[American Terror. A century ago in Tulsa, a murderous mob attacked
the most prosperous black community in the nation.]
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REMEMBERING TULSA  
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Tim Madigan; Photographs by Zora J. Murff with Trent Bozeman
March 16, 2021
Smithsonian Magazine
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_ American Terror. A century ago in Tulsa, a murderous mob attacked
the most prosperous black community in the nation. _

Artist Aaron R. Turner shaped these historic images of black Tulsa
residents into three-dimensional forms and then photographed them.,
Aaron R. Turner

 

At 5:08 a.m. on June 1, 1921, a whistle pierced the predawn quiet of
Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was disagreement later about whether the sound
came from a steam engine on the railroad tracks or from a factory in
the center of the booming oil town, but there was no doubting its
meaning. It was the signal for as many as 10,000 armed white Tulsans,
some dressed in Army uniforms from their service in World War I, to
attack the place known as Greenwood, the city’s uniquely prosperous
African American community. “From every place of shelter up and down
the tracks came screaming, shouting men to join in the rush toward the
Negro section,” a white witness named Choc Phillips later
remembered. By dawn, “machine guns were sweeping the valley with
their murderous fire,” recalled a Greenwood resident named Dimple
Bush. “Old women and men and children were running and screaming
everywhere.”

The trouble had begun the day before. A black teenage shoeshine boy
named Dick Rowland had been arrested and charged with assaulting a
white girl in an elevator of a downtown Tulsa building. Even white
police detectives thought the accusation dubious. The consensus later
was that whatever happened between them was innocuous, perhaps that
Rowland had stepped on the toe of young Sarah Page when the elevator
lurched. But that was academic after the _Tulsa Tribune_, one of the
city’s two white newspapers, ran an incendiary editorial under a
headline residents remembered as “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”

That evening, black community leaders met in the Greenwood newspaper
office of A.J. Smitherman to discuss a response. Already a white mob
had gathered outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Some
African American leaders counseled patience, citing the promise of
Sheriff Willard McCullough to protect Rowland. Others wouldn’t hear
of it. A cadre of about 25 black residents, some in their own Army
uniforms and carrying rifles, shotguns, pistols, axes, garden hoes and
rakes, drove south from Greenwood and marched the final blocks to the
courthouse and offered the sheriff their assistance.

At about 10:30 p.m., when a second group of 75 or so residents marched
to the courthouse, an elderly white man tried to grab the gun of a
black World War I veteran. A shot went off during the scuffle. Scores
of other shots were fired in the panic that followed. Men, women and
children dove for cover behind trees and parked cars, but as many as a
dozen people of both races ended up dead.

The black marchers retreated to Greenwood. A lull set in after 2 a.m.,
but tensions rose in the hours of darkness. Then the whistle rang out.
Armed black residents hiding on the rooftops of the sturdy brown-brick
buildings lining Greenwood Avenue attempted to repel the white mob.
But the mob not only had superior numbers; it also had machine guns,
which were placed at elevated points on the edge of Greenwood, as well
as biplanes, perhaps belonging to a local oil company, which circled
overhead and rained bullets and dropped incendiaries.

Thousands of residents of the Greenwood district, known as the
“Negro Wall Street of America,” were left homeless after the
attack destroyed roughly 1,100 residences and dozens of businesses and
churches. As many as 300 people were killed. (Oklahoma Historical
Society (2); University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of
Special Collections)

Members of the white mob, which included teenage boys and some women,
went from business to business, church to church, home to home,
hefting weapons, torches and containers of kerosene, rousting African
American shop owners and residents and killing those who resisted and
some who did not.

A white Tulsa resident named Walter Ferrell, who was a boy at the time
of the massacre, recalled years later how he used to play every day
with three black children who lived across the street from him on the
border of Greenwood. On the morning of June 1, young Walter watched as
a carload of white men entered the home of his friends. Then he heard
a series of gunshots. He waited for his friends to flee from the
flames engulfing their residence, but they never did. “It’s just
too terrible to talk about, even decades later,” Ferrell told an
interviewer in 1971.

W.D. Williams was 16 years old at the time. His family owned the
thriving Williams’ Confectionary at the corner of Greenwood Avenue
and Archer Street. Just down the block was their Dreamland Theater.

When the attack came, W.D. Williams fought next to his father, John,
who fired down at armed invaders from an upper floor of the Williams
Building until the place that was both their home and place of
business was overrun. When the teenager eventually surrendered, he was
marched down Greenwood Avenue with his hands in the air, past his
family’s flaming theater and candy store. He watched as a white
looter emerged from his home with a fur coat belonging to his mother,
Loula, stuffed inside a bag.

Eldoris McCondichie was 9 years old on the morning of June 1. She was
roused early by her mother. “Eldoris, wake up!” she said. “We
have to go! The white people are killing the colored folks!”

On a morning nearly 80 years later, as I sat in her Tulsa living room,
McCondichie remembered how she and her parents joined a long line of
black people headed north along the railroad tracks, away from the
advancing mob. Many were dressed only in nightclothes, clutching pets
and family Bibles. She recalled that a plane appeared, buzzing low and
spraying bullets, causing her to pull away from her father and flee
into a chicken coop. Her father pulled her out and back into the line
of refugees. McCondichie and her family returned to Greenwood a few
days later and found their home among the few still standing, but
almost everything else within eyesight had been reduced to piles of
charred wood and rubble. “By now, I know better than to talk about
that day without holding a few of these,” she said, rising to take a
handful of tissues.

