin every time someone opened the church door. It was rapture, a taste of the Second Coming. Brother Whitaker had been right. Every last penny saved, every last day they had waited, had been worth it in the end.

*   *   *

The great burning happened just six weeks following that glorious moment, only a few days after graduating seniors at Washington High and their families had convened at Mount Zion for a baccalaureate service. In the early morning of June 1, after the trouble downtown, whites massed on Standpipe Hill and formed a skirmish line down the hill to surround the Negroes on the west. Then they mounted a blistering attack from that direction, raining bullets down on Mount Zion, the nearby high school, and all the nice homes of the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and leading Greenwood entrepreneurs. If the dedication of Mount Zion had been a hint of heaven, that morning was surely a taste of hell. White bullets fell on that part of Greenwood like hail.

But the whites couldn’t advance down the hill into Greenwood so much as an inch, at least not at first. Many died trying, because Mount Zion’s belfry offered an unobstructed line of fire at the enemy. For an hour or more after the battle began, Negro marksmen trained to fight Germans picked off any white hoodlum foolish enough to expose himself trying to move forward.

Someone counted more than fifty Negro fighters inside Mount Zion when the sun rose, several of them up in the bell tower, others stationed with rifles and shotguns firing out windows closer to the ground. The smell of gun smoke had replaced that of new varnish, and the stained-glass windows were shattered in the fusillade and lay around the Negro fighters in large, colorful shards. But the Negroes inside continued to fight ferociously to save the House of God for which they had waited so long. They fought in Mount Zion like the Texas patriots at the Alamo, with a fervor that grew even higher when their most feared warrior dodged the white bullets and slipped through the front door into the besieged sanctuary. O. B. Mann stood inside the church with his rifle, bleeding from a wound in his right hand, but with a murderous look in his pale-green eyes.

*   *   *

It had happened sometime during the battle for Deep Greenwood, though Mann could never remember exactly when. It no doubt was a white’s bullet or a shotgun pellet that had caught the little finger of Mann’s right hand, causing the blood to come spurting out. But he barely noticed the dull, burning sensation and the wet warmth of the blood as it spilled over his hand, because his mind was fully engaged elsewhere and his adrenaline raced like water in a ditch after a spring thunderstorm. At some point, when the throbbing became too much to ignore, Mann looked down between shots and saw that his finger looked like raw hamburger, but he could fire just fine with his little finger all bloody like that, so fire away he did.

Mann killed several whites during the fight for Deep Greenwood, which satisfied him. It was a fleeting satisfaction under the circumstances, but satisfaction nonetheless. He’d killed German soldiers in the war, but then he was Private Mann under orders from white officers, and he’d had no particular beef with the fighters on the other side. But this enemy had tormented his people for centuries, and now it was launching an assault that rivaled the worst he had seen in France. Only now the attack was against the homes and businesses of the folks who bought their groceries from the Mann Brothers’ store on Lansing. He had been born for this moment, all the ancient anger coiled inside, waiting for the time when he could strike back. His own blood was splattered across the starched white shirt he had put on for work the day before. He smeared blood across his face every time he tried to wipe away perspiration, blood that on his milky features looked like war paint. But otherwise, a pinkie turned to hamburger didn’t distract him in the least. Mann took aim with the rifle he’d snuck home from the war and fired away even more.

For a few minutes in early morning, Mann also enjoyed the illusion that he and John Williams and the other blacks fighting from the buildings along Greenwood Avenue would actually defeat the whites, or at least turn them back across the tracks. The whites took heavy casualties on their first push before sunrise, when a cloud of Negro bullets greeted them and sent them scurrying in retreat. But Mann’s hopeful illusions burned off with the morning sun when he could see that there was no end to the enemy. Kill one white and ten more sprang up in his place. The Negroes also didn’t have the luxury of looting a dozen pawnshops and hardware stores. Their bullets had been purchased for hunting, and that ammunition soon ran low.

Then the planes attacked when the sun came up, and the whites began to break into buildings on the west side of Greenwood Avenue from alleys in the rear. When Mann saw them poking around inside Negro property, the rage made him dizzy. He wanted to toss away his rifle and go after those fellows with his bare hands, which he might have done if the boy hadn’t come up the stairs, breathless from the excitement and his long run, to say the men needed help at Mount Zion.

Mann was incredulous. They were attacking where?

“At Mount Zion,” the boy said. “Hundreds of folks firing down at us from Standpipe.”

