Anniversary of Tulsa Race Riot - Black Community Destroyed by White Mob

TULSA, OK — Four of the remaining 70 or so survivors of mob violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31-June 1, 1921 have nightmarish memories:

 Annie Beaird was seven years old. She was wakened by shotgun blasts all around her family’s house. — Kenny Booker was a teenager. He remembers leading his sister through the house in horror as he learned every home on the street was in flames. “Is the world on fire?” his sister asked. “I don’t know,” Booker responded, “but we’re in a heck of a lot of trouble here, baby.” — Beulah Smith, then 14, escaped slaughter by hiding in the family hog pen as truckloads of white men shot black people on sight.

 George Monroe was five years old at the time: “They came in the house with torches, and my mother hid us four wee children under the bed. They set the curtains on fire and, as one guy was leaving, he stepped on my fingers. My little sister slapped her hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming out. That’s what I remember most, my little sister’s hand slapped over my mouth.” The roller rink his father owned was one of the many black-owned businesses destroyed by the mob.

 These survivors were among the lucky. Three hundred others were left dead and their 36-block neighborhood left in smoldering ruins. On the night of May 31, 1921, hatred, fueled perhaps by envy of the perceived economic prosperity of blacks, was unleashed by an armed mob that had gathered at the jailhouse for a lynching. A 19-year-old black man, a shoeshiner named Dick Rowland, had been wrongly accused of trying to rape a 17-year-old white woman, Sarah Page, an elevator operator in a downtown building, the day before. The woman never pressed charges.

 A group of armed black men gathered to defend Rowland while petitioning for his fair trial. A scuffle led to an exchange of gunfire and the city was beset with fire bombings and gunplay, often from automatic weapons. The white mob marched on toward homes across the railroad tracks in the black neighborhood of Greenwood. The Oklahoma National Guard was called out but did not arrive until the next day. [MORE]