After the fires burned out, Greenwood, known at the time as the Negro
Wall Street of America, on account of its affluence, resembled a city
flattened by a massive bomb. The mob had burned more than 1,100 homes
(215 more were looted but not burned), five hotels, 31 restaurants,
four drugstores, eight doctors’ offices, a new school, two dozen
grocery stores, Greenwood’s hospital, its public library and a dozen
churches. In all, 35 square blocks were destroyed. Most of the
area’s 10,000 residents were left homeless. Estimates of losses in
property and personal assets, by today’s standards, range from $20
million to more than $200 million.

White mobs broke into homes as well as businesses, robbing cash,
clothing, jewelry, keepsakes and other personal property before
setting fire to buildings. Ultimately, 35 square blocks burned to the
ground. (Oklahoma State University, Tulsa. Library, Special
Collections and Archives)

A white Tulsa girl named Ruth Sigler Avery recalled a grim scene:
“cattle trucks heavily laden with bloody, dead, black bodies,”
Avery wrote decades later in an unfinished memoir. “Some were naked,
some dressed only in pants....They looked like they had been thrown
upon the truck beds haphazardly for arms and legs were sticking out
through the slats....On the second truck, lying spread-eagled atop the
high pile of corpses, I saw the body of a little black boy,
barefooted, just about my age....Suddenly, the truck hit a manhole in
the street. His head rolled over, facing me, staring as though he had
been frightened to death.”

There is no complete tally of how many were killed. The best estimates
put the number at as many as 300 people, the vast majority of them
black. The exact number of casualties—and the location of their
remains—may never be known. Many Greenwood families simply never saw
or heard from their loved ones again, and were condemned to live with
uncertainty about their fate.

That was the first act of Tulsa’s willful forgetting: to bury the
truth of what had happened.

* * *

I first learned about the massacre 21 years ago, as a reporter at
the _Fort Worth Star-Telegram_, from a wire-service story about
the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
[[link removed]]. The commission
was created in 1997 by the State Legislature to document an event that
few people knew much about, apart from elderly survivors and those
they had entrusted with their memories.

I was incredulous. How could I not have known about something so
horrible? I went to Tulsa to report on the massacre, and on that first
trip and many that followed, I met with survivors such as Eldoris
McCondichie and Kinney Booker and George Monroe, who were children
during the massacre. I heard descendants compare Greenwood households
to those of Holocaust survivors; black children and grandchildren
sensed a darkness but could only guess at the source of it. I spoke
with a white historian named Scott Ellsworth, who had made uncovering
the truth about what happened his life’s work. And I sat down with
Tulsa’s Don Ross, a black Oklahoma state representative and a civil
rights activist who had introduced the resolution to create the
government commission along with a state senator named Maxine Horner.

On my first night in Tulsa, Ross and I had taken a table at a Chinese
restaurant and were looking at menus when I asked what I thought was
an innocent question: “What was it like for African Americans after
the Civil War?”

John W. Rogers Jr. is a great-grandson of J.B. Stradford, who escaped
the massacre but lost much of his fortune. Rogers, an investor based
in Chicago, focuses his philanthropy on closing the racial wealth
gap. (Olivia Obineme)

Ross brought his fist down on our table, loud enough to draw glances
from people seated nearby. “How can you not know these things?” he
asked, his voice rising. “And you’re one of the educated whites.
If we can’t count on you to understand, who can we count on?”

I spent much of the next year immersing myself in the story of the
massacre and our country’s racial history, and went on to write a
book about it, _The Burning_ [[link removed]], published in
2001. I had been further astounded to learn that what happened in
Tulsa was unique only in its scope. In the years leading to 1921,
white mobs murdered African Americans on dozens of occasions, in
Chicago, Atlanta, Duluth, Charleston and elsewhere.

I also learned that at first Tulsa’s white leaders were contrite.
“Tulsa can only redeem herself from the country-wide shame and
humiliation into which she is today plunged by complete restitution
and rehabilitation of the destroyed black belt,” former mayor Loyal
J. Martin said days after the massacre. “The rest of the United
States must know that the real citizenship of Tulsa weeps at this
unspeakable crime.” But, by July, the city had proposed building a
new railroad station and white-owned manufacturing plants where
Greenwood homes and businesses had stood. The Tulsa City Commission
passed a new fire ordinance mandating that residential buildings be
constructed with fireproof materials—an ostensible safety measure
that had the effect of making it too expensive for many black families
to rebuild. It was only when black lawyers rushed to block the
ordinance in court that Greenwood could begin to come back to life.

Then, in a matter of months, once reporters for national newspapers
disappeared, the massacre disappeared with it, vanishing almost
completely for more than half a century. The history has remained hard
to find, as if the events are too horrible to look at, and the
depredations too great to comprehend.

I returned to the subject in recent months, as the 100-year
anniversary drew near. I found that even at this time of social unrest
much has changed since I learned about the massacre 21 years ago.
Events have forced this forgotten history into the nation’s
consciousness, and there is a new willingness to confront it.

Phil Armstrong is the project director for the 1921 Tulsa Race
Massacre Centennial Commission [[link removed]], an
organization working with the city and other partners to plan a
ten-day commemoration scheduled to begin May 26. Armstrong’s office
is near the intersection of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, long
known as Deep Greenwood. Construction workers there are now putting
the finishing touches on Greenwood Rising
[[link removed]], a gleaming new history center that
will be dedicated on June 2. A quotation will adorn one exterior wall,
words chosen in a poll of the community. “We had about five
different quotes—from Martin Luther King Jr., from Desmond Tutu,
from the black historian John Hope Franklin,” Armstrong told me.
“But this quote from James Baldwin far and away had the most votes:
‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be
changed until it is faced.’”

