Stuff You Should KnowIn reality, the Tulsa "race riots" of 1921 was more like a massacre. Yet it was almost lost to history until 1997, and still not widely known outside of Oklahoma until HBO's The Watchmen put it on the cultural map. Learn all about this dark chapter in American history in this classic episode.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josham for this week's select I've chosen our January twenty twenty episode on the Tulsa massacre. It's such a vile event that it left us stain that spread out of Tulsa and even out of Oklahoma to become a blemish on the history of the entire US. And it's a lesson and how important it is to talk about the past, even the worst of the past, to move forward to heal. It's also a lesson on how you just can't bury the past no matter how hard you try. I hope you get a lot out of this episode.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, there's Jerry over here. We have all come together in the year twenty twenty to wear a silver jumpsuits as always I know, right, and talk about a buried, overlooked blemish in the history of the United States.
Are we not going to recount no anything about this past year, no talk about this being the first recording of the new year. Nope, all right, we've had a break here I'm going to push forward. We've been off for a couple of weeks, which was pretty glorious to not have to just over text my brain. But it was also nice to get back in here into the stank of this room.
This room, I don't think this room stinks.
Well right now.
It smells like you're caramel vanilla Freppa lape.
This is just black coffee. This happens to be flavor blake.
It's really I mean, it smells great.
It's I think a green mountain or something. Caramel vanilla coffee.
Pod man. It is super fragrant. Yeah, it's nice in a great way. It makes me. It smells like an ice cream Sunday.
It's pleasant.
It is very.
Pleasant, but it's not doing the job. Like I'm still I'm a little tired, a little groggy.
You know, I had a four shot latte earlier. Oh yeah, and so I'm kind of gotcha.
Maybe that's what I mean.
I'm zippy and go downstairs to I know you don't like to pay for coffee, but yeah, go downstairs to Spiller Park.
Okay, Hugh Atchison's place.
A four shot latte?
Yes, Okay, that that has me going.
Well, I give it about a half hour before Chuck crashes everybody.
Yeah, seriously, anyway, I'm glad to be back.
Well, I'm glad you're back to You know, we've been here the whole time. This is where you spent Christmas and New Year's Yes, both in this room and Thanksgiving.
And I guess you, me and Momo slept over there in the corner.
They come to visit sometimes they say, please, please come on, please stop working. I say, I can't.
They slide the food tray through the slot.
You know where I got this idea, And I know you haven't watched it, but the Watchmen.
I came across mentioned of that. I was like, why is everybody talking about the Watchmen with the Tulsa race riot?
Or more appropriately, why is everyone all of a sudden talking about the Tulsa massacre?
Yeah?
Yeah, because the Watchmen really put it on the map in a big way.
Yeah. That's great.
Utilize it quite well in the storyline, and I have a recommendation for everyone, even though it is a marketing piece. There's a thing in the Atlantic called the Massacre of Black Wall Street, paid for by HBO, but it tells the story in a comic book.
Form in the Atlantic. H Oh cool, very cool.
And I didn't notice it was a marketing piece until afterward. But well, it's still.
Good sure, as long as the content's good.
Yeah, it's cool and very well done.
So this is like, it's great that the Watchmen has brought attention to this, yeah, because it wasn't until about two thousand and one, maybe the late nineties, really that people started talking about this.
I know.
And this event that we're going to talk about happened in nineteen twenty one, and almost the week after, basically the week after, everyone said, don't talk about this, Yeah, just forget it ever happened. We're's moving forward and we're going to bury the past, literally buried people, the evidence, all this stuff. It was buried, and people just acted like nothing happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma for like eighty years. And when you hear what we're about to talk about, it's astounding that the community, both black and white, agreed to just basically pretend this never happened, at least publicly or civically.
Yeah, and it's hard to find some information still on some of the key events and definitely some of the key players.
Because a lot of them died of old age without ever having been interviewed.
Yeah, no follow ups, Like, I mean, we'll get to it, but a couple of the most key players.
It's like, this is kind of all we know, right.
I looked them up too, and it's like, what do you mean you have no idea? Yeah, even who this guy was let alone? You know, what became of him? Or what do you mean? Like just no one kept track. But that's how complete and total this cover up was. It was a cover up. Yeah, so let's talk about it first. Let's talk about Greenwood, which I was not familiar with. But Greenwood was an affluent i guess almost suburb adjacent to Tulsa, just north of Tulsa. And what was odd about the fact that it was affluent is that it was an all black community in you know, the turn of the last century, and yet it was one of the most affluent communities in the entire United States.
