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Randy Hopkins

The Notorious Sarah Page

Updated: Aug 2, 2023

By Randy Hopkins -


Sarah Beaver (third from left) would eventually become Sarah Page, a central figure in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Image courtesy Juanita Ruebke Spitzenberger.



 

On Memorial Day 1921, a young, white Tulsa, Oklahoma elevator operator named Sarah Page had a confrontation with a black teenager named Dick Roland. The incident in Tulsa’s downtown Drexel Building soon spiraled into the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Much like Roland himself, Page remains known today only through the accumulated legend of sparse news articles and the speculations of historians. As it turns out, most of Sarah Page’s legend is untrue. Fortunately, it is now possible to meet the real person at the center of Tulsa’s race war.

She began life as Sarah Elizabeth Beaver. Her folks called her “Sarie.” She was raised on a family farm near Cedar Township, Arkansas close to the Missouri state line. It wasn’t that far from Oklahoma either. She was the fourth of many siblings. She was described as much fun and a person who loved life.[i]

Her birthday was July 27, 1899. That meant that she was twenty-one when she was working on a Tulsa elevator on Memorial Day, 1921. She was not then an orphan. While her father Allen Jefferson Beaver died in September 1920, her mother Nancy Davis Beaver lived until 1938.[ii] The Tulsa Tribune’s infamous article of May 31, 1921 - Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator - got both those things wrong, along with much else.

A surviving family photo shows an attractive family. The judgment of the sons of bank presidents and oilmen who made up the Tulsa High School senior boys’ club - that she was not much to look at - was another suspect characterization of Sarah Page.[iii]

In March 1918, at the age of eighteen, Sarah made her escape from the farm by marrying Robert H. Fisk, twenty-eight and a self-employed contractor from Lincoln, Nebraska. The marriage did not last. By January 1920, she was again Sarah Beaver, living as a single, unemployed lodger in Springfield, Missouri.[iv]

In February 1920, at the age of twenty, she married Springfield’s Raymond M. Page. He was twenty-six and had served in the U. S. Army during the War to End All Wars, rising to the rank of corporal. He was a taxi driver.[v]

Feb. 14, 1920 newspaper announcement of the Page and Beaver marriage courtesy of the Springfield Missouri Republican.

 

Exactly one year later - the waiting period required by Missouri law - Ray Page opened divorce proceedings in Springfield’s Greene County Circuit Court. His divorce petition was served on Sarah on March 7, 1921, by Tulsa County Sheriff Willard McCullough.[vi]

In June, after Tulsa's race war, Sheriff McCullough was quoted that “if half the charges alleged in the petition of her husband for divorce are true, she is a notorious character.”[vii] This lurid sketch has bled into colorful, alternative versions of what was going on between her and Dick Roland on May 30, 1921, including a dangerous romance and/or prostitution with a pimp named Diamond Dick. Like Nab Negro, McCullough’s rendition of Sarah Page was also false. The divorce petition said no such thing.

Ray Page’s sworn petition reveals that the Pages’ marriage was celebrated on February 13, 1920, but that the couple lived together only until April 20, 1920, a scant nine weeks. But the marital union had been shattered at the outset. After legal boilerplate that Ray had faithfully discharged his duties as a husband, while Sarah had disregarded hers, the petition outlines Sarah’s “indignities” as follows:

"Within a few days after the marriage, Sarah became dissatisfied with married life and told Ray that “she did not care to be married and did not want to live with him.” These complaints were “continuous” up until April 20, 1920."

The petition then reveals that sometime before April 20, the couple left their Missouri home to reside in Tulsa. The reason for the move was not given. Given Sarah’s consistent declarations, it is possible that she chose to remove herself to Tulsa and Ray Page trailed her there. The move did not revive the marriage. On April 20, compelled by unemployment and in order to get a job, Ray returned home to Springfield. There, he claims to have obtained employment and immediately wrote Sarah and asked her to return to Missouri. This she refused to do and “continued to refuse to come here ever since.”

