By Randy Hopkins J.M. Adkinson from a campaign advertisement courtesy of the author. On Tuesday afternoon, May 31, 1921, a newspaper article titled “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator” hit the streets of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Located on the front page of the Tulsa Tribune, it was promoted by the outcries of newsboys - “negro assaults a white girl!”[i] In modern parlance, “Nab Negro” was fake news. Its deceit married hatred and bred hysteria. One hundred years later, the outcome is called the Tulsa Race Massacre.[ii] Part 1: Cleaning up Tulsa The trail to “Nab Negro” began in April 1920, when the Tulsa Republican Party’s “Bigger and Better” ticket won a narrow, upset victory in city elections.[iii] The win, which ousted incumbent mayor Charles H. Hubbard and three Democrat Party city commissioners, was a bipartisan affair. During the primary election three weeks earlier, almost five thousand voters had cast ballots for Democrat mayoral candidates versus barely two thousand Republican votes.[iv] A dissident “law and order” faction of the Democrats, however, led by defeated primary mayoral candidate Charles F. Hopkins and his supporters Tate Brady, Stephen R. “Buck” Lewis, and Lina Walker Hull switched sides and put the Republicans over the top.[v] The monstrous consequences of the election were revealed in June 1921, when Greenwood lay in ruins. Hubbard had actively campaigned for Greenwood votes and his energetic supporters there included Andrew J. Smitherman, publisher of the Tulsa Star, and J. B. Stradford.[vi] Odds are high that a re-elected Hubbard administration would have never countenanced Tulsa’s race war.[vii] Under the new administration, Tulsa’s city government caused it. Thaddeus D. Evans, a lawyer and farm loan agent, became the mayor, but the dominant force of the new regime was commissioner James Munroe Adkison. Born in Ohio and raised in Texas, the forty-one-year-old Adkison ran an insurance and loan company and had served as city treasurer during the prior Republican administration from 1916-18.[viii] Adkison tallied more votes than any other candidate, crushing incumbent Police Commissioner F. A. Bohn by over twenty-four hundred votes and outpolling Evans by over eight hundred. With the consistent support of Evans and O. A. Steiner, the assertive Adkison commanded a narrow majority of the commission.[ix] He became Police Commissioner, the most hotly contested commission assignment.[x] Adkison was also Tulsa’s acting mayor during Evans’ absences, including during Roy Belton’s lynching in August 1920.[xi] John A. Gustafson courtesy of the Tulsa World Since Adkison promised the “enforcement of every letter of the law,” the selection of Tulsa’s police chief became the most highly anticipated post-election appointment.[xii] There were competing candidates, each with their own set of backers, and for a time no one had the votes for the job.[xiii] To the deep chagrin of rebel Democrat Lina Hull, local private detective John A. Gustafson won the role.[xiv] It was a puzzling selection for a straight-laced administration. The forty-seven-year-old Gustafson’s sparse biographical information sketches a portrait of grifting and corruption.[xv] He was a private eye who claimed the Pinkerton and the William J. Burns Detective agencies for his resume and the American and Oklahoma Bankers Associations for clients.[xvi] Gustafson advertised his expertise in the areas of intelligence and infiltration; he ran spies.[xvii] Former and future Tulsa County Sheriff Willard McCullough, then a private citizen, tried to head off Gustafson’s selection, prophetically warning Tulsa’s new mayor and commissioners that: "Gustafson has all his life been connected with detective agencies and with the underworld, and knew nothing about working with anybody but snitches and crooks, and that he would have no other kind of men on his force, and that such a police force would be a menace to the City of Tulsa." [xviii] Gustafson also boasted of skills in the art of violent ambush, claiming to have masterminded the bloody Deep Fork Valley ambush of January 1917.[ixx] Evans’ operative order upon taking office was “cleanliness” and Adkison and Gustafson worked hand in glove to do the cleaning.[xx] Adkison proclaimed Gustafson the man to make “Tulsa’s morals better - immediately.”[xxi] Gustafson, in turn, proclaimed his boss was the “heart and soul in the campaign to make Tulsa a better place in which to live and to rear boys and girls to clean manhood and womanhood.”[xxii] A series of wars on crime and broadly defined “undesirable characters” were launched with round-ups a regular feature of newspaper coverage.[xxiii] Today, Adkison and Gustafson are remembered for deputizing four hundred special deputies during the Tulsa Race Massacre, as Adkison admitted, and for having armed at least two hundred and fifty of them, as Gustafson admitted.[xxiv] On June 2, 1921, Adjutant General Charles Barrett of the Oklahoma National Guard declared that these special officers were chiefly instrumental in inciting the outbreak and did most of the shooting.[xxv] Twenty years later, Barrett wrote that “they became as deputies the most dangerous part of the mob” and were the heart of Greenwood’s incendiaries.[xxvi] Adkison and Gustafson, however, had long shown an eagerness for sanctioning precipitous violence. On August 22, 1920, they declared war on the “underworld.” Gustafson promised a clean-up so complete it will look like “a treatment from an electric vacuum cleaner when we get through.”[xxvii] A few hours later, Tulsa taxi driver Homer Nida was hi-jacked and shot near Red Fork. After a week of heated newspaper coverage, Nida died and his alleged killer, Roy Belton, 20, was easily removed from the Tulsa County jail and delivered into the hands of a lynch mob. While Nida lingered between life and death, William Cranfield, a taxi driver identified in state attorney general’s files as a ring leader of the lynchers, approached Tulsa county officials about facilitating the killing. At a discussion at the Elks Club, Cranfield told Assistant Tulsa County Attorney A. E. Montgomery that they “wanted to lynch Tom Owen (sic) alias Belton” and that “the police had agreed with them to help them lynch this boy and that they had some good citizens in addition to that.”[xxviii] The Tulsa police thereafter acted exactly like they were in on the deal.[xxix] As lynching rumors picked up speed, Gustafson promised County Sheriff James Woolley that the police were “ready at the call.”[xxx] When Woolley called, he was told that the police “were all out” and their whereabouts unknown.[xxxi] In spite of at least thirty minutes advance notice, the police arrived at the courthouse, a mere four blocks from the police station, only after Belton had been driven away.[xxxii] Suddenly energized, Gustafson and his force joined the boisterous mile-long cavalcade trailing Belton’s “fate car.” Most of the city’s police watched the murder, ordered by Gustafson to stand down for fear of harming the audience of thousands, including women and children.[xxxiii] Instead, the police helped manage the crowd and control traffic.[xxxiv] While Roy Belton’s corpse was still warm, Gustafson told the Tulsa Tribune that his death would be “a good object lesson to that class of criminals and do more to stop hi-jacking than anything else that could have happened.” He told the Tulsa Daily World that, “It is my honest opinion the lynching of Belton will prove of real benefit to Tulsa and vicinity.”[xxxv] The police never made an arrest and nobody was ever punished. Adkison later surfaced on the eve of a grand jury investigation leading a successful public relations effort to burnish the police department’s reputation.[xxxvi] The grand jury gave the police a clean bill of health despite hearing testimony from only one officer, Doc Bissett.[xxxvii] Every observant person and especially in Greenwood was free to draw conclusions about the affair and its meaning for the future.[xxxviii] While Roy Belton's murder was promoted as a vaccination against hi-jacking, failure of purpose was added to its horrible consequences. Crime was not vanquished and a postwar financial depression and collapsing oil prices did not help.[xxxix] On December 21, 1920, Adkison declared that “the greatest crime wave in history…is sweeping over the country.”[xl] Under assuring headlines in the Tulsa Daily World - “Shoot Down a Few Highwaymen and “Crime Wave” Ends” - Adkison encouraged Tulsa businessmen to station armed men in their businesses, not in the open where they might deter, but where they could “see but not be seen.” He and Gustafson urged this uncertain posse to “shoot to kill and not merely to frighten.” Adkison recommended hiring out-of-work former soldiers but proposed no control over them or even their identification.[xli] Adkison also announced that the police would begin using specially commissioned men in emergencies.[xlii] In early 1921, the Evans administration found itself confronted with two new foes. One was the discovery of “agitation among the colored people” in Greenwood, centered on a possible “black uprising.” So, Adkison and Gustafson, with Evans in tow, crossed the tracks into “Little Africa” and met with “a group of negroes of the better class” who were told that the problem was theirs to deal with and “if there ever was an uprising we would hold them responsible.”[xliii] In a few months, their threat of collective punishment would turn out to have been a prophecy. The other new problem struck Adkison and allies where it hurt - they were themselves accused of being soft on crime. Worse, they found themselves under legal investigation, one that they had unwittingly helped launch. In March 1921, Adkison and Gustafson led a chorus of grumbling that Tulsa County Attorney William F. Seaver’s prosecutorial laxities were to blame for the crimewave.[xliv] After dissatisfaction with Seaver, a Republican, spread to the Oklahoma Bankers Association, Oklahoma’s Democrat governor J. B. A. Robertson ordered Democrat Attorney General Prince Freeling into action.[xlv] Freeling, in turn, assigned the investigation to Kathryn Van Leuven, advertised as the first female assistant attorney general in the nation.[xlvi] Kathryn Van Leuven courtesy of the Tulsa Tribune The investigation into County law enforcement quickly morphed into an investigation of the Evans administration. The morphing was helped along by Lina Hull, still publicly seething over Gustafson’s selection as police chief, and her husband J. Arthur, an oilman, and director of Tulsa’s dominant Exchange National Bank.[xlvii] Van Leuven and the Hulls became open allies and the investigation publicly turned to subjects more scintillating than booze or gambling. Van Leuven announced an intent to investigate whether “young white girls were being permitted to attend dances in the negro quarter and take part in them along with negro men and women.” This was joined with a complaint that she was being “shadowed” by a man she took to be “a detective or an underworld character.