The Unfinished Story of Dick Rowland

For nearly a century, narratives about the massacre have revolved around a mysterious shoe shine boy and an even more elusive elevator operator.

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For a long time, people would say the trouble started in an elevator. A black male and a white female, both just teenagers, had a chance encounter that mutated into one of the worst acts of racial terror in United States history. There’s a butterfly-effect mystique to this version of the tale. The main characters are only roughly sketched out in the historical record, making them refractions of the person telling their story rather than fully realized people themselves. He was an innocent shoe shine boy, or a Negro brute. She was a young woman who just got startled, or a conniving temptress who weaponized her whiteness. Or maybe they were star-crossed lovers who escaped from the city together in the chaotic days that followed the Tulsa Race Massacre.

More than anything, Dick Rowland and Sarah Page became an intuitive way to simplify the story of Greenwood’s destruction. A complex narrative about mob justice, armed self-defense, and white rage can be transformed into a disagreement between two individuals. They persist in the mythology of Tulsa because even as mere shadows, they are easier to grapple with than everything that followed their collision.

Dick Rowland worked shining shoes in downtown Tulsa in May 1921. His background before then is hazy. He may have been adopted by a woman named Damie Rowland Ford, who recounted taking in a young orphan named Jimmie Jones in the early 1900’s. She said that the boy took on her surname and picked out the new first name “Dick” as a teen. Other sources point to him being the son of David and Alice “Ollie” Rowland, Damie’s parents, who owned a rooming house on Archer Street in Greenwood.

However “Dick Rowland” came to be, residents of Greenwood remembered him clearly decades after the massacre. W.D. Williams recalled him being a “nice old boy” as a classmate at Booker T. Washington High School, before Rowland dropped out. Robert Fairchild said they shined shoes together downtown. “He was handsome, very good looking,” Fairchild said in 1978. “As near as I can recall Dick, he was a ladies' man.”

Fairchild and Rowland would have made decent money shining shoes--$5 per week, plus as much as $10 or $20 in tips from the white oilmen and bankers who had more cash than they knew how to spend. According to local lore, Dick made enough money to buy flashy suits and jewelry, earning the nickname “Diamond Dick.” Even if that was the case, his opportunities would have still been hemmed in by Jim Crow. The shoe shine parlor where he worked had no bathroom, so workers would go to the Drexel Building, a four-story structure about a block away, which offered one of the only toilets available to black people downtown. The bathroom was on the fourth floor, above a department store called Renberg’s. It was accessible by a rickety elevator, which in those days would have been operated by an attendant. On May 30, 1921, when Dick Rowland entered the building, it was Sarah Page who was manning the lift. 

While Rowland’s biography is flimsy, Page’s is nearly nonexistent. In immediate accounts of the elevator incident she is described (without being named) as a 17-year-old orphan working to pay her own tuition to business college. Later, she’d be ID’d as a 15-year-old girl from Kansas City who had recently divorced. Her name does not appear in the 1921 city directory. 

At some point during their elevator ride, Page screamed. The most popular theory today is that when the old elevator made a sudden lurch, Rowland lost his balance and stepped on Page’s foot or grabbed her arm, startling her. However, a white clerk who heard the scream came over to investigate, and Rowland fled the scene. He and every other Tulsan would have been aware of the mortal danger a black man faced if even accused of assaulting a white woman. It’s unclear exactly what accusation against Rowland may have come from Page herself or the store clerk who arrived on the scene, but the next morning, the young black man was arrested by a pair of police officers and taken to the police headquarters downtown. 

On the afternoon of May 31, Tulsa police commissioner J.M. Adkinson received an anonymous phone call. “We are going to lynch that negro tonight,” the caller warned. Adkinson quickly ordered that Rowland be moved for his protection to the more secure jail that sat atop the county courthouse. He would remain there as news of the elevator encounter riled the white residents of Tulsa, and news of the subsequent arrest angered the black ones.

The Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was kept on the top floor the night of the massacre. Photo courtesy Tulsa-County Public Library.

These were the events that set the stage for a confrontation in front of the courthouse on the night of May 31, when armed blacks from Greenwood drove into downtown in order to protect Rowland from the armed whites they feared would lynch him. Though Rowland was ostensibly the reason both groups assembled, his fate quickly slid out of focus as violence erupted in the streets (I’ll discuss what is known about how the shooting started in a later newsletter). 

 As the scope of the conflict grew, and then morphed into something even more brutal with the burning of Greenwood, Rowland was more or less forgotten in his cell. According to one account, he left Tulsa the next morning, never to return. In September of 1921, the Tulsa World reported that the charges against him had been dropped. Rowland was innocent, but Tulsa was burdened with a festering guilt that it has still done little to rectify. 

In oral histories collected from massacre survivors decades later, Rowland takes on the role of a folk hero--he ran off to Kansas City, or he lighted out for Oregon, or he snuck back into Tulsa one night to visit his adoptive mother. Page was also rumored to have wound up in Kansas City, though nothing concrete places her there. Their stories will remain forever unfinished, piquing the curiosity of anyone who is first learning about the massacre. But fleshing out their lives offers no greater understanding of what happened in Tulsa, or why. 

An event as devastating as the Tulsa Race Massacre--thousands of homes destroyed, millions of dollars in damage accrued, potentially hundreds of lives lost--must be thought about on the scale of institutions, not individuals. Rowland and Page are intriguing curiosities tied to the event, but they are not the reason Tulsa burned. Over the next few newsletters, I’ll examine several of the institutions that played a pivotal role in the massacre’s origins--starting with the newspaper that turned Dick Rowland into a household name just hours before the first fires were lit. 

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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, and it has been named a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Buy Built From the Fire on Amazon, Bookshop, or at your local bookseller.

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Sources

1921 Tulsa City Directory

Fairchild, Robert (1978). An oral history with Robert Fairchild/Interviewer: Scott Ellsworth.

Ford, Damie Rowland (1972). An oral history with Damie Rowland Ford/Interviewer: Ruth Sigler Avery. Ruth Sigler Avery Collection (Series 1, Box 2). Oklahoma State University-Tulsa, Tulsa.

Hirsch, James. Riot and Remembrance.

Krehbiel, Randy. Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre.

“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.” Tulsa Tribune. May 31 1921.

Williams, W.D. (1978). An oral history with Robert Fairchild/Interviewer: Scott Ellsworth.