Yeah.
I mean, now it's just part of Tulsa, like a neighborhood. But back then just sort of like my neighborhood would have been a suburb of Atlanta in the nineteen twenties, even though I'm you know, five miles from downtown.
Right exactly.
But in nineteen twenty one, it was, like you said, super affluent. They had a lot of I think there were ten thousand black residents there. It's called the Black Wall Street, like I mentioned, Yeah, and six hundred businesses. There were fifteen African American millionaires living in this district.
Yeah, fifteen black millionaires in nineteen twenty one in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Yeah, and it wasn't I mean, like the whole area was very well to do. There was like indoor plumbing, the public schools there were like top not. Yeah, and in many cases Greenwood had a lot to boast about that. Like the white areas in Tulsa just over the railroad tracks, literally on the other side of the track, Yeah, didn't have like like this is far better off than some parts of white Tulsa.
Yeah, including one of the top African American surgeons, if not the top in the country, endorsed by the doctor Mayo himself.
The Mayo brothers.
Yeah.
This guy's doctor A C. Jackson, and he was one of the people murdered in this massacre.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was going to say there was a spoiler, but I guess we've already kind of mentioned there's a massacre coming, right, Yeah, so just to take a step back even further, so it's pretty impressive to think of, like, this is the Jim Crow era United States. Yes, this is we're talking about. You know, this massacre took place in nineteen twenty one, that's you know, fifty years after the end of the Civil War. In many ways, the Jim Crow era was just as bad as the Antebellum slavery era. But so the idea to us today looking back at this time of well, there's a black community in Oklahoma that was one of the most affluent areas in the country. It's kind of mind boggling. But if you dig even deeper into how it was formed, it almost you developed like a sense of pride in this that these these people came together under these conditions and not only survived, but like thrived and create a carved out a place for themselves where like being black was celebrated and where you could be proud and you took pride in your home, in your children, and your children's education and the healthcare that they were getting, in the bus service, and the quality of the theater that you went to. The confection area, the soda fountain, like that's where you went to go like proposed marriage. Like. There was this incredibly developed community. And one of the ways that it was that it was able to flourish and was able to kind of grow like this is because the first thing that Oklahoma did when it became a state. Remember it was originally a territory for forced relocation of Native Americans and their African slaves to this area. When it became a state, when white side came in and said, no, we want this instead, we're going to take this territory we gave you away and turn into stay. The first piece of legislation they passed was that black people have to stay in their own area. They can't marry outside their race, they can't frequent white owned businesses, they have to stay over here. And so the people of Greenwood said, fine with us. We're going to pass a covenant that says you have to be a black person to own land here, or to even rent a place here, to own a business here. It's a covenant restricted community, and we're going to take a tremendous amount of pride and in circulating our currency, our hard earned money that we're making by working for these white businesses that we're not allowed to patronize. We're going to go make our own businesses over here, and we're going to support them with our community, not only because we can't spend our money elsewhere, but because we have a lot of pride in the businesses that we've built over here. And so in this way, Greenwood flourished because of and in spite of these Jim Crow era laws that black people had to deal with in Oklahoma at the time.
Yeah, and this was Dave Ruz helped put us to put this together, and some of the research he got was from the book The Burning Colon, Massacre, Destruction and the Tulsa Race Ride of nineteen twenty one by Tim Madigan and various Stuteley points out that this was this happened in Oklahoma, of course, but this kind of thing was happening all over the country, not just in the South or the whatever you call Oklahoma.
I guess it's the West Midwest, Yeah, but not Midwest.
I don't know. I think you just call it Oklahoma.
It's interesting some people there identify with the South, but if you're from Georgia, Oklahoma it's not the South might as well be you know, Montana.
I think of Oklahoma as like Native America. Yeah, and then what it says on the license.
Plate, maybe it says middle of the country with a with a little apostrophe.
And there's a picture of the Mountain DO logo on.
But this was happening everywhere. There were In nineteen nineteen, there were two dozen.
Race riots in places like Chicago, Washington, d C.
Saint Louis.
In between the end of the Civil War and World War Two, there were more than four thousand lynchings in the United States, right, which is, you know, it's important to point that out because what and we'll get into the story here, but a lynching is what was the aim of the white people of Oklahoma on this night.