[xlviii] The next day, Freeling, who would soon announce his candidacy for governor, declared the investigation was expanding to city officials. On April 16, Mrs. Hull and other prominent citizens announced the reinvigoration of the Committee of 100, an elite “law and order” group that exercised heavy control over public affairs during the World War. Van Leuven addressed the new organization, as did Richard Lloyd Jones, publisher of the Tulsa Tribune, who followed with an editorial praising the Committee members as the ”best citizens.”[xlix] Prior to April 1921, Jones’s editorials and Evans administration policy had been largely consistent, if not coordinated.[l] Relations between Jones and the police were about to take a nasty turn, though other people would bear the consequences. Van Leuven invited the public to tender their criticisms in confidence. Mrs. W. H. Clark, a former Tulsa police matron, reported that the police station had aspects of a brothel and a brutal one at that.[lii] Much unsavory and odious behavior, she claimed, involved Chief of Detectives James Patton, who would later run of the investigation of Diamond Dick Rowland.[liii] A federal Bureau of Investigation agent reported that the town’s hotels and rooming houses were awash with prostitution. The Brady Hotel, owned by key Evans’ supporter Tate Brady, was said to have “the most popular reputation for their prostitutes.”[liv] Other complaints in the attorney general’s case file suggest that Gustafson was running too true to his reputation for graft, with claims of pawnshop rake-offs, payroll padding, and diversion of confiscated booze.[lv] Gustafson placed his dubious policeman Doc Bissett as rooming house inspector, a position fertile for bribery.[lvi] None of these details were shared with the public, which likely made rumors the more titillating, especially with Jones’ newspaper stirring the pot. The Tribune had been alternating between criticism and support of the police, but on Monday, May 16, Jones’ editorial page crossed the Rubicon by claiming the existence of “police instructions to let booze, gambling, and prostitution alone.”[lvii] Richard Lloyd Jones, publisher of the Tulsa Tribune courtesy of Russell Cobb Jones’ editorial lit the fuse and Adkison exploded. At the city commission the next morning, Adkison demanded a city-run “court of inquiry,” at which his accusers would be forced to produce or shut up. Accusing Jones’ editorial of “damnable lies,” Adkison continued: "I demand that these apostles of purity be brought before a court of inquiry. I have been severely criticised (sic) and I want these howling wolves hushed. When my integrity is attacked I want proof." Evans wanted nothing to do with this, pleading that “we can’t go around listening to every dog that barks up a tree.” Adkison’s usual opponent on the commission, C. S. Younkman, was happy to give Adkison the public show he craved. Gustafson appears not to have uttered a word.[lviii] Subpoenas were served on sixty witnesses, including Jones, Van Leuven, and the Hulls. On May 19, 1921, the court of inquiry kicked off before a crowded city hall auditorium.[lix] Evans presided and the city commission sat in judgment. The plan was to let the administration’s freshly minted special counsel, Tulsa lawyer A. J. Biddison, grill anyone who came forward. Things went immediately awry. Jones, by now the police department’s public enemy number one, was the first witness and announced that Mrs. Clark, the former police matron, had been threatened by the police, as his paper would that day elaborate in detail.[lx] Jones said he had seen the attorney general’s evidence, but wouldn’t part with any of it. Van Leuven also refused to disclose any complaints, but won “thunderous applause” by noting that Evans and city attorney Frank Duncan had failed to present themselves to her for questioning. Rev. Harold Cooke won more cheers relating his tour of Tulsa’s north side nightlife, complete with ethnic dialect.[lxi] J. Arthur Hull climaxed proceedings by testifying that “we found whites and negroes singing and dancing together. Young white girls were dancing while negroes played the piano.”[lxii] Van Leuven revealed that Evans and two commissioners were themselves under investigation.[lxiii] While the city’s Republican paper, the Tulsa Daily World, did its best to argue that the accusations against the police had fallen flat, Jones’ Tulsa Tribune reported every juicy detail.[lxiv] Biddison, the administration’s mouthpiece, proclaimed Jones “the municipal liar” and worked the Judas metaphor, arguing that Jones had back-stabbed the administration, that the Tribune’s former “splendid support” had been “but the preparation of the place where the treacherous steel might enter your vitals,” and that Jones had “intended from the first, an opportunity to stick the knife into you to the hilt and when that opportunity came it was sought to be driven home.”[lxv] The commission voted 5-0 to exonerate the police, but the attorney general’s investigation remained as did Jones’ self-righteous editorials. In short order, however, most of the administration’s embarrassments would all but be forgotten.[lxvi] The forgetting began on Tuesday, May 31, with the arrival of the day’s Tulsa Tribune and “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator.” To be continued in Part 2: The Police Nab a Negro Endnotes: [i] John Hope Franklin & John Whittington Franklin, My Life and An Era (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 196. [ii] There are several different published versions of “Nab Negro.” The version quoted by Roscoe Dunjee, Bob Hower, and Alfred Brophy matches the body of the article printed in the Tulsa Tribune’s surviving June 1, 1921 state edition. “The False Sorry (sic) Which Set Tulsa on Fire,” The Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City, OK), July 1, 1921, 1; Bob Hower, Angels of Mercy (Tulsa, OK: Homestead Press 1993), 210; Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing The Dreamland (New York: Oxford University Press 2002), 24-25. This correct version has Rowland giving his “Diamond Dick” moniker to the “police” - a risky boast for a negro arrested for assault of a white girl - and includes Rowland’s alleged admission that he put his hand on the girl when she was alone. The version quoted in the Race Riot Commission Report, Hannibal Johnson, and Randy Krehbiel has Rowland giving the inflammatory name to the “public” and omits the “put his hand” sentence. Scott Ellsworth, Death in the Promised Land (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 48; Scott Ellsworth, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, 2001), 58; Hannibal B. Johnson, Black Wall Street (Austin, TX: Eakin Press 1998), 38; Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa 1921 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 2019), 33. The version quoted by Loren Gill, R. Halliburton, and James Hirsch also refers to the “public,” but includes the “put his hand” sentence. Loren L. Gill, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” (master’s thesis, University of Tulsa 1946), 22; R. Halliburton, Jr., The Tulsa Race War of 1921 (San Francisco, CA: R and E Research Associates 1975), 4; James L. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company 2002), 79-80. Tim Madigan’s The Burning (New York: Thomas Dunne Books 2001) does not even quote the whole article. All the writers except Gill, Hower, and Halliburton incorrectly omit the “an” from the title. [iii] “Evans and Bigger Tulsa Ticket Win,” Tulsa Daily World (OK), April 7, 1920, 1, 10; “Vote By Precincts in City Election,” Tulsa Tribune (OK), April 7, 1920, 5. [iv] In the March 1920 primary, the total Democratic vote for mayor exceeded the Republican vote at 4,905 to 2,160. “Democrats Select Hubbard Again for Mayor of the City,” Tulsa Tribune, March 17, 1920, 1, 10. With the support of the rebel democrats, Evans won a narrow 4,891 to 4,684 victory. Republican commission candidate O. A. Steiner won even more narrowly, suggesting that without the factional split the Democrats would have retained a majority of the city commission and selected the next police commissioner, This would have likely been Herman Newblock, a former Tulsa police chief and the only Democrat who won re-election. [v] For the role of rebel democrats, “Hubbard and Evans Win for Mayor,” Tulsa Daily World, March 17, 1920, 1, 13 (Tate Brady promises to deliver 1,500 votes to Republicans); “Evans and Bigger Tulsa Ticket Win,” Tulsa Daily World, April 7, 1920, 5. (Hopkins exults over GOP win). For role of the newly franchised women’s vote and Lina Hull, “Evans and Bigger Tulsa Win, Tulsa Daily World, April 7, 1920, 1, 5. A late surge in support for Evans was credited to public reaction over an “arrest” of Lina Hull at a voting precinct she was observing. Richard Lloyd Jones, also a nominal Democrat, soured on Hubbard for failing to repudiate the Democrat’s “yipper” faction, alleged to be the “open city” crowd favoring bootlegging, gambling and more. “Not a Yipper City,” Tulsa Tribune, April 7, 1920, 18; “When the County Wakes Up,” Tulsa Tribune, July 28, 1920, 14. Jones’ paper would later call the anti-Yippers like Buck Lewis the “decent citizenship.” “Which List Do You Want to Control the Democracy of Tulsa,” Tulsa Tribune, August 1, 1920, 1. [vi] For Smitherman’s support, “Hubbard Administration Sure to Win,” Tulsa Star (OK), March 13, 1920, 1; “Bohn Has Made Good as Police Commissioner,” Tulsa Star, March 13, 1920, 1 (“Tulsa is the only city in the state having a Colored Man officiating at the head of the detective department”); “EXTRA! Our Best Citizens Favor Mayor Hubbard,” Tulsa Star, March 15, 1920, 1; “Democratic Nominees Will Win,” Tulsa Star, April 3, 1920, 1; “Deserting the Party,” Tulsa Star, April 3, 1920, 12; “Loving Cup to Mayor Hubbard,” Tulsa Star, April 17, 1920, 1. Hubbard received approximately sixty percent of the vote in the precinct dominated by black voters. “Republicans Win by 206 Votes!” Tulsa Star, April 10, 1920, 1. For Stradford support, “Popular Colored Republican Candidate Praises City Democratic Administration,” Tulsa Star, March 13, 1920, 1. Hubbard also made a practice of addressing political rallies in Greenwood, an act that generated ridicule in the white press. “Mayor Hubbard Principal Speaker at Colored Democratic Rally,” Tulsa Star, February 21, 1920, 1; “Democratic Rally To-night,” Tulsa Star, March 13, 1920, 1; “The Colored Man and Democracy,” Tulsa Daily World, February 27, 1920, 4. [vii] In March 1919, for example, a delegation of African American men visited the county jail demanding assurances of the safety of certain prisoners. Scott Ellsworth, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, 53. Thaddeus Evans would later assert that they came armed. “Message Mayor to Commissioners,” Record of Commission Proceedings, City of Tulsa, Vol. XV, June 14, 1921, 24-6. No mass hysteria ensued. [viii] For Adkison’s biography, Clarence B. Douglas, The History of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Volume II (Tulsa, OK: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1921), 52-3; Joseph B. Thoburn and Muriel H. Wright, Oklahoma: A History of The State and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1929), 122-23. Adkison’s name appears on a Ku Klux Klan roster from the late 1920s. Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa1921, 203, 282, n41.For Evans’ biography, “Mayor’s Wife Will Help Fulfill Promises,” Tulsa Tribune, April 8, 1920, 8; http://genealogytrails.com/oka/tulsa/bios1.html#evans_thaddeus_daniel. Evans was born in Iowa in 1868 and raised there, moving to Tulsa in 1906. Evans served as Tulsa Municipal Court Judge from 1917-1918 and adjudicated the vagrancy trial that immediately preceded the Tulsa Outrage of 1921. Randy Hopkins, “Birthday of the Klan: The Tulsa Outrage of 1917, The Chronicles of Oklahoma 97, no. 4 (Winter 2019–20), 423-26. Evans was a principal in Hopping & Evans, a farm loan company. “Keep Tulsa Clean,” Tulsa Daily World, March 31, 1918, 9. [ix] The triumvirate of Evans, Adkison and Steiner often found opposition from Republican commissioner C. S. Younkman, who ran a downtown drug store, and returning Democrat Newblock. Their opposition was especially intense on police and budgeting issues and had the cooperation of City Auditor Mrs. Frank Seamon, the first woman elected to city office. “Fund Row Shakes City Hall,” Tulsa Tribune, February 13, 1921, 1 (internal warfare in administration breaks into open and Adkison asks city auditor to resign); “Look on Acts of Mrs. Seaman with Suspicious Eyes,” Tulsa Tribune, March 27, 1921, 3. [x] Possibly reflecting the bipartisan nature of its win, Evans first penciled in the surviving Democrat Newblock as police commissioner. This was reversed after a torrent of criticism. “Newblock Tells Police Plans,” Tulsa Tribune, April 9, 1920, 1; “Adkison Is Slated for Police Job,” TulsaTribune, April 10, 1920, 1; “Adkison is Man for Job, Mayor Hints,” Tulsa Tribune, April 12, 1920, 1; “Assign New City Officials Places,” TulsaDaily World, April 18, 1920, 1, 4. It did not help Newblock’s case that his likely candidate for police chief, John Moran, had been shot in the back during a mysterious incident three days before the election and remained in serious condition. “John Moran Shot by Holdups,” Tulsa DailyWorld, April 4, 1920, 1. For Newblock’s unavailing support of Moran as police chief in the Hubbard administration, see “John Moran Resigns Federal Job to be Chief of Police,” Tulsa Daily World, April 10, 1918, 1. John Moran was brother of the City Auditor in the Evans’ administration, Mrs. Frank Seaman (Mary Moran Seaman). As mayor, Newblock later appointed John and Mary’s younger brother, Rees, as Tulsa police chief from 1922-28. https://www.tulsapolice.org/content/history/chiefs.aspx [xi] For Adkison as mayor pro tempore, “Society Women at City Hall Help Start Evans Term,” Tulsa Tribune, May 4, 1920, 1. For Evans’ absence during Belton, “New Charter Plan Checked to Evans,” Tulsa Tribune, August 21, 1920, 1 (Evans out of town to return “about September 1”); “Mayor Will Return Soon,” Tulsa Daily World, September 3, 1920, 18 (Evans on vacation in Colorado to return September 5th). Belton was lynched around midnight on the evening of August 28. [xii] “Adkison Vouches He Would Enforce Law,” Tulsa Tribune, April 11, 1920, 4. According to Tulsa political historian James Mitchell, a common feature in early municipal elections was the charge that incumbents were soft on crime and corruption and should be replaced by the out-of-power party who would put things in order. The 1920 municipal election did not alter this pattern. James M. Mitchell, “Politics in a Boom Town: Tulsa from 1906 to 1930,” (master’s thesis, University of Tulsa, 1950), 30-33, 99-104. [xiii] “Adkison is Man for Job, Mayor Hints,” Tulsa Tribune, April 12, 1920, 1; “Chief Allen Asks Force to Keep Jobs,” Tulsa Tribune, April 13, 1920, 1; “Administration Is Divided on Chief,” Tulsa Tribune, April 24, 1920, 1; “Name Police Chief from List of Five,” Tulsa Tribune, April 26, 1920, 1; “To Name New Chief,” Tulsa Daily World, April 26, 1920, 1 (no candidate with three votes). [xiv] For Gustafson’s “unanimous” selection, “Name Gustafson Chief of Police,” Tulsa Daily World, April 27, 1920, 1 (per Adkison, “We investigated his record and character carefully and found them to be unquestionable”); “New Chief Promises Cleanup,” Tulsa Tribune, April 27, 1920, 1. For Hull’s anger over Gustafson, “Opens Fight on Evans’ Police Head,” Tulsa Tribune, April 29, 1920, 1 (per Hull, “Everybody that knows anything about John A. Gustafson is against him” and “[s]omebody has pulled the wool over Judge Evan’s (sic) eyes”); “Evans Sticks by Guns in Police Row,” Tulsa Tribune, April 30, 1920, 1 (per Evans, “Time, I believe, will show that our proposed clean up of Tulsa will not be retarded but hastened” by Gustafson and “will cure (Hull’s) hurts”). The common explanation of how an alleged grifter could become police chief in a bluenose administration is provided by Mitchell who concluded that a “vice ring, using its money and influence, brought pressure on each administration to refrain from living up to its pre-election closed town pledges.” James Mitchell, “Politics in a Boom Town: Tulsa from 1906 to 1930,” 32. [xv] “Local Findings on John A. Gustafson,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, box 25, record group 1-2, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries (hereafter “Attorney General Case no. 1062”). The “Local Findings” document is undated, unsigned, and consists of much hearsay and/or gossip. It claims he was brought to town by “Dan Herring, crook” In early 1917, Herring briefly served as a police captain but was canned after the surfacing of skeletons from his past. “Police Captain Herring Ousted,” Tulsa Daily World, April 20, 1917, 2; “Herring Tells Why He Was Discharged,” Tulsa Daily World, April 21, 1917, 7; “Letter Special Officer to E. L. Lucas, Chief of Police, 30 March 1917,” Attorney General Case no. 1062. The Local Findings also quoted Gustafson as being supported for chief by Lee Kunsman of the “open town class.” The socially prominent Kunsman ran a clothing store in the Bliss Building, where Gustafson’s agency was located. Kunsman, however, appears to have supported liquor and crime crackdowns. “Police Clean-Up Blocked,” Tulsa Tribune, May 20, 1921, 2 (per Kunsman, city officials “are incompetent”). [xvi] ”Kick” in Chicken Feed Led to Booze Raid,” Tulsa Tribune, July 18, 1920, 1, 11 (former detective for William Burns and Pinkerton agencies); “New Choice Possible for Chief of Police,” Tulsa DailyWorld, May 28, 1918, 4 (endorsed by Tulsa Retail Merchants Association). Gustafson testified at his July 1921 removal trial that he arrived in Tulsa four years earlier. Prior to that, he testified to living in Kansas City for “fifteen or twenty years.” “Gustafson Testimony District Court State of Oklahoma v. John A. Gustafson,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062. The 1910 federal Census, however, placed he and his wife in Portland, Oregon, where he was managing a department store. 1910 U. S. Census, Portland Ward 5, Multnomah, Oregon Roll, T624_1286; Page: 7B; Enumeration District: 0160; FHL microfilm: 1375299. Gustafson was born in Missouri on November 11, 1873 and raised there. [xvii] For “intelligence” work, August 10, 1917 letter from Gustafson to Oklahoma Governor R. L. Williams marked document 82169, folder 1, box 36, R. L. Williams Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society Research Center, Oklahoma City, OK. By 1920, Gustafson’s agency was headquartered at the Bliss Building at Third Street and Main.“Tulsa City Directory 1921” (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co., 1921), 676-77. [xviii] “Part 1 Attorney Notes of Witness Testimony,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 2. [xix] The ambush took the lives of Oscar Poe and the Hart twins, Billie and Harry, alleged bank robbers. “Tulsa Detective Tells of Fight,” Tulsa Daily World, January 20, 1917, 1. Other newspaper coverage of the shootings either omit or downplay Gustafson’s role. “Three Youthful Bandits Die When Caught by Posse in Hell Hole of the Hills, Muskogee Times-Democrat, January 19, 1917, 1; “3 More Bank Bandits Killed in Battle Today,” Tulsa Democrat, January 19, 1917, 1; “Bank Robbers Killed,” Okmulgee Chieftain, January 25, 1917, 1. Gustafson thanked Governor Robert Lee Williams for helping with warrants to collect the rewards in the case. See footnote 17 above. The “Local Findings” document says Gustafson lost his contract with the American Bankers Association for wrongly claiming a reward and it may have been this one. Gustafson was still associated with the Oklahoma Bankers Association in March 1921. “Freeling Sent Here to Push for Sperry Trial,” Tulsa Tribune, March 26, 1921, 1. [xx] “New Mayor Attacks Vice Ring,” Tulsa Tribune, April 7, 1920, 1 (per Evans, “Tulsa must be made a clean city”); “Mayor T. D. Evans Talks in Sapulpa,” Tulsa Daily World, April 15, 1920, 7 (Evans will clean up Tulsa); “New Chief Promises Cleanup,” Tulsa Tribune, April 27, 1920, 1; “New Mayor Orders ‘Closed Town’,” Tulsa Tribune, May 4, 1920, 1 (when swearing in Gustafson, Blaine and others, Evans orders them to “close the town and keep it closed”); “New Commission Now in Control,” Tulsa Daily World, May 5, 1920, 1; “Cobwebs and Dirt to be Ousted at Police Holdover,” Tulsa Tribune, May 5, 1920, 4 (Evans says police station is “a disgrace to darkest Africa”). [xxi] “Name Gustafson Chief of Police,” Tulsa Daily World, April 27, 1920, 1. [xxii] “Drive Crime from City, Orders Chief,” Tulsa Tribune, August 22, 1920, 8. During the 1910s, new city administrations conducted “beheadings” of the police, firing existing officers and replacing them with new ones. The early Tulsa police, then, were unprofessional tools of the ruling political party. Early in their reign, Adkison and Gustafson took a two-week tour of other major police departments. They returned promising to professionalize the Tulsa force via civil service reforms. “Police Civil Service Law is Demanded,“ Tulsa Tribune, August 8, 1920, 1; “Cops May Get Civil Service,” Tulsa Daily World, August 21, 1920, 18. The promise faded and it was not until the 1930s that such reforms reached the department. “Two Centuries of Policing in Tulsa,” The Police Chief, September 1990, 56-7. [xxiii] “Seize 48 in 7 Police Raids,” Tulsa Tribune, May 6, 1920, 1; “Underworld Defies Police Department,” Tulsa Tribune, May 9, 1920, 1; “Murder Try Brings Order from Chief,” Tulsa Tribune, June 2, 1920, 1 (war on gunmen and hi-jackers); “50 Men Will Help Police Curb Crime,” Tulsa Tribune, June 10, 1920, 1 (Tulsa Jaycees to be sworn in as police); “Mayor will Stop Show of Weapons,” Tulsa Tribune, June 17, 1920, 1; “Declares War to End on Whisky Makers,” Tulsa Tribune, July 18, 1920, 11; “Mayor Backs Officers in Booze War,” and “City Plans to Halt Gun Sales,” Tulsa Tribune, July 20, 1920, 1; “City Orders Police Force Increased,” Tulsa Daily World, December 22, 1920, 1; “Strict Policing Safeguards City,” Tulsa Daily World, December 23, 1920, 1; “Chief Orders