Judge Lynch
Oklahoma's white power structure systematically condoned lynching, from the police to the press to the mobs themselves. It was Greenwood residents who upheld the rule of law
Phrases above the masthead of the Tulsa Star often addressed the scourge of lynching and the need for armed resistance
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Marie Scott sat alone on a spring night in the Wagoner County jail, about 40 miles east of Tulsa. It was 1914, and Scott was just 17 years old. She was a new arrival in town who was living in a black neighborhood that newspapers derisively called “the Bottoms.” Her life and her world would have been invisible to the white people of Wagoner, except for the fact that a white man named Lem Peace was killed during a trip to her neighborhood. Scott was accused of his murder.
The details of Scott’s encounter with Peace were murky from the moment they landed on newsprint. According to some articles, Scott stabbed Peace after he and another man attempted to rape her. One historian’s account claims that Scott’s brother killed Peace in her defense, and Scott was arrested after her brother fled town. Local retellings by white newspapers of the era said that Scott had approached Peace on the road and stabbed him without warning. The truth is unknowable. Only this is plainly evident: The white writers who described Scott’s behavior in the most vicious and irrational terms are the ones who expressed the most admiration for what happened next.
At about 1 a.m. that night at the jail, a group of masked white men armed with revolvers overpowered the lone jailer. They pulled Scott from her cell and marched her to the corner of Main and First Street. According to one account, a rope was already cast around Scott’s neck as she was dragged through the streets. The men hanged her from a telephone pole in the middle of town, leaving her body for the sheriff to retrieve whenever he happened to show up.
In nearby Tulsa, the lynching does not seem to have garnered coverage in the Tulsa World, and it received a short, terse treatment in the Tulsa Democrat (in Wagoner, the white paper asserted, “That lynching will result beneficially to this community”). Only A.J. Smitherman of the black-owned Tulsa Star denounced the attack. Like many black entrepreneurs of the period, Smitherman was an ardent moralizer who believed black people had to condemn the vice and crime that emerged in their own communities. He labeled Scott as a prostitute and acknowledged that she might have been guilty of her alleged crime, though he was skeptical the killing was as cold-blooded as portrayed in the white press. But more important than Scott’s station in life was her right to a presumption of innocence and a trial. Smitherman was not naive enough to assume that such a trial would be fair, but he understood that the elimination of even the pretense of justice would ultimately prove disastrous for black people.
“These conditions are becoming very alarming and a serious calamity is sure to follow if something is not done to force all citizens to respect the law,” Smitherman wrote. “There can be nothing but shame and contempt in the heart of any true man for the hellish victims who committed this basterdly [sic] crime. Will Judge Allan call a grand jury? Wait and see.”
Oklahoma wasn’t supposed to be like this. The state was once envisioned as an idyllic all-black state, an escape from the white terrorism that seized the South in the decades after the Civil War. After three black businessmen were lynched in Memphis in March 1892, thousands of black people made the journey west to the Oklahoma and Indian Territories (which, combined, make up modern Oklahoma). Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who dedicated her life to chronicling the scourge of lynching, visited Oklahoma herself in April of that year and saw “the chance [blacks] had of developing manhood and womanhood in this new territory.” She even considered relocating her Memphis newspaper to the region but was overruled by her business partner.
By the time of the Wagoner lynching in 1914, both the image and reality Oklahoma had soured. While most of the lynching victims in the region were white during the years before statehood, mob violence took on a starkly racialized form as more Southern whites poured into the state. Between 1907 and 1914, 21 black people were lynched in Oklahoma, with many of their murders becoming morbid fodder for postcards. In one haunting image from the town of Okemah, a mother and son named Laura and L.D. Nelson hang from a bridge while about 30 white men, women and children stand above their dangling bodies. Originally meant to provide titillating entertainment, the photo now haunts the American psyche as a rare visual depiction of the brutalities black women faced during that era.