Right, But I have seen also one of the reasons I went to so much lengths to explain Greenwood, Yeah, in part was to because to show what was lost here, but also to show there are a lot of people who consider this massacre to have been carried out or fueled in part by envy, right, because the people of Greenmaw were so much better off in some instances than the white people who were carrying out this massacre.
All right, maybe we should take a break, No, and then we'll come back. Man, we got to start twenty twenty with an argument over a break.
Yeah, let's do it.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk a little bit about the beginnings of what would end up being the Tulsa massacre. All right, So we should talk about the key player here, or players, And in this case it is Diamond.
Dick Rowland, one of the greatest names I've ever heard in my life.
It's pretty good.
He was a shoeshine boy in Tulsa, and by all accounts, he was smart. He was a handsome young guy, and he was sort of a man about town.
He was popular with the.
Ladies, had the world on a string.
Yeah, pretty much.
And there was a girl named Sarah Page who ran an elevator at the Drexel Building, a building that I have walked past with my own two feet Oh wow.
Right, And she was white.
She was white, and you know, Dick thought she was cute, and he would go down there and basically kind of make up excuses to ride her elevator.
Okay, I saw something different than that, Oh yeah, I saw that he was on the elevator because he was he could use the segregated bathroom on the top floor of the Drexel building only, so he had to ride up the elevator up and down, okay, to get to the bathroom, the closest bathroom for him to be able to use. That's what I saw.
So you're saying he didn't fancy Sarah Paget, Oh No, I don't know.
But I also saw a different explanation for why he would have been on the elevator as often as he supposedly was.
All Right, maybe it was both.
Yeah, maybe he went to the bathroom a little more often than he had to because they did, think Sarah Pegq. Who knows. I'm not saying they necessarily contradict each other. I'm just saying I've seen other explanations as well. I got you that sounded very lowyally for some reason, didn't it.
Man, Maybe this is the new YU in twenty twenty Matt Locke, Josh Clark Esquire.
Yeah, a spree.
That's different than Esquire.
So at any rate, we should probably also point out that, and you know, mixed race couples still get sideways looks in some parts of America today, but certainly in nineteen twenty one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the idea of a black man fancying a white woman.
He was even looking at a white woman.
Yeah, it was not only untoward, but like a threat worthy of a lynching.
Right.
It was still that time in America where if you made any advances, that was sort of the biggest fear for some white men was black men coming in and takingquote unquote their women.
Yeah, which is character I are popularized thanks to Birth of a Nation, which depicts the clan, you know, coming to the aid of white women who were about to be raped by maniacal black men who just could couldn't help themselves. They were just so in love with white women that they just had to rape. That was just what black guys did. That was the view of black guys at the time, right, that that's just how it was. So to white people, like you kept an eye out for that, Like when you saw a black man and there's a white woman over there, you wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to you know, rapeer. Yeah, that was the mentality that people were walking around with back then.
Yeah, that movie was actually partially shot in my old neighborhood in LA.
You have a lot to do with this episode.
Well, it's just weird to think about birth of a nation, you know, being shot in Los Feeless, which is this very like kind of hip community and on the east side of Hollywood.
Sure.
But anyway, on May thirtieth, nineteen twenty one, Dick Roland went into that elevator to either flirt or use the restroom or both. And what I saw was that the It was well known that the third floor landing did not land flush with the threshold, and supposedly this is why, as the story goes, Dick Roland tripped when he was getting onto the elevator. So maybe if that bathroom was on the third floor, that could make sense.
I heard top floor. I don't know how many floors of the dot I don't remember. Actually, was it more than three? I don't know, I don't remember. Actually, I just I don't think they'd call a building the something building if it only has three floors, you know what I mean, You're probably right, that's like an eight plus floor like Moniker.
I think you're probably right. But at any rate, he gets on the elevator. As the story goes, stumbles getting on and kind of falls forward and grabs her arm, which was kind of the first thing that he could get a hold of from falling. As the story goes, she started beating him over the head with her purse because I guess it's an old Looney Tunes cartoon and she didn't have a rolling pins And the elevator opened. On the ground floor, people see this sort of scuffle going on, or what appears to be a scuffle. She allegedly cries out that she had been assaulted, and people on the first floor called the police as Dick flees on foot.
Right takes off.
Yeah, and you know, no one knows exactly how this all went down.