Booze Cleanup,” Tulsa Tribune, March 1, 1921, 1. “Undesirables” included anyone who could not prove a legitimate means of livelihood, a testy standard given that the country was entering a post-World War financial depression. “Drive Crime From City, Orders Chief,” Tulsa Tribune, August 22, 1920, 8. [xxiv] For Adkison’s four hundred special commissions, “Inefficiency of Police is Denied, Tulsa Daily World, July 19, 1921, 7; “Chief and Officers Take Witness Stand,” Tulsa Daily World, July 20, 1921, 8. The 2000 Tulsa Race Riot Commission report suggests there were five hundred commissions, which George Blaine may have confirmed in his 1946 interview with Gill. Loren L. Gill, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” 28, n21. For arming at least two hundred and fifty men, deposition of J. A. Gustafson in Stradford v. American Central Ins. Co.; Superior Court of Cook County, No. 370,274 (1921), 3-4 (“We armed during the night probably two hundred fifty citizens who assisted the Police Department in trying to quell the mob” and “I think we armed about two hundred fifty”) (hereafter “Gustafson 1922 deposition”). This confirms that the police sponsored the “looting” of the nearby hardware stores. “Police Accused From Stand,” Tulsa Tribune, July 15, 1921, 9 (per J. W. Megee of Megee Hardware, “issued guns on demand from the police station”); “Part 1, Attorney Notes of Witness Testimony,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062) (“store broken into and arms dealt out, supposedly by Capt. Blaine”). Blaine testified that he tried to protect the store, but “they rushed me.” “Chief and Officers Take the Stand,” Tulsa Daily World, July 20, 1921, 8. [xxv] Barrett’s declaration occurred at the public meeting at the city hall auditorium. “Tulsa in Remorse to Rebuild Homes; Dead Now Put at 30,” NewYork Times, June 3, 1921, quoted in Tom Streissguth, ed., Reporting: The Tulsa Riot 1921 (St. Paul, MN: Archive of American Journalism, 2018), 70; “Tulsa Will Rebuild Homes of Negroes,” Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK), June 3, 1921, 2. [xxvi] Major General Charles F. Barrett, Oklahoma After Fifty Years: A History of The Sooner State and its People, (Oklahoma City, OK: Historical Record Association, 1941), 209 (“…in a race war a large part, if not a majority, of these special deputies were imbued with the same spirit of destruction that animated the mob. They became as deputies the most dangerous part of the mob and after the arrival of the Adjutant General and the declaration or martial law the first arrests ordered were those of special officers who had hindered the firemen in their abortive efforts to put out the incendiary fires that many of these special officers were accused of setting.”). [xxvii] “Drive Crime From City, Orders Chief,” Tulsa Tribune, August 22, 1920, 8. [xxviii] For Cranfield as mob leader, Work product and investigative documents preserved in State of Oklahoma v. James Woolley in the District Court of Tulsa County, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1017, box 23, record group 1-2, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City, OK, 1017-036 (hereafter “AG Civil Case 1017-page no.”). For Elks Club conference, Transcript of the testimony of A. E. Montgomery in court of inquiry conducted by Assistant Attorney General C. W. King, “In the Matter of the Investigation of the Conduct of the County Officials of Tulsa County, Okla,” September 1920, State of Oklahoma vs. James Woolley in the District Court of Tulsa County, Attorney General Civil Case No. 1017, box 23, record group 1-2, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City, OK, 166-68 (hereafter “Court of Inquiry, witness name, page no.”). [xxix] Victor Barnett, managing editor of the Tulsa Tribune, stated that, “everybody knows who did the lynching. The best people in town formed the mob. It was done as a protest against the inefficiency of officials of the law. City police officers directed traffic at the lynching, affording everybody, as far as possible, an equal chance to view the event. It is said that the police telephoned a local undertaker before the lynching took place to come out and get the body.” Walter F. White, “Tulsa’s Shame Due to Race Prejudice and Corrupt Rule,” Chicago (ILL) Defender, June 18, 1921, 3. Barnett’s belief had not stopped his paper from writing up the lynching in a way to justify police behavior. “Mob Lynches Taxicab Slayer,” Tulsa Tribune, August 29, 1920, 1. [xxx] “Probe Belton Lynching,” Tulsa Daily World, August 30, 1920, 3. [xxxi] As Woolley described it: So I went up to the office and I called the police station. I says “There is a mob here” I says “Have you got any men down there?” And they says “I will see.” So they fooled around there a while. Pretty soon he called up and answered and said “They are all out.” I says “Where are they?” And he says “I don’t know.” I says “You have them to call me just as quick as they get in because this mob is here.” Court of Inquiry, Woolley, 132. [xxxii] For 30 minutes notice, “Probe Belton Lynching,” Tulsa Daily World, August 30, 1920, 3 (per Gustafson, “the call came about 10:30 o’clock when the jailer phoned that the mob was on its way to the jail”). Belton was taken at 11 p.m. that night. “Mob Lynches Tom Owens,” Tulsa Daily World, August 29, 1920, 1. The Daily World was still using Belton’s alias for the headline. [xxxiii] AG Civil Case 1017-001; AG Civil Case 1017-037. [xxxiv] The head of the police department’s traffic division later bragged about being at the lynching. AG Civil Case 1017- 003. (“Doctor Donohoe told Nick Remachel (sic) that this would get them in trouble and the policeman replied “He didn't (sic)give a d—, he was there”). For head of traffic division, “Rigid Steps to Enforce Traffic Law,” Tulsa Tribune, May 7, 1920, 1. [xxxv] “Mob Lynches Taxicab Slayer,” Tulsa Tribune, August 29, 1920, 3; “Probe Belton Lynching,” Tulsa Daily World, August 30, 1920, 3. [xxxvi] Three days before the grand jury commenced, Adkinson threw a special “prison dinner” for the newsmen of the town and presented speakers attesting to the ability, integrity and appearance of the department. Adkison offered a resolution thanking the newspapers for all their support and fifty policemen approved it with a standing ovation. The next day, the Tribune reported that the Tulsa police department was “[t]he best, in fact, that has ever safeguarded the interests of the Magic City.” “Police Department Lauded for Efforts,” Tulsa Tribune, September 21, 1920, 3. The Daily World did not cover the event. [xxxvii] According to the attorney general’s file, policeman Doc Bassett (sic) bragged to Curley Lemon that “they received telephone message fifteen minutes before mob taken prisoner from sheriff, and that they went to cornor [sic] of courthouse and waited until mob got prisoner, and then got car and went to scene of tradedgy [sic].” AG Civil Case 1017-003. Bissett was a detective and the “they” waiting with him likely included more of the department’s plainclothesmen. [xxxviii] Oklahoma suffered two lynchings over the weekend that Belton was killed, with a Black teenager named Claude Chandler effortlessly lifted from the Oklahoma County jail. If there was a link between the two lynchings other than timing, even if just mutual encouragement, a possible nexus was Gustafson and Oklahoma County Attorney O. A. Cargill. Cargill has been outed as the likely mastermind behind the Chandler killing. Bobbie Dobbs, “1920 Lynching of Claude Chandler: Shedding Light on a Painful Past, The Oklahoman, February 22, 2016 at https://oklahoman.com/article/5480171/1920-lynching-of-claude-chandler-shedding-light-on-painful-past? Cargill and Gustafson were later linked through the Oklahoma Bankers Association. “Freeling Sent Here to Push for Sperry Trial,” Tulsa Tribune, March 26, 1921, 1. [xxxix] James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance, 77 (a year earlier oil had stood at three dollars a barrel, but had collapsed to one dollar and sixty per cent of oil industry was shut down); “Crude Oil Prices are Slashed,” Tulsa Tribune, January 8, 1921, 1; “Two Big Oil Firms Slash Wages,” Tulsa Tribune, February 2, 1921, 1; “New Oil Shutdown Threatened,” Tulsa Tribune, May 3, 1921, 1. [xl] “City Asks More Police and Money,” Tulsa Tribune, December 22, 1920, 1. [xli] “‘Shoot To Kill’ Is Police Advice,” Tulsa Daily World, December 28, 1920, 1. Adkison explained that when he operated a grocery store, he hired a “special man” equipped with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with buckshot and placed him in a hiding place with a view. The Tulsa Worldcommented that, fortunately for some robber, no attempt was made on the store. Lucky, as well, for Adkison's customers and employees. [xlii] “Police May Use Special Officers,” Tulsa Daily World, January 5, 1921, 7. Adkison said he was going to get a municipal ordinance for this. It was not Adkison’s first foray into special commissions, as he had previously granted police powers to members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. “To Be Special Officers,” Tulsa Tribune, June 11, 1920, 20 (Jaycees to be given “same authority as that vested in regular plainclothes men”). [xliii]“Police Say They Knew of ‘War’ Plans, Tulsa Tribune, June 3, 1921, 1; “Warning Against Further Trouble,” Tulsa Daily World, June 4, 1921, 11. In 1946, Adkison, then chief clerk in the Tulsa water commissioner’s office, and George Blaine, then chief of police, confirmed these warnings in 1946 interviews given to Loren Gill. Loren L. Gill, “The Tulsa Race Riot,” 15, n33. [xliv] “Chief Orders Booze Cleanup,” Tulsa Tribune, March 1, 1921, 1 (Gustafson tells Ministerial Alliance that blame for conditions is “squarely at door of the county attorney”); “Enforce the Law Police are Told,” Tulsa Daily World, March 1, 1921, 1, 13; “To Disclose Six Drug Stores in Booze War,” Tulsa Tribune, March 2, 1921, 1 (Adkison blasts Seaver). Their attack came on the immediate heels of the death of a 20-year old stenographer in the county attorney’s office who allegedly drank poisoned wood alcohol which she allegedly lifted from some kind of evidence cabinet. “Poison Booze Kills Divorcee, Tulsa Tribune, February 28, 1921, 1; “Woman Dead and Companion Blind, Tulsa Daily World, March 1, 1921, 16; “May Exhume Remains of Mrs. Wilson,” Tulsa Tribune March 3, 1921, 1. Adkison and Gustafson’s criticisms against Seaver may have been coordinated with Richard Lloyd Jones. “Excuses Won’t Go,” Tulsa Tribune, March 2, 1921, 14. Seaver left dissatisfaction in his wake. Even local Republicans turned on him. “Seaver Under Fire of Own Party Heads,” Tulsa Tribune, March 16, 1921, 1. Seaver’s failure to prosecute defendants in the Nida shooting came in for blistering criticism from Gustafson. “Seaver’s Conduct in Office Is Under Fire,” Tulsa Tribune, March 30, 1921, 1. [xlv] “Seaver Ousted in Bank Case,” Tulsa Tribune, March 26, 1921, 1; “Freeling May Quiz Seaver on Office Change,” Tulsa Tribune, March 28, 1921, 1. Robertson also directed Freeling to investigate Seaver’s alleged mishandling of a statutory rape