So they would attack a church, too. Mann squeezed off a few final shots at the whites across Greenwood Avenue and followed the boy down the back stairs, then out the door for the half-mile sprint to Black Tulsa’s Alamo.

*   *   *

Young Ruth Sigler had never seen a dead thing until that morning, not even a pet. But she had never witnessed open warfare either, or an assault that approached genocide, or a whole community going up in flames. There were many things the first-grade girl had never seen until then, many things she hoped to never see again.

She was a child of seven, the daughter of a man who’d become rich in oil and real estate before his death a few years earlier. Ruth was therefore raised in the cocoon of privilege, a world of storybooks and new dolls and fancy ribbons for her hair. She was insulated from the coarser aspects of Tulsa life by her mother, by Aunt Jessie and Uncle Ross, and by the nuns at the Catholic school. No wonder that the shock of those days would never leave her system, that it would linger like a persistent virus that plagued her for the next eighty years.

Ruth’s mother had been in the hospital for surgery at the time, so on the night before the burning, it was Aunt Jessie who dressed the little girl for the school program at Convention Hall, warning her against soiling her new white dress, which would cost nine dollars to dry-clean if it became dirty. But Auntie forgot about dry-cleaning costs when Father Heiring rushed onto the stage. In fact, it was Ruth’s aunt who forced her and her younger brother, Jack, onto the dirty floor of the trolley that was packed with terrified people trying to escape south. The streetcar had been waiting near Convention Hall, which was only a few blocks west of the Negro district, and its windows had already been shot out. Several people cut their hands on the pieces of glass that lay about on the floor.

They rode in silence as the trolley clacked along, until Auntie yelled for the conductor to stop at Eighth Street and Main. Then she grabbed the hands of the children, and she, Ruth, and Jack sprinted for home a block away, where she pulled down the blinds as the priest had instructed members of his flock to do. Instead of putting on the electric lights, Auntie lit a candle to lead Ruth and her brother to their bedrooms, where she told them to remove their shoes but to sleep with their clothes on, though she didn’t say why. So Ruth crawled beneath the covers in her once-precious white dress that was now wrinkled and smudged from the trolley floor. Her aunt closed Ruth’s bedroom window against the sounds of gunfire and men shouting around the courthouse, which was only four blocks away. Ruth shivered in terror when Auntie left to look in on Jack.

Ruth wondered in later years how she managed to fall asleep that terrible night. But she did. She must have been asleep, because the loud bumping sound outside awakened her at dawn. She had never heard trucks in the neighborhood so early. In the thin morning light and in the shock of what she saw, it took a few seconds before she could comprehend the scene outside her bedroom window. Two slat-sided cattle trucks inched by in succession. Ruth assumed at first that the Negroes were only sleeping on the truck beds, but then she recalled the dire words of Father Heiring, and the sounds of the shooting, and it all began to fit together in her childish mind. It also dawned on her that no person could sleep like that, with people piled on top of one another. The corpses were stacked haphazardly, as if whoever put them on the trucks had been in a hurry. Negro arms and legs bounced through the slats with each bump in the road. A dead woman’s legs dangled from the open tailgate of the front truck, and Ruth wondered what kept the woman’s body from toppling onto the pavement altogether.

Some of the bodies were naked. Others wore only pants. A few dead women wore colorful kimonos. There were dead children on the trucks, too. Well, at least one. A young Negro boy lay spread-eagled atop the pile of dead Negroes on the second truck. He was barefoot, but otherwise dressed in a neat plaid shirt and dark-colored pants, as if he was getting ready for school when the end came. The truck bumped over another pothole and the boy’s arms flounced. The bump in the road also caused his head to roll toward Ruth’s window. The dead boy’s eyes were wide open and seemed to look straight at her, somehow pleading with her. His mouth was open, too, as if to scream, but no sound came out. By the terrified look on his face, Ruth thought the boy had been scared to death.

Her mind raced and her stomach tumbled. She had overheard previous conversations between Uncle Ross and Aunt Jessie about how the Klan hated Negroes, so she naturally figured that the Klan had killed that little boy and the rest of those Negroes on the trucks. But the Klan hated Catholics, too, didn’t they? Ruth was a Catholic and about the same age as that boy on the truck. Might she someday end up on a pile of dead people?

The trucks were well down the street before she found her voice. “Auntie!” she screamed.

