The Story of Black Wall Street: What They Lost
A partial accounting
On Oct. 21 researchers uncovered ten coffins in an unmarked mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery. The coffins may contain victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
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The first thing they lost was a man, name unknown, who was shot as he ran out from an alley onto Third Street. A crowd of white people gathered around to watch the life leave him. The crowd wouldn’t let a doctor or an ambulance anywhere close to the dying man, and so he bled out right there on the street.
They lost another man, name unknown, who was dragged behind a car down First Street. A group of white men tied a rope around the man’s neck, hitched him to their vehicle, and went barreling down the road at 50 miles per hour.
They lost more men at the Frisco railroad tracks, the informal dividing line between black and white Tulsa. There, as the bloody night dragged on, whites scaled a flour mill at the corner of Greenwood Avenue and First Street and fired down upon the black neighborhood. Thousands of empty cartridges were later found scattered across the mill floor.
They lost the right to sleep in their own beds. At dawn, after the sounding of a loud whistle, the chaotic violence of the previous night gave way to something more calculated. Small cadres of armed white men, some of them deputized by law enforcement, went from house to house rounding up Greenwood residents to take to internment camps. The move was for their own safety, the men sometimes claimed, but it was not optional. Traveling with only the clothes on their backs, men, women, and children were marched to Convention Hall downtown or the nearby fairgrounds. Most would never see their homes intact again.
They lost A.C. Jackson, a renowned black doctor, who was shot in cold blood, his hands in the air, as he tried to comply with the white mob’s orders. They lost Eddie Lockard and Reuben Everett and Joe Miller and John Wheeler and George Jeffrey. They lost many more people whose names will never be known.
They lost the ability to breathe. The fires were set systematically, like this: A team of white men would enter a home, blowing the lock off the door if necessary. The men would smash all the valuables found inside, or steal them. After gathering the bedding, wooden furniture and other flammable materials into the center of the home, the men would douse the objects in kerosene. Then the men would light a match. Smoke hung over Greenwood, and all of Tulsa, for days. The black folks had to cough and sputter in the thick poison, but it traveled far across the city and the Oklahoma plains, and so their attackers inhaled the poison too.
They lost the following physical items: a front porch swing, several barbershop chairs, multiple pianos, a violin, a china closet along with all of its contents, a cedar bucket, an ivory bedroom suite, a leopard-print coat, several featherbeds, a Victrola, a collection of rings, a set of rocking chairs, a bookcase case filled with 60 books, a lawnmower, a sewing machine, window shades, a gas heater, a refrigerator, a 21-jewel ladies’ watch, a shotgun, a popcorn machine, a typewriter and a desk to sit it on, four pairs of eyeglasses, a Burroughs Adding Machine, multiple Hamilton Beech electric dryers, an electric fan, a manicuring table, a dog, a collection of cigars, eight pool tables along with the associated accessories, a coffee urn, a cache of savings bonds, a gold plate, two automobiles, a safe, a collection of diamonds, an Elberta peach tree, a chandelier, three massage machines, a set of hair clippers, German pistols, an organ, a barn and three wagons, an ambulance, a Kodak camera, an X-ray machine, a microscope, several medical books, liberty bonds purchased during World War I, a Louis XIV walnut dining room set, an ice box, a silk umbrella, an entire law library.
They lost the daily take from the shows at the Dreamland Theater, which could be $3,000 over the course of a brisk weekend. They lost the cash they had hidden under mattresses, inside shoeboxes, beneath loose floorboards. They lost their business ledgers and insurance paperwork, but that didn’t really matter anyway because the insurance companies were never going to pay out over a riot, and the banks were never going to issue a new business loan in ‘Niggertown,’ as white Tulsans still called it decades after the fact.
They lost A.J. Smitherman, the moral clarion at the Tulsa Star, who fled to Boston and then to Buffalo after he was charged with inciting a riot. They lost J.B. Stradford, the hotel owner and business magnate, who left for Chicago under similar legal threat. They lost Loula Williams, who didn’t leave Tulsa in body but did in spirit, unable to run her businesses as depression set in and her mind slowly fractured into a thousand shards that could only focus, occasionally, on those missing rings. They lost the hundreds of Greenwood residents, names unknown, who were seen walking northward on foot along the Midland Valley railroad track, their joint pilgrimage stretching for miles toward the horizon.
They lost their last bit of faith in a legal system that had never been built for them in the first place. They would file lawsuits, nearly 200 of them, in the coming years. But they knew they’d have to start rebuilding on their own long before a Tulsa or Oklahoma or U.S. Supreme Court judge would grant them justice, because all three courts had already failed them time and again.
They lost their ability to be remembered as anything but “they,” the collective victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Their individual hopes, dreams, frustrations, schemes, rivalries, loves became subsumed by the legacy of the riot, just as their homes had been devoured by the flames of the event itself. They became the refugees, the riot victims, the Negro problem, “bad niggers,”—and all that just in their own time. Today they are a point of historical trivia, a trending topic, a dramatic scene in the HBO series Watchmen, a dramatic scene in the HBO series Lovecraft Country, a canvass on which people have granted themselves the right to imprint their current racial anxieties and political agendas. Whether or not they would prefer to rest in peace, we have insisted they haunt us as ghosts. Their bones rise from the grave this very week. It is unnatural, and when considered beyond the urgent need to make headlines and history, almost unbearably grotesque. If it is now our responsibility to reckon with the depravity of it all, in a way that white Tulsa wouldn’t and black Tulsa wasn’t allowed to, then let us never minimize how horrible it truly was.
They lost eight little ones, born premature, before it was all over. They lost their past. They lost their future.
That is what they lost.