case. Letter James B. A. Robertson, Governor, to S. P. Freeling, Attorney General, 24 March, 1921,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062. [xlvi] “Seaver’s Conduct in Office Is Under Fire,” Tulsa Tribune, March 30, 1921, 1; “Small, Very Feminine Woman Fills Big Job,” Tulsa Tribune, March 6, 1921, 23. [xlvii] For J. Arthur Hull as director of Exchange Bank, “The Glorious Fourth,” Tulsa Daily World, July 4, 1917, 7. [xlviii] “Freeling’s Aide ‘Shadowed’ in Quiz of Crime,” Tulsa Tribune, April 8, 1921, 1 (“He was a large, red-faced man who wore glasses and had a general appearance of roughness and boorishness about him not entirely hidden by the rather well-tailored clothes he wore. I took him to be either a detective or an underworld character”). On the evening she investigated the negro quarter, Van Leuven escaped her pursuer by taking dinner and staying at the Hulls’ home and sneaking out from there in Mr. Hull’s automobile. [xlix] “Freeling to Extend Quiz of Crime Here,” Tulsa Tribune, April 9, 1921, 2. On April 12, assistant attorney general George F. Short disclosed that city commissioners were now in the crosshairs. “Suspect in Auto Theft Ring Freed,” Tulsa Tribune, April 12, 1921, 1. Short’s brief tenure in Tulsa was marked by his attempt to lead raids using borrowed Tulsa policemen. Gustafson ridiculed the effort after it came up empty-handed, apparently because everyone had been alerted. “Raid Hotels for Evidence in Vice Quiz,” Tulsa Tribune, April 15, 1921, 1; “Police Chief Says Assistant Attorney General Lead (sic) Raids,” Tulsa Tribune, April 17, 1921, 30. Shortly thereafter retreated to Oklahoma City, not returning for the court of inquiry and leaving matters in the hands of Van Leuven. Short succeeded Freeling as Oklahoma Attorney General. [l] “Committee of ‘100’ Demands City Cleanup,” Tulsa Tribune, April 17, 1921, 1; ”The Committee of 100,” Tulsa Tribune, April 19, 1921, 16. The new Committee promised to follow in the old Committee’s footsteps by hiring a private detective to assist public officials. The earlier Committee of 100 paid the salary of Tulsa County Attorney’s special investigator, E. S. Macqueen. “Funds Not Available; Macqueen Resigns Job as Enforcement Officer,” Tulsa Daily World, November 2, 1918, 4. State district judge Redmond S. Cole later named Macqueen as “the man that fired the first shot” on May 31, 1921. June 6, 1921 letter from Redmond S. Cole to U.S. Department of Justice official Jas. G. Findlay, M290, box 12, folder 1, Redmond S. Cole Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. (hereafter “Cole to Findlay letter”). Macqueen’s name also appears on the list of knowledgeable individuals regarding the lynching of Roy Belton. AG Civil Case 0017-004. [li] Evidence of co-ordination between the Evans administration and Jones’s editorials include: - support for gun sale restrictions. “Would Place Ban on Sale of Pistols,” Tulsa Tribune, June 16, 1920, 1; “Cut Out the Fire Arms,” TulsaTribune, June 16, 1920, 15 (editorial); - support for police training. “Let’s Have a Pistol School,” Tulsa Tribune, January 3, 1921, 12 (editorial); “Will Teach Police Use of Firearms,” TulsaTribune, January 4, 1921, 1; - demands for full support of Adkison and Gustafson. “A Law Enforcement Lesson,” Tulsa Tribune, January 6, 1921, 14 (editorial); “Go After Them,” Tulsa Tribune, February 12, 1921, 8 (editorial). [lii] “Statement of W. H. Clark,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062. [liii] “Statement of W. H. Clark,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062. Clark testified that Patton beat a black female prisoner with a rubber hose and told a white Canadian woman who allegedly served as a police sex slave that she was “not as good as a nigger; all these sons-o-bitching foreigners ought to be killed. You are nothing but a ___.” She also accused Patton of having sex with a female prisoner atop the police clerk’s desk, drinking or being “dopey” on the job and, along with Gustafson, removing confiscated booze from lockup. Clark accused officer Leo Irish of having sex with a female prisoner through the bars of her cell. On June 1, 1921, Officer Irish was the motorcycle officer who later roped six captives from Greenwood together single file and made them run “at a hot pace” behind his cycle to detention. “Blacks Tied Together,” Tulsa Tribune, June 1, 1921, 2. [liv] “Federal Report on Vice Conditions,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, box 25, record group 1-2, Oklahoma State Archives, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, 3 (a Brady Hotel bellhop called “Baldy” sent a girl to the investigator’s room, price $4.00, and assured him “to have no fear of the police”). A separate investigation conducted by H. H. Townsend reported that “bell boy no. 9” at the Brady Hotel said: "if we would come down there at any time that he was on duty that he would get us a pretty girl, any kind we wanted, and any kind of whiskey we wanted. We asked him if Tate Brady, the proprietor of this place, knew what the bell boys were doing and he said that he might know but that he didn't get any money out of it. He said that all of the bell boys did the same thing at this place." “Report on Vice Conditions in Tulsa, 1921 May 18,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 1, 3, 5. This must have been a ripe moment since Townsend was accompanied by Rev. Harold Cooke, pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church, located across the street from the site of Tate Brady’s villa. J. Arthur Hull was also along. They toured “nigger town,” as Townsend called it, inquiring about booze and girls. They were observed by a policeman who might have arrested them. It would have been a priceless event had it happened. [lv] H. O. Brown, a private detective with the William J. Burns Agency, reported that Gustafson was getting rake-offs from pawn shops. “Miscellaneous Witness Notes,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 2. Brown and Gustafson had recently worked on the Sperry, Oklahoma bank robbery case promoted by the Oklahoma Bankers Association. “Seaver Ousted in Bank Case,” Tulsa Tribune, 26, 1921, 1. A former assistant U. S. Marshal claimed that two detectives at Gustafson’s detective agency were being paid by police funds. “Statement of W. S. Ellis,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 1-2. [lvi] “Police Clean-Up Blocked,” Tulsa Tribune, May 20, 1921, 2 (Lina Hull’s outrage over Bissett as rooming house inspector); “Federal Report on Vice Conditions,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 3 (Bissett rooms at Hotel Boswell where four women, described as “keen stuff,” were said to be “hustling”); “Part 2 Attorney Witness Notes,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 3 (witness McInturff to testify that Bissett bragged “about following young women from the railroad station and taking advantage of them in various ways”). [lvii] “Better Get Busy,“ Tulsa Tribune, May 16, 1921, 12. For alternating Tribune policy, “Tulsa Filled with Danger for Police,” Tulsa Tribune, May 2, 1921, 1 (“Tulsa is the most dangerous place in the world for police officers.”); “Make Tulsa Decent,” Tulsa Tribune, May 13, 1921, 24 (editorial claiming “Prostitution, bootlegging and gambling, with all their degrading influences, have run pretty much unmolested, both by the city and county authorities”). [lviii] “City Turns on Police Critics, Plans Inquiry,” Tulsa Tribune, May 17, 1921, 1; “City Calls Bluff on Police Critics, Tulsa Daily World, May 18, 1921, 1; “Ask Citizen to Assist in Probe,” Tulsa Daily World, May 19, 1921, 1. Steiner seconded Younkman’s motion and provided the requisite third vote along with Adkison’s. Newblock voted no and Evans did not vote as there was no tie to break. [lix] “Threats Fly in Police Quiz,” Tulsa Tribune, May 19, 1921, 1, 3; “Impeachment of Police Falls Flat,” Tulsa Daily World, May 20, 1921, 1. Lina Hull’s favorite for police chief, H. H. Townsend, was also there. Hull and her allies were of the view that “one man with nerves and no restrictions could clean up the city.” Tulsa Daily World, May 21, 1921, 17. Townsend had briefly ruled the police department from September 1916 to early 1917. His reign was a violent one, marked by raids conducted by his “wrecking squad” who sometimes fell hard upon innocent parties. Even the downtown Retail Merchants Association eventually demanded his resignation. The end came in January 1917, when he and his “wreckers” shot a 21-year old taxi driver twice in the back. Under indictment for murder, Townsend resigned and was hired by Standard Oil’s primary Tulsa subsidiary as security chief. Randy Hopkins, “Birthday of the Klan” The Tulsa Outrage of 1917,” 416, 418, 420-21, 428-29, 437, n37-38, 438, n46, 439, n53, 445, n115, 446, n120. [lx] “Threats Fly in Police Quiz,” Tulsa Tribune, May 19, 1921, 1, 3 (Tulsa police officer Roy Meacham said to visit Mrs. Clark the morning of the hearing and said she would be in great trouble and possibly “leaving town” if she talked, having earlier told her “I’m telling you they’ve got things framed against you at the station and they’ll blacken your reputation if you dare to talk”). The Tribune also quoted Mrs. Clark: “It all goes to show that Tulsa is in the hands of the toughest gang of crooks in the county. I have served for 12 years as a welfare officer and police matron in some of the biggest cities of the country and I never ran up against anything so rotten as the Tulsa police department. I know what I’ve seen with my own eyes and I am not afraid to tell the truth.” For further Clark testimony, “Matron Bares Police Failures,” Tulsa Tribune, May 21, 1921, 2; “Statement of W. H. Clark,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062. [lxi] “Threats Fly in Police Quiz,” Tulsa Tribune, May 19, 1921, 1; “Police Clean-Up Blocked,” Tulsa Tribune, May 20, 1921, 1. The Tribune wrote that the “bubble of innocence” affected by the mayor and commissioners was “rudely burst” by Cooke’s performance. [lxii] “Matron Bares Police Failures,” Tulsa Tribune, May 21, 1921, 2. C.E. Buchner, another Townsend man, brought humor to the proceedings by telling Evans that “prostitutes ply their trade in front of the city hall.” Mrs. Frank Seaman testified about the process for issuing subpoenas, suggesting Gustafson shopped for favorable witnesses. [lxiii] “Impeachment of Police Falls Flat,” Tulsa Daily World, May 20, 1921, 1. Adkison and Street Commissioner Steiner were caught up in charges relating to alleged financial dealings with the city. Neither case involved substantial sums, but they became public embarrassments, especially for Steiner. Mrs. Seaman diligently assembled the evidence against them. “Steiner Case Put Up to Mayor by Duncan,” Tulsa Tribune, December 2, 1920, 1; “Letter Mrs. Frank Seaman, City Auditor to Mrs. Van Leuven, Assistant Attorney General, 13 May 1921,” There is no mention of Younkman or Newblock as a targets. The investigation thus centered on the controlling Republican triumvirate. [lxiv] “Impeachment of Police Falls Flat,’ Tulsa Daily World, May 20, 1921, 1; “Thirty