No one even knows exactly who Diamond Dick Roland.
Was or Sarah Page. Yeah, for that matter, always are. Yeah, all we found out what was that she was an orphan. She could have been a young at sixteen. I've seen reports of seventeen and was working to pay her way through business college.
And that's what the Tulsa Tribune reported like the day after.
Yeah, and I saw that elsewhere, But I also saw like literally nothing else about her.
Yeah, I couldn't find anything.
And then Dick Roland. They think that he might have possibly been named Jimmy Jones, right, I saw that too, and who was raised by his grandparents whose last name was Roland, so he took their name. And there is a guy who would have matched his birth date named Jimmy Jones that they found buried in Tulsa, but he died like two months before these events took place, so it couldn't have possibly been him.
Yeah, there were a few years apart too, I think, Right, how was it? Yeah, okay, but it's unbelievable that so much of this is lost to history.
Yeah, these two people who set off this one of the most despicable events that it's ever taken place in this country's history just vanish almost after this point. It's just you guys played your role. Now everyone else is going to step in.
So Dick goes home his mom, I guess. He tells his mom what happened, and she obviously was pretty scared right away because she knew probably what this meant. But for that night, at least, nothing really happened. The next day, he goes out to meet up with some friends and the Tulsa police pull up and take him in.
Basically on an assault charge.
Right, which is I don't know why they didn't go pick him up at home or whatever, but they I also read somewhere that they had arrested him on the spot. But what you're you're recounting matches what I've seen most right, right, Yeah, But that's that's history, especially suppressed history.
Right.
One person writes, and then somebody else reports, and then enough people report it, and then that's.
Fact exactly, that's the story.
But so either way he came into police custody, we know that is the way it is. And then this is like a white sheriff named William Sullivan.
I think, right, William McCullough.
McCullough I was very close.
Yeah, And when you're starting to read the story, you hear about this, you know, white mustache sheriff and immediately think, oh boy, this guy's in trouble.
Well, this guy had replaced the last guy that it was trouble, right, who had allowed a white mob to take an arrested black man out of his custody and lynch him.
Oh it says here it was a white person. Is that not true?
I think that's wrong. Oh, okay, either way, he let somebody be lynched by an angry mob.
Yeah, which I thought for sure Sheriff McCullough was going to do. But apparently McCullough was intent on kind of going by the book.
He followed the Hectate school of sheriffing. Do you know what that from to kill a mockingbird?
Oh?
Right, right, which was, hey, let's let the law play out, let's give him a stay in court. There will be no lynchings on my watch.
Right, So he took Diamond Dick up to a room on an upper floor. The only way to get there was this one staircase, so he basically strategically hit him out, went down to this white crowd and said, there's not going to be any lynching today, Like Chuck said, The thing is, we've left out a really important point here.
Yeah, like why was there a white crowd to begin with? Right? Yeah.
There is a newspaper that was called the Tulsa Tribune that ran an article about Sarah Page being assaulted. This is a news article and the headline for said news article was nab negro for attacking girl and elevator. Not people might nab negro for attacking girl in elevator. Police worried white mob. Might it's nab like go do this? Yes, that was the headline for the article. The editorial took it even a step further. And this is the day after this event took place.
Yeah, the editorial was to Lynch Negro tonight.
And I gotta say, whoever's writing these headlines, it's inflammatory, of course, but they also don't make much sense.
Oh yeah, they're of poor construction.
They're very poor construction. And I went to try and find the microfilm of this, and I think the first one is available, but blurry.
The second one.
The only copy of that paper they have is a front page with an article cut out that scanned in and everyone's like, it must have this must have been that editorial, But I literally couldn't find any you know, because I was kind of curious to read just how poor of a writer this person was and get you know, probably what would not have been accurate details.
No, no, so no, they I mean they basically reported in the first one, in the actual article that her clothes had been torn at. They really characterized it.
Like he attacked her, like a sexual assault, right exactly.
And then the second one is just basically like an all out editorial calling for Dick Rowland's lynching. Yeah, this is in the paper. So the local newspaper has inflamed the white citizenry into basically calling them to action, to go do something about this. And they all show up at the courthouse to demand that Sheriff McCullough hand over Dick Roland to them so they can go lynch him. And he says, yeah, no, back off, no. But so before but I think he tells him like, no, I'm not I'm not doing that like you said. But before the crowd disperses, a second group comes and it's actually a group of World War One veterans from Greenwood who had found out that this white mob was going to lynch Dick Roland. And they were like, no, no, they're not. We're going to go see to it that doesn't happen.