The conspiracy of silence that prevailed for so long was practiced on
a vast scale. But one day in the late 1950s, at Tulsa’s Booker T.
Washington High School, during a meeting of the yearbook staff, W.D.
Williams, a history teacher, could hold his tongue no longer. “When
I was a junior at Washington High, the prom never happened, because
there was a riot, and the whites came over the tracks and wiped out
Greenwood,” Williams told a roomful of students. “In fact, this
building was one of the few that wasn’t burned, so they turned it
into a hospital for colored folks. In those days, there were probably
Negroes moaning and bleeding and dying in this very room. The whites
over yonder burned Greenwood down, and with almost no help from
anybody, the Negroes built it back to what it was.”

Today in North Tulsa, home to historic Greenwood, a third of residents
live in poverty—two and a half times the poverty rate in largely
white South Tulsa. (Zora J Murff)

In the back of the room, a young pool hustler named Don Ross jumped up
from his seat. “Mr. Williams, I don’t believe that,” Ross
remembered saying. “I don’t think you could burn this town down
and have nobody know nothing about it.”

The next day, the teacher showed the teenager a scrapbook filled with
photographs of charred corpses and burned-out buildings. Williams soon
introduced Ross to others who had lived through the massacre. As they
drove one night to meet another survivor, Ross summoned the nerve to
ask Williams how such a thing could have remained a secret. “Because
the killers are still in charge in this town, boy,” Williams
answered. “Now you understand why anyone who lived through this once
damn sure doesn’t want to live through it all again. If you ask a
Negro about the riot, he’ll tell you what happened if he knows who
you are. But everyone’s real careful about what they say. I hear the
same is true for white folks, though I suspect their reasons are
different. They’re not afraid—just embarrassed. Or if they are
afraid, it’s not of dying. It’s of going to jail.”

The historian Scott Ellsworth showed up at W.D. Williams’ home in
North Tulsa, the historically black part of the city that includes the
Greenwood district, in August of 1975. Ellsworth had heard whispers
about the massacre while growing up in Tulsa in the 1960s, and he
still didn’t understand how an incident on a Tulsa elevator could
lead to the destruction of an entire community. It was Ruth Sigler
Avery who suggested talking with Williams. “He had been looking all
his life to tell his story, waiting for a professor from Howard
University or Ohio State or a reporter from _Ebony_, and nobody ever
came,” Ellsworth told me last year. “He sure wasn’t waiting for
me.” At Williams’ kitchen table, Ellsworth laid out a
painstakingly drawn map of Greenwood as it existed in 1921. “He is
now wide-eyed, in a trance, because this is a map of his childhood,”
Ellsworth recalled. “Then he looks up and says, ‘Tell me what you
want to know.’ I had made the cut with him. That was the moment when
we saved the history of the riot.”

At the time, the event in Tulsa was known, to the extent it was known
at all, as a “race riot”—always a gross misnomer. “Facts
mattered to W.D. Williams,” Ellsworth told me. “I don’t recall
any particular emotionality or outward catharsis on his part. Sitting
there at his kitchen table, he was completely changing the narrative
that had held sway for more than a half century. And he wanted to make
sure that I got it right.”

Brenda Alford, a descendant of massacre survivors, stands on Greenwood
Avenue at the site of one of several destroyed businesses, the Nails
Brothers’ Shoe Shop. (Zora J Murff)

That interview was the first of dozens Ellsworth conducted with
massacre survivors and witnesses, conversations that became the heart
of his groundbreaking book, _Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race
Riot of 1921_ [[link removed]], published by LSU Press in
1982. “It had an underground existence,” Ellsworth said of his
book. “Every year it was one of the most stolen books from the Tulsa
library system. Every year I would send them a new box.”
(Ellsworth’s long-awaited follow-up, _The Ground Breaking_
[[link removed]], will be published this May.)

In 1995, thanks to _Death in a Promised Land,_ an awareness of the
massacre went more mainstream, after an Army veteran named Timothy
McVeigh detonated a bomb outside a federal building in downtown
Oklahoma City. The attack killed 168 people, including 19 children
attending a day care center in the building. Nearly 600 other people
were injured. The national news media descended on the city to cover
what was described as the worst act of domestic terrorism in American
history.

Don Ross, by then a state legislator who for years had represented the
district that included Greenwood, believed that America’s worst
domestic atrocity had happened 74 years earlier, in Tulsa. A few days
after the Oklahoma City bombing, Ross met with Bryant Gumbel, host of
NBC’s “Today” show, and handed him a copy of _Death in a
Promised Land_. “Today” went on to produce a segment about the
massacre for its 75th anniversary the following year. Amid the
publicity that followed, Ross co-sponsored the resolution in the
Oklahoma Legislature that led to the Tulsa Race Riot Commission.

The 11-member commission had two main advisers: John Hope Franklin, a
revered African American historian and a Tulsa native, and Scott
Ellsworth. When, two years later, the commission announced that it
would begin investigating possible sites of mass graves, the public
response was enormous, as if the pent-up pain of keeping such secrets
had finally exploded into the daylight. Hundreds of people contacted
commission investigators, many of them wanting to share personal
memories of the massacre and how it had affected their families over
the years. The commission discovered reams of government and legal
documents that had been hidden away for decades. “Each opened an
avenue into another corner of history,” Danney Goble, a historian,
wrote in the commission’s final report
[[link removed]].