Smitherman refused to witness black death passively. He regularly encouraged black people in Tulsa to arm themselves so they could be ready to stave off a potential lynching at a moment’s notice. “Any man has a right to resort to arms to defend the law, or to protect a citizen from violence,” he wrote after yet another lynching in August 1914, this one in the town of Eufaula. “It's up to us to act. We must have justice!" Smitherman went beyond mere rhetoric, as well. In 1918, he traveled to Bristow, Oklahoma, in order to prevent the rumored lynching of a black man named Edgar Bohanan who was being held in the local jail on charges of shooting and robbing a white man. At least two hundred black farmers “armed to the teeth” were in town prepared to defend the accused man, with violence if necessary. The police managed to keep the white mob that formed near the jail under control, and Bohanan was placed on a northbound train for his own safety. Smitherman’s aid was not needed, but the presence of so many armed defenders shows that his mentality was common among black men in that era.
When white people fell victim to lynch mobs, Smitherman was just as loud in his denunciations. About nine months before the 1921 race massacre, a young white man named Roy Belton accused of murdering a white taxi driver was taken from his cell at the top of the courthouse, driven out of town by a caravan of cars, and hanged from a road sign. A mob of dozens ripped the clothes from Belton’s body as souvenirs, while police officers looked on in tacit acceptance of the murder. While the white establishment, including the press, the sheriff and the police chief, accepted the lynching as a valid form of street justice, only Smitherman rang alarm bells about the collapse of the rule of law. “The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on top of the Court House from mob violence,” he wrote.
It was the very same courthouse where a black shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland would be held on May 31, 1921, when years of violent provocations by Oklahoma’s white supremacists finally came due. For generations the story of Rowland and Sarah Page, a white elevator operator he was accused of sexually assaulting, has served as a shorthand for explaining the reason for the massacre, especially for people outside of Tulsa (I’ll get into what we know about what happened between the pair in a newsletter very soon). But the nexus of the conflict in Tulsa was not a false rape accusation or a salacious newspaper headline. It was violence--the threat of it, the memory of it, and the unwillingness of the white power structure to stop it.
Rowland and Page are the two most famous names tied to the events of the massacre, but decades later, it was these earlier lynchings that massacre survivor Robert Fairchild recalled lingering in the minds of the black Tulsans who chose to defend Greenwood. The news of deaths like Marie Scott’s sparked a radical shift in mindset in black Tulsa years before their world was upended. Fairchild described that mindset simply: “Whenever they come over here to lynch somebody, we're going to be in the middle of it."
Thank you for reading. To learn more about the origins of Greenwood, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and the community’s astonishing rebirth, check out my narrative nonfiction book Built From the Fire. The book was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Buy Built From the Fire on Amazon, Bookshop, or at your local bookseller.
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Sources
Daly, Michael. “The Real Lynchings in SAE’s Oklahoma Backyard.” The Daily Beast. March 12 2015.
Dorrien, Gary. The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. 2015.
Hirsch, James. Riot and Remembrance. 2002.
McMahan, Liz. “Lynchings Occurred in Wagoner.” Wagoner County American-Tribune. Aug. 3 2013.
Meaders, Daniel. “Black Women Who Were Lynched in America.” Accessed via Henrietta Vinton Davis’s Weblog. Aug. 1 2008.
Monroe Work Today Dataset Compilation.
“Negress Who Wantonly Killed Lem Peace Saturday Night Taken From Jail Monday Night and Hanged From Telephone Pole.” Wagoner County Courier. April 2 1914.
Oklahoma Daily Times Journal. April 12 1892.
Smitherman, A.J. “A Near Lynchiing at Bristow, Okla.” Tulsa Star. Aug. 24 1918.
Smitherman, A.J. “Another Man Lynched. And the Murderers, as Usual Go Unpunished.” Tulsa Star. Aug. 8 1914.
Smitherman, A.J. “One Hundred Men Lynched Negro Woman at Wagoner.” Tulsa Star. April 4 1914.
“Wagoner Lynching of Negro Woman.” Tulsa Democrat. April 1 1914.
Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. 2020.