Yeah, I mean, there were hundreds of w W One veterans, Black veterans in Greenwood. They were people who fought for this country. And it's sort of that familiar despicable story, shed blood on European soil, come back home to America and you're still a second class citizen. They had petition to and this is just sort of a sidebar. The petition to walk in the Memorial Day Parade for many years and were always refused. And May thirtieth was Memorial Day, and that that same year they had once again said can we participate in the Memorial Day Parade as veterans? They say, no, we're only going to honor the white veterans.
No.
I think they wanted to be integrated in the parade with the white veterans, just as World War One veterans marching together. And they said, no, whites only, you can march by yourself. Oh really, And when they did march, they were taunted and jeered at, oh gotcha by the people who are watching the parade.
So these are the people that got guns and came down there and said not on our watch.
We're not going to let this happen.
And it kind of plays out as a film, you know, from the sounds of it is like these cars pull in and part the crowd, and these black veterans get out with their guns and they're like, no, you're not taking this kid, this is not going to happen.
Right.
So apparently Sheriff McCullough was able to to convince the Greenwood World War One veterans who showed up that he wasn't going to hand over dick roll and that he's going to protect a role, and then they should probably just go he's gonna get rid of this white crowd too, But don't worry. I'm I'm not like the old sheriff.
Yeah.
And there's about seventy five armed men. Yeah, and I drive it home, like, how many people.
I read that there were? I saw a thousands somewhere of white people of white people at the courthouse, like it was just this calling for a lynching.
Yeah it was. They were heavily outmanned.
Yeah, but seventy five, the seventy five black veterans showed up in the midst of this. Let's even say it's just a thousand, let's even say it's like five hundred people calling for a lynching. Yeah, and you're seventy five black men showing up armed saying like no, it's not happening. Just pretty courageous stuff, right.
Yeah.
So before they can leave or as they're leaving, it's actually not clear what this event name gets its name from. Happens what you would call a race riot.
Yeah, I mean it looked like It might have been on the way to being a scene that the sheriff managed successfully. They might have been on the way out that white crowd might have dispersed if not for this one incident.
And even if we did know, you know, just beat by beat, the history of this, you still wouldn't be able to say what would have happened. Yeah, exactly, that is a possible outcome. There was a there was an older white man who demanded that one of these black veterans give him his gun, and the black veterans said, no, I'm not going to do that, and the old white man went to go grab it, and the gun went off, and both sides just started shooting at one another.
Yeah, that's what triggered it. It was chaos. There was a hail of bullets.
People on both sides just started, you know, dropping dead from the bullets flying, and it became a full on war scene basically for the next couple of days.
Right.
Okay, So at that point, the black veterans are like, we really should get out of here.
Yeah. They leave toward Greenwood.
Toward Greenwood, which is their home. They're going back to their homes, and along the way, some of them, like kind of drop back and like stake out positions and start sniping at the white rioters who are coming after them. And at that point they go further back into Greenwood. And by this time it's like the early morning hours of I believe June first, right.
I don't think it was the early morning at that point.
It was like midnight. I mean like midnight one something like that.
Yeah, yeah, it's during the night time.
And this is when the white people started breaking into the hardware stores and looting businesses to get weapons.
Yeah.
Because here's the thing. So that's Sheriff McCullough, who you're kind of like, oh, okay, as far as this whole story goes, that's not so bad. Like he at least tried now. The moment this race riot happened and the black veterans took off back for Greenwood, he started deputizing white rioters, handing out guns and ammunition and basically saying, go get them, Go get those guys. Yeah, And rather than saying like this is not your job, this my responsibility. I'll go home. I'm going to go handle this, he enlisted the help of these people who were involved in this riot on the white side and at that point any semblance of what you would call a race riot ended and what became a revenge massacre just started. So people call this the Tulsa race riot, and I think maybe a tenth of it qualifies as a race riot, and the rest it just should be called the Tulsa massacre.
Yeah, So what happens is, like you said, some of these veterans get staked out in strategic positions on rooftops and behind houses, behind cars. The White Army, for lack of a better word, is advancing into Greenwood. They start setting fires at these strategic locations to flesh out these snipers, and then they just start burning everything, basically setting fire to every house in every business to burn down Greenwood.