The commission concluded there was no doubt white Tulsa officials were
to blame for the massacre; they not only failed to prevent the
bloodshed but had also deputized white civilians who took part in the
burning and killing. And yet not one white person was brought to
justice for the atrocities. The commission’s 200-page report was
submitted to state and city officials on February 28, 2001. The
“silence is shattered, utterly and permanently shattered,” Goble
wrote. “Whatever else this commission has achieved or will achieve,
it already has made that possible.”

The first step toward lasting reconciliation is to face ugly truths,
says Phil Armstrong, project director for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
Centennial Commission. “There is no more hiding it.” (Zora J
Murff)

Even so, there remains an unmistakable sense among Tulsa’s black
community that important steps were left untaken. The commission
recommended financial reparations for survivors and their descendants,
a suggestion that state and local officials rejected. As Tulsa
prepares to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the massacre, the
question of restitution remains unanswered.

* * *

One gray afternoon last fall, I stood at the intersection of Greenwood
and Archer. It was a cold day, with low clouds and the occasional spit
of rain. A red construction crane towered over the intersection, where
work had begun on Greenwood Rising. There was the three-story Williams
Building, circa 1922, rebuilt to resemble the original. Next door was
a “Black Wall Street” T-shirt and souvenir store. Farther down
Greenwood Avenue was a hamburger place, a beauty salon and a real
estate office. Two blocks north, I walked beneath the ugly concrete
gash of a freeway overpass that has divided Tulsa’s African American
community for decades. Close by was a baseball stadium, home of the
Drillers, Tulsa’s minor-league team, and sprawling apartment
complexes under construction. The neighborhood’s gentrification is a
source of resentment among many longtime black residents.

Small bronze plaques were set into the sidewalks up and down Greenwood
Avenue and Archer Street. I might have missed them entirely if
passersby hadn’t pointed them out. Don Ross had been involved in
putting the first one down 30 years ago; each commemorates the
location of a business before June 1, 1921. The Dreamland Theater.
Nails Brothers’ Shoe Shop. Dr. Richard Walker. Abbott Printing.
Colored Insurance Association. Hooker Photography. C.L. Netherland,
Barber. Hughes Café. Gurley Hotel. The Williams Building. Attorney
I.H. Spears.

The little monuments, one after another down the street, had a stark
but beautiful power. Each one noted whether or not the business had
ever been revived. By my count, in just these few blocks, 49 had
reopened after the massacre. Twenty-nine had not.

THE HEART OF BLACK TULSA

_A view of the thriving Greenwood district 100 years ago, around the
time it was attacked by a white mob_

__

Among the latter was the office of A.C. Jackson, a nationally
respected physician who was shot dead outside his home as he attempted
to surrender to the mob. A couple of blocks away was a marker for the
Stradford Hotel, at the time the largest black-owned hotel in the
United States, the culmination of a remarkable American journey that
had begun in slavery. The Stradford Hotel was never rebuilt, either.

* * *

Late in his life, J.B. Stradford set down his memoirs in careful
cursive, later transcribed into 32 typewritten pages. The manuscript
has been handed down to six generations and counting. For those who
share Stradford’s blood, it is a sacred text. “It’s like the
family Magna Carta or Holy Grail or Ten Commandments,” Nate
Calloway, a Los Angeles filmmaker and Stradford’s
great-great-grandson, told me recently.

From left, after the attack by white Tulsans, attorney I.H. Spears,
secretary Effie Thompson and attorney B.C. Franklin worked temporarily
in a tent office.

A studio photograph of the Cotten family taken in 1902. The names of
the family members are on or above their likenesses: Carrie, Mildred,
Loula, Elizabeth, Myrtle, Tom, Sallie, Susie and Ernest.

Calloway first read the memoirs nearly three decades ago, when he was
in college, and has gone back to them many times in his effort to
bring Stradford’s story to the screen. Though the memoir is closely
held by the family, Calloway agreed last fall to study it again on my
behalf and share some of its contents.

The story begins on September 10, 1861, in Versailles, Kentucky, the
day John the Baptist Stradford was born. He was the son of a slave
named Julius Caesar Stradford and the property of enslaver Henry Moss.
The enslaver’s daughter changed the Stradford family’s trajectory
by teaching J.C. to read and write. J.C. taught his children.

In 1881, not even two decades after the end of the Civil War, J.B.
Stradford enrolled at Oberlin College, in Ohio, where he met the woman
he would marry, Bertie Wiley. After graduation, the couple returned to
Kentucky, but now the young man was a school principal and the owner
of a barbershop.

Stradford’s memoir describes the chilling story of a black man
accused of raping a white woman. “She was having an affair with one
of her servants, and the husband walked in and caught the two of
them,” Calloway said, summarizing the passage. “She yelled
‘rape.’ The black guy ran away and the whites caught him.
Stradford said others in his community ran and hid, because typically
what would happen is that the whites would unleash their wrath on the
entire black community. But Stradford didn’t run. He intentionally
went to witness the lynching. He wrote that the man was hanged up by a
tree, but his neck did not snap. He suffocated. The most vivid detail
was how the black man’s tongue was hanging out of his mouth.”
Calloway went on, “That had a big impact on him. Moving forward,
when it came to lynching, he wasn’t going to stand for it, to sit
by.”

Stradford took his family to Indiana, where he opened a bicycle store
as well as another barbershop. In 1899, he earned a law degree from
Indiana University. Then, early in the new century, Stradford heard
about the black communities springing up in what would become the
state of Oklahoma. After Bertie died unexpectedly, Stradford decided
to stake his claim in a former Native American trading village on the
Arkansas River called Tulsa that had begun to attract oil men and
entrepreneurs.