Sarah was quoted, “That she was not going to live with plaintiff anymore and for him to get a divorce and if he did not do so, she would, as she never intended to live with him again.”[viii]

The petition contains no mention of infidelities, scandals or the remotest of notorieties. The reasons for Sarah’s immediate and persistent refusal to continue the marriage to Ray Page were not given. That she was abused or in some way injured during either or both of her two marital forays cannot be dismissed out of hand.[ix]

The Page divorce decree courtesy of the Greene County Circuit Court.

 

This petition, and possibly the reasons behind it, throw a different light on what transpired inside the Drexel elevator. If Sarah was not McCullough’s Jezebel, the elevator becomes less fraught with images of prostitution or a romance on the rocks. The image of Diamond Dick the pimp also begins to fade.

In their stead, the impact of Dick Roland’s power-forward sized foot coming down hard on Sarah’s foot after an accidental trip and fall comes to the fore, with pain and anger in its wake. That was Roland’s explanation.[x] With her hands apparently free from a sexual assault, Page seized her purse and began pounding Roland with it. She showed the broken purse to her neighbor an hour later.[xi] Perhaps it was just the pain and the anger. Possibly, racial animus added force to the blows. The specter of a former husband’s abuse may have momentarily been at work. Roland then admits grabbing her arms. A scream later, the Renberg’s clerk arrived and Roland ran. Sarah Page was left to explain.

A day later, the likely cause of the elevator rage was transformed into the Tulsa Tribune’s tale of attempted sexual violence. Sarah’s aggressive purse-wielding was replaced by a hapless young orphan’s scratched face and torn clothes. The Tribune’s managing editor later admitted that these inflammatory claims were untrue.[xii] Sarah Page was not responsible for inventing them. She did not mention them to her neighbor Anna Green. Green didn’t mention them in her interview with the Tribune.[xiii] The police talked to Sarah on Monday and would have noticed scratches. A torn dress or blouse would have been Exhibit A. According to the police, Sarah denied those claims on Tuesday, June 1, and had not filed charges against Roland as of June 2.[xiv]

Seeking a fallback culprit, attention has been turned to the consistently unnamed Renberg’s clerk, sometimes cast as a white supremacist whose bigotry caused him to read the darkest motives into the event. “Racist” and “bigot" were not the terms employed by Roscoe Dunjee of Oklahoma City’s The Black Dispatch after the Race Massacre. On the front page of his newspaper, under the headline Loot, Arson, Murder!, Dunjee called the clerk “an honest man.” Dunjee had employed an investigator - whom Dunjee characterized as “white man of unquestioned integrity and honesty” - and this investigator talked to “the man who went to the girl when the difficulty happened.” The clerk said, “she was not bruised nor her clothing disarranged in any way.”[xv] The unidentified clerk was Clarence Poulton, who was also a tailor. He worked for Renberg’s until at least 1940.[xvi]

If neither Sarah Page nor Clarence Poulton were responsible for inflating the story, then who was? All trails lead to the 1921 Tulsa police force, headed by chief John Gustafson.

The police were likely telling the truth in the beginning when they claimed that they were far from convinced a crime had been committed on Monday. They were also likely telling the truth at the end, when they announced on Wednesday that Page had denied the Nab Negro article was true in its details and, further, that Page’s version was substantially the same as Roland’s.[xvii] It was in the middle where they lied.

The motivation for the detour from the truth was due to the identity of the possible culprit in the elevator. He was none other than the flashy, outgoing, oversized and diamond-wearing negro teenager working a shine stand around the corner from the police station and right across the street from Gustafson’s detective agency. The one who “presented” himself as “Diamond Dick.” In his 1922 deposition, Gustafson could not remember Roland’s last name, but he certainly remembered the moniker of Diamond Dick.[xviii] Roland even dressed better than they did, as shown in his high school picture.[xix]