Well, I think also about for about the five or about four or five hours from the time where they managed to flush the snipers out until about five in the morning, they were quietly taking up positions inside Greenwood, and then a whistle blew at about five am and all of them just came out from their positions and then they just went berserk. It was a charge, a full on military coordinated assault on Greenwood. And so this assault involved driving people out of their homes at gunpoint any resistance that people were shot on site. There were people who were shot who weren't offering resistance. There was a story about an elderly couple who were kneeling in their house praying and they were both executed by these white mobsters. Yeah, in their home.
People were burned alive.
Yeah, houses and people doused with kerosene and burned alive. There was another story of a blind beggar who was tied to a car and dragged through the streets.
I mean, it was just bedlam.
And Watchmen actually gets pretty graphic in how they depict this, even though it's an alternate history show, just like the movie in the graphic novel where they I think they did pretty decent justice. They didn't follow the origin story of how it started, but it just placed heavily into the plotline, right, Yeah.
Yeah, should we take another break? Sure? All right, let's take another break and we'll tell you what happened from here.
Okay, So we actually took a commercial break in the midst of a massacre. So the the thing is like people are being driven out of their houses and shot in some cases, but more often than not, they're being like just flushed out. But no house, no building, no business, no nothing was spared. They're in the intent of these these white terrorists. There's really no other name for him. Was to burn down Greenwood.
Yeah, and we kept at bay.
Yeah. They said, do not come in here, like the rioters will kill you. Yeah, do you just stay away. They burned Greenwood to the ground. Thirty five blocks, thirty five blocks. Do you know how many blocks that is?
That's a lot of blocks.
Think about how many blocks is thirty five blocks, and then add like ten, because I guarantee your conception is less than actually thirty five blocks. That is a lot of blocks of buildings burned to the ground. People killed in their front yards, including doctor Andrew C. Jackson, the famous surgeon, shot like a dog in his own front yard in the chest. There's a picture of him.
Twelve hundred homes, churches, schools, hospital, library. I think I mentioned there were six hundred businesses total. They were all torched, just torch.
There were six people who owned airplanes. They were that wealthy in Greenwood.
Yeah.
Their airplanes were stolen by the rioters and used to drop bombs, dynamite, nitroglycerin, fire, and then there was also accusations the National Guard was helping coordinate this too.
Yeah, the National Guard was called in and when they got there, by all accounts, they did not try to help quell the riot. They more acted as helping to arrest.
Blackma that's just historical facts.
Oh yeah, they were bringing in I mean, they were killing people for sure, but they were also arresting black men. The women and children fled. I think six thousand people were arrested, and the women and children fled toward the woods, basically like leaving behind everything they owned.
Who are homeless. There was ten thousand people who lived in Greenwood at the time, and after this one night, this orgy of like violence, there were like nine thousand left homeless and hundreds dead.
Yeah, And apparently back to the National Guard, they said that they brought in planes just to spot fires and coordinate ground security. But there are reports from people there that said that they were actually shooting at people on the ground.
Say that that's a rumor. Yeah, even setting that aside, the National Guard didn't come in and quell anything. They just started arresting and detaining the victims of this massacre. That was the role that they played in this situation.
That's right.
So the whole thing culminates with I mean, in the end, it's really hard to get the amount of people killed. I think the official report says thirty five black people. It's certainly way more than that. I've seen all the way up to three hundred.
That's what I saw, is almost across the boards. Three hundred.
Yeah, that again might be one of those things that everyone just sort of settled on a number. But it was not thirty five people, to be sure.
No, definitely not. And so like as the sun comes up the day after I think June first, Green would burn to the ground, there's people hiding in the woods. Thousands and thousands of former affluent residents of this black community homeless, are now homeless. Well, no, they're not homeless because the National Guards very kindly put them into tention centers at the fairgrounds.
That doesn't qualify as a home right.
That's my point, yeah, is that it's not a home right. They're kept detained at the fair grounds for months. I saw that in some cases most of them had to endure the winter. This happened in May. Yeah, these people were still a lot of them kept in detention camps at the fair grounds through the winter.
Yeah, Tulsa winters and summers are both tough.
They were kept in detention camps because white rioters burn their town to the ground.
Yeah, and this was in June, so right in the math.
Right, so yeah, it was June. I guess it was the end of May. So the way that you got out of these detention centers was your white employer came and vouched for you and said, this person works for me. I need them back. Yeah, please let them go. That's how you got out.