Stradford arrived on March 9, 1905. Eight months later, oil drillers
hit the first gusher a few miles from the village. The Glenn Pool Oil
Field would be one of the nation’s most bountiful producers of
petroleum for years to come.

Tulsa became a boomtown virtually overnight. White Tulsans flush with
cash needed carpenters and bricklayers, maids and cooks, gardeners and
shoeshine boys. African Americans came south over the railroad tracks
to fill those jobs, then took their pay home to Greenwood. An African
American professional and entrepreneurial class sprang up, and no
black Tulsan prospered more than J.B. Stradford. In little more than a
decade, his holdings came to include 15 rental houses and a 16-room
apartment building. On June 1, 1918, the Stradford Hotel opened at 301
Greenwood Avenue—three stories of brown brick, 54 guest rooms, plus
offices and a drugstore, pool hall, barbershop, banquet hall and
restaurant. The hotel was said to be worth $75,000, about $1 million
in today’s dollars.

The Dreamland Theater, the city’s first for black audiences, was a
busy 750-seat venue that showed silent movies, staged live
performances and served as a political hub. It was destroyed in the
attack. The Williams family reopened the venue but were forced to sell
it during the Great Depression. (Tulsa Historical Society & Museum)

But for all his success and personal happiness—in Tulsa he found
love again and married a woman named Augusta—there was some question
about whether Stradford would live long enough to enjoy it. He and
A.J. Smitherman, the editor of Greenwood’s _Tulsa Star_, gathered
groups of men to face down lynch mobs in surrounding towns. In those
days, black people were killed for much less. “It was remarkable he
was able to live out his natural life,” Calloway told me. “But,
then again, he almost didn’t.”

On the night of May 31, 1921, as the confrontation between the
city’s black and white communities drew near, Stradford, rather than
march to the courthouse, stayed in Greenwood to be available to
provide legal representation to any black residents who might be
arrested. His memoir continues:

_The mob organized with the agreement that at the sound of whistles
from the large factories at five o’clock they were to attack the
“Black Belt.” The Boy Scouts accompanied them. They were furnished
with a can of kerosene oil and matches....Houses were pillaged and
furniture taken away in vans. Then, the fire squad came along to light
the fires._

_They kept up their plundering, burning and killing until they came
within two blocks of my hotel....I can’t say whose plane it
was....It came sailing like a huge bird, in the direction of the
hotel; about two hundred feet above the ground and just before it
reached the hotel it swerved and shot bombs through the transoms and
plate glass windows._

_A dozen people, at least, were in the lobby. One man was shot running
out and many others were wounded. All were frightened to
hysteria....The men pledged to die with me, if need be, defending the
hotel, but the plane episode destroyed their morale. The women, crying
and pleading, said, “Let’s get out. Maybe we can save our
lives.” They turned in their guns and ammunition, leaving me alone
with my wife, who knew me too well. She said, “Papa, I’ll die with
you.”_

_The mob caught one of the patrons and inquired about the number of
people in the hotel and if J.B. had an arsenal. The captured patron
was sent back with the message that they were officers of the law and
came to take me to a place of safety. They guaranteed that my hotel
would not be burned, but used for a place of refuge. I opened the door
to admit them, and just at that instant, a man was running across a
lot southeast of the hotel trying to make his getaway. One of the
rioters fell to his knees and placed his revolver against the pillar
of the building and shot at him. “You brute,” I yelled. “Don’t
shoot that man.”_

_Just as I was getting in an automobile, the raiding squad arrived on
the scene and broke open the drug store and appropriated cigars,
tobacco and all the money in the cash register. The perfume they
sprinkled over themselves. They filled their shirts with
handkerchiefs, fine socks and silk shirts._

_I saw lines of people marching with their hands above their heads and
being jabbed by the guards with guns if they put their hands down. The
guards acted like madmen....Oh! If only you could have seen them
jumping up and down uttering words too obscene to be printed, striking
and beating their prisoners._

_We went out Easton Avenue. On the northwest corner of Elgin and
Easton Avenues I owned eight tenement houses. As we passed, flames
were leaping mountain high from my houses. In my soul, I cried for
vengeance and prayed for the day to come when the wrongs that had been
perpetrated against me and my people were punished._

Stradford was interned with his wife and son along with hundreds of
others at Tulsa’s Convention Hall. In all, thousands of displaced
Greenwood residents were herded into places such as the hall, ballpark
and fairgrounds. At the convention hall, Stradford’s son overheard
white officials scheming to abduct Stradford. “We will get Stradford
tonight,” one of them said. “He’s been here too long...and
taught the n------- they were as good as white people. We will give
him a necktie party tonight.”

A white friend of the family’s agreed to help them escape. He backed
his car to a side door of the convention hall and the Stradfords
slipped out. J.B. Stradford crouched down in the backseat, his head in
his wife’s lap as the car sped away. By the next day, the couple had
made it to Independence, Kansas, where Stradford’s brother and
another son were living.

In the aftermath of the massacre, at least 57 African Americans were
indicted in connection with it, including Dick Rowland for attempted
rape. (None were ever tried or convicted. Tulsa authorities,
apparently, had little stomach for revisiting the massacre in court.)
Stradford was one of the first to be charged—accused of inciting a
riot.

The Tulsa police chief himself showed up at the door of Stradford’s
brother in Kansas. The chief did not have an arrest warrant, and J.B.
Stradford threatened to shoot the officer if he tried to enter the
house. The chief retreated. Sheriff Willard McCullough later got
Stradford on the telephone and asked if he would waive extradition,
voluntarily turn himself in and face charges in Tulsa.