Witnesses Fail to Link Police to Vice,” Tulsa Daily World, May 21, 1921, 1; “Police not Shirking; Tulsa Morals at Par, Citizenry Testifies,” Tulsa Daily World, May 22, 1921, 1; “Attack on Police only Propaganda,” Tulsa Daily World, May 25, 1921, 1; “The Biddison Statement,” Tulsa Daily World, May 26, 1921, 4 (editorial). For the Tribune's contrasting views, “Threats Fly in Police Quiz,” Tulsa Tribune, May 19, 1921, 1; “Police Clean-Up Blocked,” Tulsa Tribune, May 20, 1921, 1; “Unique,” Tulsa Tribune, May 20, 1921, 22 (editorial); “Matron Bares Police Failures,” Tulsa Tribune, May 21, 1921, 1; “Police, Angry, Scrap Idea of Aiding Women,” Tulsa Tribune, May 22, 1921, 1; “Blow Away the Smoke Screen,” Tulsa Tribune, May 22, 1921, 34 (editorial); “Duncan Points the Way,” and “The City’s Loss,” Tulsa Tribune, May 24, 1921, 18 (editorials); “Whitewashed,” Tulsa Tribune, May 25, 1921, 16 (editorial). [lxv] “Attack on Police only Propaganda,” Tulsa Daily World, May 25, 1921, 1-2. [lxvi] The attorney general would later successfully remove Gustafson from office, but apart from a charge relating to failing to disarm the Black “invaders,” the only successful charge involved auto thefts. “Chief Guilty - Sheriff Up Next?,” Tulsa Tribune, July 23, 1921, 1, “Chief Found Guilty on Two Counts,” Tulsa Daily World, July 23, 1921, 1. Charges involving booze, prostitution, and extortion were discarded along the way. “Points in Chief’s Trial,” Tulsa Daily World, July 20, 1921, 1; “Chief Tells Own Story About Riot,” Tulsa Tribune, July 19, 1921, 2. Even the auto theft charge had been delivered to the attorney general by County Attorney Seaver and his longtime “evidence man,” possibly as revenge against Gustafson. “Nabs Suspect as Fence for Auto Thieves, Tulsa Tribune, April 5, 1921, 1; “Ask Quiz of Auto Thefts,” Tulsa Tribune, April 6, 1921, 1; “Statement W. F. Seaver,” Attorney General Civil Case no. 1062, 1. The Attorney General repaid that favor by waiting until two weeks remained in Seaver’s term before securing his removal in a suspiciously quick end-of-year hearing. “Seaver Fights Suspension in Supreme Court,” Tulsa Tribune, December 14, 1922, 1.

By Randy Hopkins Art by Randy Riggs On the morning of July 30, 2021, an iron fence and locked gates divided two groups of Tulsans at the City-owned Oaklawn Cemetery. Outside the fence, aggrieved descendants of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre victims cried out in anger and anguish. Inside the barrier, a backhoe stood poised to dump dirt into a mass grave pit located adjacent to the cemetery’s so-called “colored” potter’s field.[1] The remains of thirty-three humans, suspected to be those of Race Massacre victims, were about to be once again covered up.[2] At the edge of the pit, another group, only a small minority of which was Black, held hands and joined in ceremonial prayer. Two months earlier, on the exact 100-year anniversary of the incineration of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood and amid much media hoopla, the backhoe’s blade touched unplowed earth on a far different mission — the pursuit of Tulsa Race Massacre victims. Within days of the commencement of excavation came the news that a mass grave had been uncovered. This was followed by the disinterment of nineteen sets of human remains, including a pregnant woman.[3] Cameras carefully recorded the procession as individual remains were hand-carried to a nearby laboratory for forensic study. Hope blossomed that long and literally buried truths would finally begin to emerge. On July 30, however, fledgling hope and trust were reburied alongside all the pit’s remains, the previously extracted ones now housed in gleaming white cases and dark plastic bins. Cameras, though not as many as before, recorded a drama that seemed to encapsulate the racial turmoil and conflict already polarizing the nation. The City of Tulsa’s mass graves investigation had turned into an ugly echo of the town’s ugliest past. Tulsa: June 2, 1921 On the evening of June 1, 1921, while smoke from Greenwood hung in the air, Tulsa’s reputation hung with it. The City’s Mayor T. D. Evans, at least a majority of the City Commission, and the Tulsa Police Department were heavily implicated, not just in failing to prevent the Race Massacre, but for having caused and coordinated it.[4] Mayor T.D. Evans courtesy of the Ruth Avery Collection at Oklahoma State University - Tulsa. Tulsa’s financial elite, led by its Chamber of Commerce, rushed to the rescue of the City’s image and its “wounded pride.” Almost instantly, the Chamber’s president Alva J. Niles proclaimed a “plan of reparations in order that the homes (in Greenwood) may be rebuilt and families as nearly as possible rehabilitated.” Vast sums were promised for “wiping out the stain” from the City’s reputation.[5] News of the reparations plan quickly reached America’s newspaper readers. By June 2, the city’s promise to rebuild and redress generated prominent headlines from New York to Los Angeles. Tulsa was presented in heroic terms, grief-stricken, sorrowful, and seeking to atone for the wrongs.[6] The New York Times called it setting “an example for other cities.”[7] At the very moment the great catastrophe had momentarily captured the nation’s attention, Tulsa’s reputation won a reprieve. Tulsa: June 27, 2019 On June 27, 2019, at the 36th Street Event Center in north Tulsa, Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum delivered a ringing endorsement of the City’s mass graves investigation — the search for both buried victims and the buried truth of the Race Massacre. Bynum conceded that the City of Tulsa had “not earned the trust on doing this the right way, both in its actions to protect Black Tulsans during the Massacre and to wait ninety-eight years to actually start this investigation.” Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, flanked by City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper (left) and former Deputy Mayor Amy Brown, speaks during a Mass Graves Investigation Public Oversight Committee meeting on Thursday, June 27, 2019. Photo by Joey John for the Tulsa World. To win this trust, Bynum introduced a public committee, namely “folks from outside the City Government” who would oversee the process. Bynum empowered this Public Oversight Committee to provide transparency, to hold the City “accountable” for doing the investigation in “the right way,” and to “point out (where) if isn’t being done in the right way and where we need to be right.” There seemed to be steel in Bynum’s words when he proclaimed that: “If you get murdered in Tulsa we have a very basic compact with you that we will do everything we can do to find out what happened to you and to render justice for your family. And our homicide department has among the best record in the nation…and in my mind and I think in the policymakers of the City’s mind it doesn’t matter if you were murdered two weeks ago or ninety-eight years ago. No family in this community should have to have as part of their family story that an awful event happened and their family member disappeared and they never knew what happened. That’s not acceptable. And that is why we are treating this as a homicide investigation.” (emphasis added). Mayor Bynum’s promises, a public relations windfall for himself and City government, committed the City — or seemed to commit it — to provide criminology expertise in the pursuit of the truth. A homicide investigation would consolidate the skills of trained criminologists and detectives.[8] For two years, it appeared to the outside world that the City of Tulsa was indeed doing things the right way. Triumphing over the hideous past and rendering at least some justice finally seemed possible when the excavation of the mass grave in the City’s Oaklawn Cemetery commenced on June 1, 2021. A promotional image featuring Mayor G.T. Bynum (center) during the excavation period of the 1921 Graves Investigation. Photo provided by the City of Tulsa. Tulsa: June 4, 1921 Tulsa’s ballyhooed 1921 rebuilding plan for Greenwood turned out to be no more than a public relations hustle. Having assured the American public of the City’s heroic sincerity, the plan disappeared without a trace. The Chamber of Commerce, the author of the reparations plan, made no substantial effort to raise funds for rebuilding and provided not a penny for reconstruction. As it concerned Greenwood, the word “reparations” vanished from the Tulsa newspapers of the day. Insidiously, the Chamber of Commerce’s Bureau of Public Welfare issued a nationwide directive not to contribute to any rebuilding fund; outside donations were ostentatiously returned. People were also urged not to donate directly to “the negroes.” The City’s pride, it was said, demanded that Tulsa go it alone. Move along, nothing to see here was the message. It was one of the first steps in the Great Forgetting of Tulsa’s race war. Going it alone turned out to be doing nothing.[9] Tulsa: here and now Once the centennial commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre was in the rear-view mirror — and coffins in an apparent mass grave were unearthed — the City of Tulsa’s search for mass graves succumbed to a new reality. Mayor Bynum’s words of steel turned out to have the weight of feathers. 1. The homicide investigation that wasn’t. If a homicide investigation ever ensued, it was kept concealed from the Public Oversight Committee. When Committee member Chief Egunwale Amusan asked why there was no homicide investigation during a July 27, 2021 virtual private briefing, the City’s startling response was that the Oaklawn mass graves pit was not considered a “crime scene.” The reasons, as given, were that all the culprits of the Race Massacre were long dead and criminal prosecution of the City itself was allegedly time-barred by a statute of limitations.[10] But G. T. Bynum had said it didn’t matter if the murders happened ninety-eight years ago. He called it a “basic compact” with the victims when he forcefully committed the City to a homicide investigation. He cast the legal barriers away for purposes of the City’s 1921 Graves Investigation when he promised Tulsans, including descendants of Race Massacre victims, that his government would do “everything we can to find out what happened.”[11] He reiterated this pledge when he told an audience at George Carver Middle School, “We will follow the truth where that takes us.”[12] In retrospect, it appears that the Mayor’s office was already preparing to render Bynum’s promises inoperative by inviting former Tulsa district judge William Kellough to appear before the Public Oversight Committee’s virtual meeting on May 17, 2021. The Judge effectively and professionally explained two limited legal issues — that dead people can’t be criminally prosecuted and that there were potential statute of limitations prohibitions against civil and criminal prosecution of Tulsa’s local government. In the case of a criminal prosecution, he said that the City could only be liable for a $5,000 penalty. Kellough did not say that crimes had not been committed in the Massacre or that Oaklawn could not be considered the scene of a crime if potential Massacre victims were found. He did not so much as hint that it was not important to discover the truth or that the talents of homicide investigators should be spurned in the pursuit of that truth.