Aunt Jessie rushed into the room and gathered the hysterical child in her arms. She looked out the window to see what had frightened her niece, but by then, the trucks were long gone. Even when she had calmed down, Ruth had difficulty explaining what she had seen, had so much trouble untangling her words, that she began to wonder whether the dead bodies had been there at all. Auntie encouraged her in that regard, patting Ruth’s head and dismissing her vision as a particularly bad nightmare. Then she brought the children to the breakfast table, lit another candle, and set steaming bowls of porridge in front of them as if it were any other Wednesday morning. After a few comforting spoonfuls, Ruth had almost convinced herself that despite the dirt on her dress, the whole chain of events had been nothing but a nightmare—Father Heiring on the stage, hiding on the trolley, those bodies on the truck, and the face of that horrified Negro boy. It wasn’t possible that such terrible things could happen in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But then Uncle Ross came bursting in through the front door, holding a folded newspaper, looking like he hadn’t slept.

“The Tulsa World says an army of blacks are coming from Muskogee and they’re gonna burn the whole place down,” he told Aunt Jessie, gesturing with the paper.

“My Lord,” Auntie said.

“The World says those Negroes are gonna start at Central High School and work their way out from there,” Uncle Ross said.

“But Ross, that’s only a block away,” Auntie said. “What will we do?”

“I’ll tell you what we won’t do,” Ross said. “We won’t stay here. You and the children get out to the car. We need to get to the country place. My guess is that we’ll be safe there.”

The four of them, Uncle Ross and Aunt Jessie, Ruth and Jack, rushed outside and climbed into the Ford. Ross fired up the engine and sped off east on Eighth Street. Suddenly he turned north.

“What on earth are you doing?” Aunt Jessie said.

“I want to have a look at what’s causing all that smoke,” Uncle Jack replied.

“But what about the Negroes coming from Muskogee?” Aunt Jessie asked.

“It couldn’t hurt to take a quick look, could it?” Ross said. “My God, I’ve never seen smoke like that. I’ll just take a minute. Then we’ll go. I promise.”

Auntie sulked in the passenger seat but didn’t argue after that. Uncle Ross drove north on Main Street as the wall of black smoke towered above them. Then he turned right on Easton and drove up the backside of Standpipe Hill, which extended into Greenwood like a long, fat finger. He stopped the car and they all sat speechless, struck mute, almost paralyzed by the otherworldly spectacle unfolding around them.

Dozens of other cars were already parked in the grass at the top of the hill. Some of the occupants were spectators, including several women who stood behind the thick trunks of oaks and cottonwoods to look down on what was happening in Greenwood. But there was an army up there, too. Several men in the khaki uniforms of World War I veterans, and other men wearing civilian clothes, lay on their bellies at the crest of the hill, firing with rifles and shotguns into the Negro neighborhoods below. Some of the men had turned their caps backward so the bills wouldn’t affect their aim.

Ruth could look down into Greenwood from the backseat of the Ford. She saw the source of the smoke: orange flames flickering from dozens of homes and larger brick business buildings. Groups of Negroes dashed away from Standpipe through the black haze, many of them adults dragging children along by their arms. Some Negroes fell as they ran and didn’t get up. White puffs of smoke billowed repeatedly from the windows of a huge brick church at the bottom of the hill, smoke from the guns of the Negro men who fired back up at the whites.

Then planes roared in from the east, circling over the church. Ruth was afraid that the planes would swoop in their direction and shoot down at them, too, but in a few minutes, the machines circled again and disappeared.

A large brown dog raced up the hill toward their car, yelping in pain from the flames shooting up from its tail, until the man in the car next to them pulled out a pistol and shot the dog in the head. A white hen, its feathers singed black, cackled wildly and died.

Several khaki-clad veterans manned the machine gun that spit bullets from the top of the hill just south of Uncle Ross’s Ford. One man aimed and fired toward the Negro church while another fed a string of bullets into the gun, and other men crouched nearby. One of the veterans at the machine gun spotted Ruth and her family, who were still sitting stunned in their car, and broke away from the others, running toward them. He waved a shotgun over his head, screaming to be heard above the noise. Ruth couldn’t hear what he said until the man had almost reached their car.

“Dammit to hell!” he yelled. “Get out of here! You’re in the range of fire.”

Then he dropped his shotgun, and a dark red stain sprouted on the left shoulder of his uniform.

“Oh, my God!” he cried. “Oh, my God!”

He staggered against the Ford, clutching his wound with both hands. He tried to steady himself with a hand against the car, leaving bloody prints near Ruth’s window. He bent to retrieve his weapon, but fell over into the dirt. Ruth instinctively leaned out her window to help him and Jessie pulled her back, but not before the man’s blood had stained Ruth’s white dress, which sickened her. It was a good thing that Uncle Ross had gathered his wits and begun to pull away. Soon they were racing back down the hill, which was the last thing Ruth remembered for a while. The world turned black and she heard a shrill scream that came to her from a long distance.