“Hell, no,” Stradford said, and hung up.

“They were keepers of secrets,” Joi McCondichie says of earlier
black Tulsans, including her grandmother Eldoris. (Zora J Murff)

Stradford’s 29-year-old son, C.F. Stradford, had recently graduated
from Columbia Law School, and was then in the early stages of what
would be a long and distinguished legal career in Chicago. The son,
packing a pistol, arrived in Independence and got his father on a
train north. By then, J.B. Stradford knew his hotel had been destroyed
by fire, his hard work and dreams vaporized.

Tulsa authorities did not pursue Stradford to Chicago. He never
returned to the city where he had achieved his greatest successes, nor
did he receive any financial compensation for all he had lost.
Stradford wasn’t able to recreate a luxury hotel in Chicago, but in
his later years he owned a candy store, a barbershop and a pool hall.
Descendants say he remained embittered about the Tulsa massacre until
his death in 1935, at the age of 74.

His descendants went on to become judges, doctors and lawyers,
musicians and artists, entrepreneurs and activists. His granddaughter
Jewel Stradford Lafontant, for example, was the first black woman to
graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, in 1946, and later
became the first woman and first African American to serve as a deputy
solicitor general of the United States. Richard Nixon considered
nominating her to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her son, John W. Rogers Jr.,
is an investor, philanthropist and social activist who formed what is
the nation’s oldest minority-owned investment company, Chicago-based
Ariel Investments.

“I feel for J.B. Stradford, overcoming all these obstacles to build
a great business and see that business thriving and then overnight to
see it destroyed through pure racism,” Rogers told me last year.
“I can’t imagine how devastating that would be. It’s just
unimaginable heartache and bitterness that comes from that.”

Stradford’s descendants also never forgot that he had technically
died a fugitive, and they were determined to set that right. The fight
was led by his great-grandson, a Chicago judge named Cornelius E.
Toole, and by Jewel Lafontant. State Representative Don Ross also
joined the effort, which resulted in a historic ceremony at the
Greenwood Cultural Center in 1996, 75 years after the massacre. About
20 members of Stradford’s family gathered from around the nation to
hear Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating read an official pardon. “It was
truly a homecoming of sorts,” Erin Toole Williams, Stradford’s
great-great-granddaughter, told me. “None of us had ever been to
Tulsa, but the welcome was so warm from the members of the Greenwood
community, from other descendants of victims.” After the ceremony,
officials hosted a reception. “They had enlarged photographs of
lynchings and pictures of the ruins of my great-great-grandfather’s
hotel,” Toole Williams said. “That just took me down. I just
sobbed along with my family. It was all coming full circle, making for
a very bittersweet moment.”

Nate Calloway, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, made his first
trip to Tulsa in 2019. On a crisp autumn afternoon, he finally stood
before the commemorative plaque in the sidewalk at 301 Greenwood
Avenue. The place where the Stradford Hotel once stood was a grassy
lot between a church and the freeway overpass. “It was very
emotional,” Calloway told me. “But you know, when I went there and
I saw those plaques, I got very upset. They took away all that
property from those people, property that would be worth tens of
millions of dollars in today’s wealth, and they replaced it with
plaques.”

Recently, Calloway searched through Tulsa property records to find out
what happened to Stradford’s land after the massacre. He learned
that in November 1921 Stradford sold his burned-out real estate to a
white Tulsa property broker for the price of a dollar. According to
later court records, the broker had agreed to sell the property and
give Stradford the proceeds, but he never had. “It appears he was
defrauded,” Calloway told me. “It adds insult to injury.”

* * *

Teaching the history of the massacre has been mandatory in
Oklahoma’s public schools since 2002, a requirement that grew out of
the work of the state commission. Last year, state officials announced
that the Oklahoma Department of Education had taken it a step further
[[link removed]],
developing an in-depth curricular framework to facilitate new
approaches to teaching students about the massacre. Amanda Soliván,
an official for Tulsa Public Schools, cited the example of an
“inquiry driven” approach that has teachers pose questions about
the massacre in the classroom—for example, “Has the city of Tulsa
made amends for the massacre?”—and challenges students to study
primary sources and arrive at their own conclusions. “I don’t need
to be lecturing students whose ancestors might have experienced the
Tulsa Race Massacre,” Soliván told me. U.S. Senator James Lankford,
a Republican, had been one of the new curriculum’s most vocal
advocates. “A lot of things need to be done by that 100-year
mark,” he said at a press conference announcing the changes.
“Because quite frankly, the nation’s going to pause for a moment,
and it’s going to ask, ‘What’s happened since then?’”

The new educational approach is one of several initiatives the state,
the city, and their private partners are pursuing as part of a broad
effort to reckon with the legacy of the massacre and, officials and
community members hope, create the conditions for lasting
reconciliation. The city of Tulsa is sponsoring economic development
projects in North Tulsa, which includes historic Greenwood.
The Greenwood Art Project
[[link removed]] selects artists whose works
will be featured as part of the centennial commemoration. But, for
many, the most significant major initiative has been the renewal of
the search for the graves of murdered massacre victims.

Much of the civic soul-searching is being led by Tulsa Mayor G.T.
Bynum, a Republican born and raised in the city. Last year, Bynum told
me that he himself hadn’t heard anything about the massacre until a
night 20 years ago, at a political forum at a library in North Tulsa.
“Someone brought up that there had been a race riot, and that bombs
had been dropped on residents from airplanes,” Bynum told me. “I
thought that was crazy. There was no way that would have happened in
Tulsa and I would not have heard about that before.”