[13] His limited and precise legal presentation was later spun by the City into an excuse to shove Mayor Bynum’s “basic compact” and his promise of a homicide investigation down the memory hole.[14] Conducting a true investigation here demands much more than jailing culprits or slapping the City of Tulsa’s wrist with a token fine. It is about finding what really happened during those days of evil. One cannot have “truth and reconciliation,” much less justice, without first unearthing the truth. 2. The order to stop the dig. Thirty-four coffins were located in the Oaklawn mass gravesite, at least one of which contained evidence of gunshot trauma.[15] Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield of the City’s physical investigation team — and a forensic scientist specializing in the recovery and identification of human remains — said that her profession’s “tradition” was to “dig everybody up.”[16] That tradition was cast aside. Fourteen coffins were left in the ground, later to be covered back up.[17] Back in January 2021, the City’s physical investigation team said that a coffin's hardware would not preclude the finding that a body was a Massacre victim. [18] During the July 27, 2021 “private” briefing, however, Dr. Stubblefield explained that a decision had been made to target only bodies in plain wood boxes, leaving untouched those in fancier coffins such as wood boxes with hardware handles.[19] One possible explanation for the presence of higher quality coffins scattered among plain boxes in a mass grave is that Tulsa suffered a “run of coffins” in early June 1921. Funeral homes might have reached deep into their inventory, even throwing in casket shipping crates, at least one of which was also found in the Oaklawn pit.[20] In March 2021, the physical investigation team reported that they did not expect to find only male victims and would not be restricting their investigation to males only.[21] On July 27, 2021, however, the limited extractions were further justified by a decision to target black male corpses for analysis.[22] Chief Amusan complained that the City was “marginalizing” Black women and children, already among the most marginalized people in the nation.[23] The Public Oversight Committee had not been consulted about these diminished “targets” and learned of them only at the July 27, 2021 private briefing. In response, Amusan warned that an incomplete extraction of remains would not only mislead the public but would arouse suspicion that the City of Tulsa was covering up the truth.[24] His prophetic words went unheeded. Exactly who made the decision to stop the dig remains a mystery. Chief Amusan directly asked the question, “Who made that decision to stop and to conclude the dig?” Dr. Stubblefield, head of the investigation team on the ground, replied, “I have no information for you on that.”[25] She later added, “I agree that there is a bad perception. I share your sentiment that we found something interesting then almost immediately stopped, and I agree that’s how it looks. I can’t answer your question about who gave the order, I don’t have that knowledge.”[26] Leaving the fourteen caskets in place subjected them to further degradation. It turned out that the gravesite near Oaklawn’s so-called “colored” potter’s field was located in a low spot with a creek running under, or even through it, according to Dr. Stubblefield.[27] Every time it rained, the excavated trench became a “big swimming hole” in the words of Physical Investigation team member and State Archeologist Dr. Kary Stackelbeck.[28] 1921 Public Oversight Committee chair Kavin Ross explained that mud had flowed into the coffins even before the excavation and called the area a “mud pit” and a “big bowl of soup” on the eve of July 30 reburial.[29] While the Investigation team suggested that perhaps they could later unearth the still entombed fourteen, that task has been made more difficult technically, financially, and politically by the City’s unilateral decision literally to restore the Oaklawn mass grave on July 30.[30] 3. The City’s private briefing of July 27. From its birth, all meetings of the Public Oversight Committee were announced in advance and open to the public. There have been no public meetings since the Race Massacre centennial. The Committee was cut out of the loop by the City of Tulsa after nineteen sets of human remains were hand-carried by Oversight Committee members to a lab for study. In apparent response to an email query from Committee member Amusan, the City scheduled the first and only “private briefing” of the Committee. This occurred on July 27, 2021, just three days before the stealthy reinterment. Previously, members of the public had been given notice of Oversight Committee meetings and were able to watch and comment. In late July, the public was kept in the dark. Even now, the video of the private session remains absent from the City’s Graves Investigation webpage.[31] In retrospect, it appears that the primary motive for the private briefing was a desire to have the Committee rubber-stamp the City’s abrupt decision to rebury the disinterred remains. The City knew that reburial was a touchy subject, and not only for members of the Oversight Committee. Many descendants of Race Massacre victims railed against the notion of even temporarily reburying possible victims in the same muddy pit from which they had been removed. What sort of ceremony would take place mattered greatly to the Oversight Committee, especially since the mass graves investigators had not finished their analysis or issued a written report. Why was July 30 so important to the City? The Mayor and his staff likely chose or knew of that deadline in advance and, if so, had sufficient time to inform the Oversight Committee. Instead, they waited until the last second. Acting in the manner of a plantation boss, the City told Chairman Ross about the decision and the deadline, but would give him no justification. When he pressed the City prior to the July 27 briefing, he was told they just needed to “push the process along.”[32] It was not the first time the City dismissed his questions. He had never been able to get answers to queries about finances or budgets for the investigation. Similar questions posed during the July 27 briefing also bore no fruit.[33] Remains being re-interred at Oaklawn Cemetery on July 30, 2021. Photo provided by the City of Tulsa. On July 27, the City justified July 30 by pointing the finger at the Committee itself and its approval of a reinterment plan in March.[34] But that plan imposed no specific deadline date — July 30 or otherwise.[35] Indeed, when that plan was first presented in January 2021, Tulsa’s then Deputy Mayor Amy Brown said, “We are not aware of a restriction that limits how long they can be out of the ground for analysis” — a representation made after consultations with the State Department of Health, the Department’s general counsel, and the City of Tulsa’s legal team.[36] The re-interment plan approved in March not only did not impose a July 30 deadline, it barred it. The plan required, first, a determination of whether discovered graves did or did not house Massacre victims. Even without regard to the future DNA analysis stipulated in the plan, fundamental forensic analysis was not yet concluded in late July. It wasn’t even certain that the remains were Massacre victims. After the controversial reburial, Mayor Bynum’s press aide Michelle Brooks conceded that “further analysis” will be necessary to determine that fact.[37] The final report of the Physical Investigations Committee was at least a month away.[38] Even if Massacre victims were confirmed, the re-interment plan provided an option (a) to store the coffins above ground or (b) to rebury them somewhere in Oaklawn. The word “OR” was capitalized.[39] Hands were not tied by the re-interment plan. Who was behind the decision to push July 30 was also steeped in confusion. The Mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff said that the “team on the ground” helped make the decision, but Chief Amusan refuted that, citing Dr. Stubblefield, leader of the team on the ground, who said that she did not make the “timeline of the ceremony.”[40] Dr. Stubblefield would later join with the Oversight Committee in opposing the July 30 reburial. Dr. Kary Stackelbeck, State Archeologist, also urged more study of the issue.[41] The unresolved matter of where in Oaklawn to rebury the remains, if at all, superseded any discussion of when. Dr. Stubblefield warned that the mass grave pit had a creek running under or even through it and constantly filled with water and mud. She emphasized the undesirable consequences posed by the accumulated water, warning that she had “real concerns” and was “really worried” that the coffins “won’t stay there.” If the remains’ new airtight enclosures began migrating, they could damage the adjoining unearthed caskets or even begin floating toward the surface.[42] In contrast, another Oaklawn location called Sexton, high and dry and ready to go, was available as a temporary re-burial site. In February, Tulsa’s then-Deputy Mayor Brown had herself suggested Sexton for that purpose, and committee chair Ross had seconded Brown’s “excellent” alternative.[43] When Ross strongly advocated Sexton during the July 27 briefing, Dr. Stubblefield said that, given the problems with the mass graves pit, it should definitely be considered. Dr. Stackelbeck, from the University of Oklahoma, backed Sexton as “a very reasonable suggestion” and also urged its consideration.[44] She said that the re-interment plan itself was designed to “facilitate” moving reburial to a different location within Oaklawn.[45] At the end of the three-hour private briefing, the Oversight Committee had every reason to assume that the July 30 reburial had been averted. Not only did the Committee decide unanimously to delay it pending answers to major questions, but the Physical Investigations team tried to slow things as well. Dr. Stubblefield, warning that it would create a “bad perception,” agreed with the decision to stop.[46] As noted, Dr. Stackelbeck pushed for consideration of Sexton as an alternate location. The Mayor’s deputy chief of staff Rojas promised that “tomorrow I can find out more information” and that he could get answers to the questions “immediately, tomorrow.”[47] The meeting ended. 4. The July 30 Debacle. The morrow brought no answers. On Thursday, July 29 a terse email from the City to the Oversight Committee announced that it was “working diligently” to address “some” of the questions. Which ones were not specified. The email repeated the falsehood that the re-interment plan required the fast-approaching reburial and ignored the Committee’s decision and the Physical Investigation team’s professional concerns and warnings.