Yeah.
So in the aftermath, no one was arrested, There were no prosecutions.
No, no, I'm sorry, Chuck. There was a grand jury that was sat convened. They indicated twenty people. All of them were black. Well none, we're white.
Yeah, that's I meant on the white side.
Okay.
There were in today's dollars between fifty and a hivehundred million dollars worth of damage everywhere I look, said. The only organization that really helped, and they really helped was the American Red Cross, super Brave and did a whole lot. And I also saw where you know, it wasn't the entire city of Tulsa, Apparently there were some white communities that reached out in the aftermask, of course, to help with the recovery efforts to take people in. So we don't want to paint the entire town as doing the wrong thing. Apparently some people did step up.
Sure, I mean, just nothing is that literally black and white? Yeah, you know, like there's always shades of gray in that situation, in any situation.
Yeah, but Greenwood came back. They it's probably not a surprise, but the insurance companies had it classified very quickly as a riot instead of just a violent massacre because that means they wouldn't have to compensate people for their homes being businesses being burned to the ground.
Right, because if they were rioting, then they were culpable for the damage. And that insurance company went, yeah, so also despicable. The county commission said, no, we're not accepting any outside donations, will take care of our own, and then didn't didn't follow through on that at all. So there were no funds paid to the Greenwood people.
And people were trying to right as.
Reparations or to even help them rebuild, and the county commission, I guess proposed at one point that they would handle us by buying the land for like a fraction of its market value and then auctioning it off to the high spider.
That was one proposal, an old scam.
And they also said, well, you know what, just to make sure that this doesn't happen again, we're going to establish a new building code for Greenwood. No building can be rebuilt unless it's built with fireproof bricks. And then they went to the fireproof brick producers and said, do not sell any materials to the black people of Greenwood. So despite this, they managed to rebuild in about five years. Astoundingly, the people whose houses in town was burned to the ground came back and rebuilt. And from just about everything I read, Greenwood was actually better, more prosperous, and more affluent from the second time around. Then it was even the first, and it was pretty affluent the first time. And Chuck, we said, like hundreds of people were killed, right, yes, so get this. Funerals were forbidden, like you weren't allowed to have a funeral. That's how covered up this thing became. And one of the reasons we will never know how many people were killed is because the people who were killed were taken off and dumped in the river, or stashed in coal mines or buried in mass unmarked graves.
Well, they think they found two of those, like a month ago. Yeah, they were archaeologists in Tulsa and this was from Time magazine from Jasmine Aguilera. They have identified two sites that they thought were that they think now are mass graves. And they've been looking since I think two thousand and one because they knew people, you know, there were reports of mass graves, and so archaeologists have been looking. In twenty eighteen, they started like a legit investigation and they think that they have found one, at least one, maybe two of these sites.
But even which is in a cemetery ironically, yeah.
I saw that. But even this whole thing is like fairly new. It wasn't like until the late nineties that people even started talking about this.
Right, Yeah, nineteen ninety seven was when the state of Oklahoma introduced a bill. And this was after just not talking about it. No, in the black community, they would talk about it in stories and whispers. The white community just buried it and the state of Oklahoma just didn't acknowledge it.
Yeah. The last thing I saw about it was. The Tulsa Tribune ran another editorial on like June fourth, a few days after, basically saying.
Like lynching failed, thank you.
No, they said thank you to the police and all the white citizens who cleaned up Tulsa by getting rid of Greenwood. It's actually way worse than what I just depicted, but I couldn't possibly bring myself to read it verbatim.
Yeah, it's just vile. Yeah, what it says, it's really bad.
But in ninety seven, this is when they introduced a bill for reparations and creation of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. And that report was released in two thousand and one, and it did hold police and public officials to blame, but it didn't do anything. Basically, there were no reparations. As for Dick Roland, the case was the actual case, remember the case of the assault that was dismissed in September. Apparently Sarah Page didn't want to press forward with charges and she's lost the time. He supposedly immediately moved to Kansas City maybe and no one else really knows anything else about him.
Huh. That's just so surprising.
Yeah, you know, and if not for the watchmen, coming out. This might still be a fairly buried story outside of Oklahoma. Yeah right, it's really brought a lot of attention to it.