Bynum had reason to be astonished. There was little that happened in
Tulsa that his family didn’t know about, going back to 1899, when
Bynum’s paternal great-great-grandfather was elected the town’s
second mayor. (His maternal grandfather and an uncle have also served
as mayors.) “One of the ways I confirmed that it happened was that I
went and asked both of my grandfathers about it,” Bynum said.
“They both had stories to tell. They weren’t alive when it
happened, but their parents had told them about it, so it became clear
that it was something talked about within families but never
publicly.”

I asked the mayor why he thought nobody spoke about it except
privately. “The civic leadership in Tulsa realized what a disgrace
this was for the city, and they recognized, frankly, what a challenge
it would be for our city moving forward,” he said. “Then you had
succeeding generations grow up, and it wasn’t taught in schools, it
wasn’t written about in newspapers.”

Even after the state commission brought national attention to the
massacre, it didn’t take long for media attention to move on,
especially outside of Oklahoma. Then, in the fall of 2019, HBO
premiered “Watchmen,”  [[link removed]]set largely
in Tulsa, which used an alternate-history conceit to explore the
city’s fraught racial dynamics. The show went on to win 11 Emmys.
Nicole Kassell, who directed the pilot episode, which opens with an
extended sequence depicting the massacre in haunting realism, told me,
“I remember hearing after the pilot aired that there had been at
least 500,000 internet hits that night of people researching the
massacre of Tulsa, to find out if it was real. I palpably felt that
even if the show failed from that moment forward, we had done our
job.”

Mayor Bynum, in our conversation, described his own reaction to
“Watchmen.” “To see it portrayed in such a realistic way—it
filled me with dread,” he said. “But I also am incredibly
grateful. There are so many tragedies related to that event, but one
of them is that the people who tried to cover this up were successful
for so long. To have a show like that raise awareness of it around the
world is a great accomplishment. It’s one way we can make sure that
the bad guys didn’t win. We can’t bring folks back to life, but we
can make sure that those who tried to cover it up were not
successful.”

Bynum had announced the year before the show aired that the city would
finally reopen the search for the remains of massacre victims. “What
I kept coming back to was this thought: ‘That’s what you hear
happens in authoritarian regimes in foreign countries,’” he said.
“They erase a historical event. They have mass graves.”

The mayor asked Scott Ellsworth to join a team that also included
Oklahoma state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck and Phoebe Stubblefield,
a forensic anthropologist whose great-aunt lost her home in the
massacre. The professionals would also work with citizen monitors that
included J. Kavin Ross, a local journalist and the son of former state
representative Don Ross, and Brenda Alford, a lifelong Tulsa resident
and prominent local descendant of survivors.

Nate Calloway, a descendant of J.B. Stradford, visits the site of the
former Stradford Hotel. “I fantasize about squatting on that land
and daring them to remove me.” (Zora J Murff)

Born into slavery, J.B. Stradford, pictured with his second wife,
Augusta, became one of Greenwood’s wealthiest men. (Courtesy
blackwallstreet.org)

Alford was already an adult when she learned that her grandparents and
great-grandmother had fled from the mob. When they returned to
Greenwood, their homes and family businesses—a store that sold shoes
and records, a taxi and limousine service, a skating rink and a dance
hall—had all been destroyed. When Alford learned about the massacre,
cryptic childhood memories began to make sense. “When we would pass
by Oaklawn Cemetery, especially when my great-uncles came to town, the
comment would always be made, ‘You know, they’re still over
there,’” Alford recalled. Of the hundreds of people interviewed by
the original state commission, many told stories about rumored mass
grave sites handed down across generations. One location that came up
over and over again was Oaklawn, the city’s public cemetery.

In July 2020, she and Kavin Ross joined the search team at Oaklawn for
the first excavation. It turned up animal bones and household
artifacts but no human remains. The search resumed three months later,
in late October. The team had historical evidence, including death
certificates from 1921, suggesting that massacre victims may have been
buried in unmarked graves at another site at Oaklawn. Geophysical
surveys had revealed soil anomalies that were consistent with graves.
On October 20, an early swipe of a backhoe uncovered human bones. A
tarp was quickly thrown up to shield the remains.

“We went into motion very quickly,” Kary Stackelbeck, the state
archaeologist, told me later. “But then it occurred to me that the
monitors may not have been aware of what was happening. I took Brenda
Alford to the side to quietly let her know that we had this discovery.
It was that moment of just letting her know that we had remains. It
was a very somber moment. We were both tearing up.”

In the coming days, at least 11 more unmarked graves were uncovered,
all of them presumably containing the remains of massacre victims.
Scott Ellsworth met me for dinner in Tulsa not long afterward. He told
me about other possible grave sites yet to be explored and the
fieldwork yet to be done. The process of analyzing the remains,
possibly linking them to living relatives through DNA, arranging for
proper burials, and searching for other sites is likely to go on for
years. But in his nearly five decades of devotion to restoring the
massacre to history, those autumn days last year at the cemetery were
among the most seismic. They were also bittersweet. “I’m thinking
of W.D. Williams and George Monroe, all those people I met in the
’70s,” Ellsworth told me. “I wish they could have been here to
see this.”

* * *

Eldoris McCondichie, who had hidden inside a chicken coop on the
morning of June 1, 1921, died in Tulsa on September 10, 2010, two days
after she turned 99 years old. I have thought of her often in the
years since we sat together in her Tulsa living room, discussing the
horrible events of her young life.