“Jack, slap her!” Aunt Jessie yelled. “She’s hysterical.”

The sting of her brother’s palm brought Ruth back around, but her stomach immediately began to tumble. As they raced toward the country, she stuck her head out the window and vomited down the side of the Ford.

*   *   *

The standoff made the whites around Mount Zion impatient, and angrier each time one of their own fell dead or wounded. They cheered when the machine gun was moved from the top of the mill on First Street to the place where it was really needed on Standpipe Hill, and before long, the gun rattled away at the snipers in the Mount Zion belfry, splintering the new red bricks of the church. But the Negroes would still not budge. The whites charged the church in a series of frontal assaults that were blunted before any of them could get near Mount Zion’s front door. Many whites were killed in the attacks. Inside the church as the battle wore on, Negro casualties numbered seven men killed or wounded.

Then the whites turned to deception.

“Hey, fellas,” one man shouted toward the church. “Enough blood’s been shed here. Let’s talk.”

A few whites waved a white sheet, walking slowly toward the front door of the church, apparently unarmed and with their hands in the air. O. B. Mann immediately suspected a trick and kept his rifle trained on the whites as they inched forward. But the Negroes were desperately low on bullets and his comrades figured it wouldn’t hurt to listen, so they held their fire until it was too late.

Mann’s suspicions had been correct. While the Negroes were distracted, whites snuck up to the sides of the church with kerosene and torches, and the massive sanctuary was engulfed in flames within minutes. The battle for Mount Zion was effectively over, and with the church went the last great vestige of Greenwood life. The Negro fighters convened in the sanctuary, choking from the smoke, holding handkerchiefs over their mouths while they considered their options. They could stay in the church and burn to death, or join ranks and dash for freedom out the front door and maybe kill a few more whites as they did, which was no choice at all.

The men loaded the bullets that remained. O. B. Mann shouldered one of the wounded Negroes and moved toward Mount Zion’s front door with the others who gathered in the thickening smoke. Hell itself could not have been worse than it was inside that church, so forty Negroes went charging out the door, firing as they went. Mann and about thirty others somehow penetrated the white ranks, then raced north along Easton. They fought final losing battles at a place farther north called Sunset Hill and then, about noon, at a Negro store at the northern boundary of Greenwood. After that, Mann and the few surviving fighters fled into the hills.

Ten other Negroes never made it off Mount Zion property. The whites emptied their weapons into the bodies of the fallen blacks, then kicked the corpses when their guns were empty. Smoke poured from the Mount Zion windows, and finally the belfry collapsed as the whites cheered.

*   *   *

The Negro battalions never arrived that morning from Muskogee, or from anyplace else. Neither Central High School nor any other white institution in Tulsa was ever threatened. In fact, classes at the sprawling school went on that morning as scheduled, though a sizable portion of the student body was absent because frightened parents had kept their children home, or because of the number of teenage boys who had joined the white mob.

Not that the school day proceeded with anything approaching normalcy. A visiting professor from France was livid when in the middle of her lecture on French poetry, her students insisted on rushing to the windows to watch trucks and wagons loaded with dead bodies rumble past. Several boys climbed to the roof of the high school to watch corpses trucked away, or to get a better view of the explosions that erupted periodically in Greenwood, or of the flames that shot up from the Negro buildings. A history teacher named Mrs. Whitham discovered the boys on the roof and insisted they return to their rooms and study for final exams. The students reluctantly complied, then spent most of the morning at the windows anyway. Some of them, particularly the girls, became ill at the sight of the bodies and asked to be excused.

For others, the corpses, and the sound of gunfire that lingered throughout the morning, inspired a different reaction. A large gang of teenage boys decided that they would like to join the action after all, and headed down the corridors toward the front door.

The principal intercepted them on the front steps, ordering them to go home immediately, but the boys ignored him and struck off down the street to the north. Most of the shops along the way were closed. “Closed for Nigger Day,” read signs in some of the windows. On the way, the boys encountered dozens of weary whites heading home after the eventful night. One of the men handed the delighted boys a new rifle and pocketfuls of ammunition.

“I’ve had enough shooting,” the man said. “I’m going home and going to bed.”

Then he shuffled off and the boys raced happily in the direction of the smoke and the flames.