Yeah, and good for them for doing that. Yeah. So one of the things that I saw about Greenwood itself was that it kept prospering and flourishing for decades after this, until about the sixties. And one of the reasons I saw that explained why not just Greenwood, but a lot of black areas started to decline in the sixties was a byproduct of integration. Was that you could, as a black person in America, spend your black dollar at a white owned business now, right, And like they didn't teach us that in public school, like that, this was a byproduct of it. But as a result, these black owned businesses started to decline more and more and more, and so Greenwood wasn't as prosperous as it was before. But the death blow, the death blow is that remember in our Interstates episode where in a lot of the poorer areas, lot of the areas of color, that that's where they built the highways. I saw that they built I two for four right through Greenwood.
Yeah, Tulsa is an interesting place I spent a few weeks there a few years ago. Yeah, and it's, uh, it's interesting because it's got this old oil money. Yeah, neighborhoods, some of the most amazing estates and houses I've ever seen. It's got some very poor communities, a lot of meth problems.
Yeah, it's an interesting place.
Sounds like it. Yeah, Well that's a Tulsa for you.
And you know what, I spent a few weeks there in this neighborhood and I didn't know anything about it. I didn't Maybe there is a memorial or something, but I didn't notice it. I'm not saying there isn't one, but I didn't see it.
So, you know, Desmond tou too Sure who helped bring about just the changeover from apartheid to reconciliation.
I love his work.
He came, Yeah, a big fan. He came to to Tulsa basically said, you guys are sitting on a powder keg here, like when this not very long ago, I think we were in the nineties, maybe even in the two thousands, just basically saying like you can't how could you possibly heal when you still have bodies in on mark graves? Like no one's talking about this still. I believe there is a park that they found, like a reconciliation park or something like that, but it sounds like there's still a ways to go. Yeah, I won't it be ironic that it was Watchman that basically is forcing this issue to be discussed.
Be pretty ironic.
Yeah, the power of comic books right, well, not even TV, I guess.
Of graphic novels. Yes, So if you want to know more about the Tulsa massacre also known as the Tulsa Race Riot of nineteen twenty one, there's a lot for you to go read, thankfully, and you should just type that into your favorite search bar. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.
Hey guys, this email is mostly for Chuck. I need to get something off my chest and clear some things up about my involvement with your pronunciation of Carrie.
Oh eyes, Elvis, Elvis.
Sometime over the summer, I made a comment in the corrections corner threat a movie crush on the Facebook page where you were pronouncing Carrie l wise l wise, I posted I had read on I read at Ama, his name sounds like Elvis, But what I meant to say was it rhymes with Elvis.
Is that why you said Carrie Elvis?
Like, yeah, it's because of Eli. He says this.
When I finally heard my name pop up in the podcast, I was thrilled and couldn't wait to hear your reaction. Not only did my comment get understandably misunderstood, but I've heard your reference to comment two or three times now and continue to correct yourself, saying Elvis, most recently on the Andre the Giant Live episode parenthetical. Josh said it right, I try to issue another I tried to issue another comment immediately afterward to clear the air, but it was too late. You discontinued corrections corner I did. I was gonna do that on Movie Crush, and it just became like you said this wrong and your inflection and I was.
Like, you said Kubrick was great. He was very great.
Yeah.
I was a minute, as like movie corrections, but you know how it goes.
So I just said, no more of this.
You don't understand how something like this, something as small, has been tearing me apart inside every time I hear you reference it. There's one thing worse than giving someone bad information, it's having them proliferate that information out in the world, in this case to millions of well.
Not millions of people, trillions.
I just want to apologize officially for correcting you on something so silly. And any way you want to say the name is fine by me as long as it's what do you say?
Elvis?
Ellis?
I think Elvis. Thanks for the decadeh No, Now Eli's got in my.
Head too, Thanks for the decade of great content. I'll see you both in January and Seattle for my third live show. Nice, all the best, Eli.
It's Eli's third live show birthday.
And I think it's pronounced el I.
Oh, it could be Ellie could be. Yeah, we're just gonna go with you.
I think Ellie's c O l I E.
It could be. I think Ellie Golding is something different than that, isn't it.
I don't know who is that or does.
She pronounce her name Eli?
I don't know who that is.
You do too, you've heard her pop songs before when you're working out. Okay, if you want to get in touch with this like Eli did to let us know we're saying something wrong because of you, well you can get in touch with this by going on to stuff youshould know dot com, and you can also send us an email send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