Abandoned steps mark Greenwood’s Standpipe Hill area, once home to
doctors, teachers and lawyers. (Zora J Murff)

On a sunny day last October, I waited for her granddaughter, L. Joi
McCondichie, whom I had never met, at an outdoor café table on
Greenwood Avenue, just across from the construction site of the
Greenwood Rising history center. She showed up carrying files that
documented her own attempts to organize a commemorative walk on June 1
for the 100-year anniversary of the massacre and newspaper stories
that celebrated Eldoris’ life. She is a thin woman in her 50s,
weakened from a spell of poor health. But where Eldoris was the
picture of tranquillity, Joi could be fierce, pounding several times
on her seat to emphasize a point during our long interview. In her
family, Joi told me, “I was known as little Angela Davis.”

Joi had been born and raised in Tulsa, but moved to Los Angeles as a
young woman to work for the federal government. She moved back to
Tulsa several years ago with her son to be closer to family. Eldoris
was the beloved matriarch. As a young girl, Joi remembered hearing her
grandmother talk, but only in passing, about the day she had been
forced to hide in a chicken coop. Eldoris never said why or from whom.
It wasn’t until one day in 1999, when Joi was living in Los Angeles,
that she got a call at work from a receptionist. “She said, ‘Do
you know an Eldoris McCondichie?’ So I go to the front desk, and
there Grandma is on the front page of the _Los Angeles Times_.” Joi
remembered the headline exactly: “A City’s Buried Shame.”
[[link removed]] Joi
and her toddler son caught the first plane back to Oklahoma.

Eldoris McCondichie was 88 years old when Joi and other similarly
agitated grandchildren gathered in the den of her North Tulsa home.
That day Eldoris told them, for the first time, about the lines of
bedraggled refugees, the planes firing down, the wall of smoke rising
from Greenwood.

“She calmed us down, not just me, but the rest of my cousins,” Joi
said of her grandmother. “We were frantic and couldn’t understand,
but she talked to us so calmly. She was sweet as pie. I said, ‘Why
didn’t you tell us all this time, Grandma?’ And she simply looked
at me and said, ‘It’s because of you, and it’s because of
him.’ She pointed to the fat baby I was holding. It made me so
angry—so disheartened and quite sad,” Joi continued. “I said,
‘Grandma, you should be mad. Let’s tear it down. Let’s get
Johnnie Cochran in here.’

“She said, ‘I didn’t want you to carry that anger and that hate
in your heart.’”

I asked Joi if her grandmother and other survivors felt relief at
finally feeling safe enough to tell their stories. “Yeah, they were
getting old,” she replied. “It was time. They could safely say
they had won the war. They had lost the battle, but they had won the
war, you see. These are the things that she told us to calm us down.
She said, You can’t fight every battle. You have to win the war.”

* * *

Last year, in a report that renewed calls for reparations
[[link removed]] to
be paid to Tulsa’s massacre survivors and their descendants, Human
Rights Watch painted a sobering picture of what remains a segregated
city. A third of North Tulsa’s 85,000 residents live in poverty, the
report found—two and a half times the rate in largely white South
Tulsa. Black unemployment is close to two and a half times the white
rate. There are also huge disparities between life expectancy and
school quality.

“I’m cutting yards today so that my son can get out of Langston
University,” Joi McCondichie told me. “They didn’t give us a
penny, sir, and now they’re going to make millions a year,” she
said, referring to the predicted influx of tourism with the opening of
Greenwood Rising.

John W. Rogers Jr., the Chicago investor and great-grandson of J.B.
Stradford, spoke about the economic disadvantages that persist in
black communities. “What I’ve been interested in is economic
justice and in helping to solve the wealth gap in our country,”
Rogers said. “I think that’s because I came from this family and
from business leaders who understood that it was important for us to
be able to vote, and important for us to get education and fair
housing, but it was also important for us to have equal economic
opportunity.”

It is against that complex backdrop that Tulsa commemorates the worst
outbreak of racial violence in U.S. history. What happened in 1921
continues to reverberate in every part of the country. It’s possible
to see a direct line from the enduring horror of the Tulsa Race
Massacre to the outrage over the police killing of George Floyd in
Minneapolis last year.

When we spoke last fall, Phil Armstrong, the project director for the
Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, shared his hopes that
Greenwood Rising could become an incubator of sorts for new racial
understanding. “The final chamber in Greenwood Rising is called
‘The Journey to Reconciliation,’” Armstrong said. “It’s
going to be an amphitheater-style seated room. You’ve seen all this
history. Now let’s sit down and have a conversation. It literally
will be a room where people can have difficult conversations around
race. You can change policies and laws, but until you change
someone’s heart and mind, you’re never going to move forward.
That’s what Greenwood Rising is all about.”

The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921
An account of America’s most horrific racial massacre, told in a
compelling and unflinching narrative. The Burning is essential reading
as America finally comes to terms with its racial past.

BUY
[[link removed]]

_TIM MADIGAN is the author of The Burning: The Tulsa Race Riot of
1921. Read more articles from Tim Madigan
[[link removed]]_

_TRENT BOZEMAN is a photographer currently based in Arkansas. Read
more articles from Trent Bozeman
[[link removed]]_

_Photographer ZORA J MURFF explores the way systemic racism can shape
landscapes by years of neglect. Read more articles from Zora J Murff
[[link removed]]_

_Subscribe now [[link removed]] to
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE for just $12 for 11 issues and save 84% off the
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