[48] The reburial commenced at 9 o’clock on Friday morning, the early hour precluding the ability of the Oversight Committee to seek legal recourse. Nonetheless, word spread and distraught descendants, resolutely determined to thwart a disrespecting of corpses they now firmly believed included Massacre victims, soon arrived to set the stage for the drama that was to follow. Approximately twenty people — only four of them Black — gathered beside the open pit to conduct a ceremony. A White minister led a prayer. Who and how the group was selected is another unknown. The backhoe then lumbered into action. The ceremony that preceded the re-internment of remains at Oaklawn Cemetery on July 30, 2021. Photo provided by the City of Tulsa. Outside the cemetery’s newly created wailing fence, old wounds were ripped open as the pit was filled with dirt. One astonished Black woman, who described herself as a descendant of a Race Massacre victim, shouted again and again, “This is a crime! This is a crime! This is a crime!” An elderly Black woman, weeping, moaned, “This is the worst funeral I’ve ever been to — they didn’t even cut the weeds.” For people nurtured in African customs of respect and honor for the remains of those who have passed, it was the depth of brutality. These sad spectacles, occurring within yards of the historic Route 66, passed into the city, state, and national news.[49] Tulsa Race Massacre descendant Heather Nash, left, yells at Brenda Alford, 1921 Graves Public Oversight Committee member, and forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield as remains from a mass grave are reburied at Oaklawn Cemetery on July 30, 2021. Photo by Mike Simons - Tulsa World/Associated Press. During the July 27 private briefing, Regina Goodwin had warned that the public was going to be misled by the reburial and ceremony into thinking these were Race Massacre victims when that hadn’t yet been determined. Goodwin continued, “We’re confusing the public and I don’t want to be part of that. I want to know who is going to tell the story? How is that narrative going to work? Who is going to be in front of the microphone talking about that one?” Dr. Stubblefield responded, “Well, you do raise a valid point.” But Goodwin got no answers as to who would explain things to the public, just as the Oversight Committee failed to get answers to so many things. On the day of reckoning, the answer arrived that it was going to be left to Dr. Stubblefield, who is Black, to try to mollify the angry witnesses — the same Dr. Stubblefield who had tried to delay the looming fiasco. None of the White people who had helped create the chaos came over to help.[50] 5. The Mayor’s public relations alibi. The July 30 debacle was a public relations shambles. Attempting damage control, Mayor Bynum’s press representative, Michelle Brooks, told the Washington Post that the City was required to rebury the remains to meet “permit requirements” obtained before the June excavation. The permit, she said, required the city to reinter after the “on-site forensic analysis, documentation and DNA sampling were complete.” She added that Tulsa had to “abide by the permit requirements that were filed with the Oklahoma State Department of Health and the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office, requiring the remains to be temporarily interred at Oaklawn Cemetery.” This story made the City seem reasonable: Regrettably, our hands are tied.[51] It is dubious that such a permit ever existed; if it did, the City violated state law with the July 30 Oaklawn reburial. Under Oklahoma law, a permit to disinter is required only if reburial will occur in a different cemetery or for the purpose of cremation. In that case, a “Request for Disinterment Permit,” specifically naming the different cemetery (or specifying cremation) must be filed with the State Department of Health in advance and receive State approval. Here, the City and Public Oversight Committee agreed to a reburial back in the same cemetery, at Oaklawn.[52] If the City filed for a disinterment permit naming a different cemetery — a prerequisite for getting a permit — then the City filed a false application. Making false statements in multiple permit applications constitutes a felony or, in this case, nineteen felonies — one for each set of remains — each punishable by up to a $10,000 fine and/or two years in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. The warning for those penalties is printed at the bottom of the permit application form.[53] Whenever reinterment is intended in the same cemetery, as here, no state permit is required. Oklahoma law is succinct and clear. Since November 2017, the applicable statute has provided that “if the dead body or fetus is to be disinterred and reinterred in the same cemetery, a disinterment permit is not required.”[54] Instead, a simple Notice, to be filed within five days of the disinterment, is sufficient, with no requisite state approval.[55] Nor is there any deadline for reinterment under a Notice. In January 2021, following consultations with the State Department of Health, its general counsel, and the City of Tulsa’s legal team, Deputy Mayor Brown said there was no known time restriction for reburial under a Notice process.[56] . 6. Conclusion. Exactly who decided to ignore the Public Oversight Committee’s unanimous decision to delay the reburial is unknown, as with the other issues where the Committee tried and failed to identify deciders. The ultimate responsibility for the proper treatment of the Oversight Committee and descendants of Race Massacre victims lies with Tulsa’s Mayor G. T. Bynum, the man who launched the Graves Investigation with much bravado. He is the one who committed the City to do things “the right way.” His obligations became especially keen after the summer 2021 departure of Deputy Mayor Amy Brown, who previously conducted Public Oversight Committee meetings. Bynum owns the investigation, now more than ever. One of the few times the Mayor spoke up during the 2021 Oversight meetings was on February 23, where the re-internment plan was being discussed. There, he dismissed Regina Goodwin’s suggestion that the City had not been taking its lead from the Oversight Committee. Bynum further complained that three Committee members were speaking “over and over and over again.” He declared that to resolve the issue “we’ll just have a vote of the Public Oversight Committee at the next meeting.”[57] At that meeting, the Committee approved the re-interment plan that the City was pushing. That plan not only did not require a hasty reburial, but precluded it. On July 27, when the Committee took a unanimous vote to delay re-interment, one that was averse to the City’s new desires, it was brushed aside like dust on an antique desk. The July 30 reburial was a humiliating slap in the face to all Public Committee members, making them appear ineffective, subservient, and complicit. The Mayor should have anticipated this anguishing consequence. He appointed the Committee members to represent their communities and knew well that they were being looked to for answers. Chief Amusan dramatically described the process for the Mayor’s deputy during the July briefing: "The reason why I’m asking who made the decision to stop and all these important questions is because community consensus says ‘the moment we found evidence of trauma, we stopped.’ It literally looks like everybody is involved in a cover-up from the public opinion perspective. So when they come ask us as Public Oversight members, ‘Whoa! What happened? Y’all were finding all these bodies and they just announced….they found this body and this trauma and all of this and all of a sudden we’re stopping and having a vigil.’ How that appears is it looks conspiratorial. It’s like ‘whoa, who does that?’ Once you find everything you’re looking for you stop!… If we don’t have an answer it looks like everybody is involved including the Oversight Committee… It looks bad. It looks so bad and there is no commemoration that can fix it." (emphasis by Amusan)[58] As the City had been eloquently forewarned, dark theories and allegations of bad faith blossomed in the wake of the reinterment duplicity and unanswered questions. Committee member Regina Goodwin raised two possible motives during the July briefing - (a) the City of Tulsa’s money had been spent and no more would be found and (b) the City of Tulsa never intended to do more digging anyway.[59] A step further is the notion that everybody was being played from the beginning and it was all just clever theatre to get past the centennial of the Race Massacre, which was certain to draw the nation’s attention. Was it preening virtue that, like the 1921 rebuilding plan, lasted only as long as the authorities felt the heat of public scrutiny? If so, the members of the Physical Investigations team, attempting a sincere and honest assessment of the evidence, have also been sandbagged by the City government. Today, the Mayor’s mass grave investigation lies in at least partial ruin. His promise of a homicide investigation has been exposed as empty. Things have not been done in “the right way.” Trust, not in grand supply to begin with, has been shattered. It would take a showing of great character and concern for humanity for all the Oversight members to return to the City’s table. Some Oversight Committee members, livid at the treatment and alive to the feeling of being conned, have petitioned for federal intervention.[60] If that happens, more anger and resentment will follow. If bodies are found after a Justice Department intervention, Tulsa will get no credit for it. A modern victory of cooperative effort will have evaporated, replaced by stress, struggle, and bitterness. If more bodies aren’t found, the controversy will haunt the history books for the next one hundred years, just as Kavin Ross eloquently warned.[61] Either way, G. T. Bynum will be the leading candidate to enter those books as the leader who failed to do things “the right way.” Even Tulsans who just want the entire graves matter over and done with have been harmed by the stonewalling and dismissive treatment of the Oversight Committee, the descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and every citizen of every race with a desire to learn the truth. The controversies will drag on, likely interminably. In the course of it, citizens of all races will be further divided and conquered. The Phantom Decider has damaged everyone. Epilogue Any tiny hope that the investigators would return to unearth additional coffins from the Oaklawn mass grave was dismantled by mid-September when the City removed all the logistics and laboratory trailers. Two City of Tulsa advertising signs appended to the iron fence were left behind. The signs begin by publicizing Mayor G. T. Bynum’s 2018 investigation announcement and include the promise that the Public Oversight Committee will “ensure” transparency and community engagement. The signs conclude with the Committee’s “rule” requiring “respect for the deceased.” Apart from the advertising, the only visible demonstration that an excavation in Oaklawn had occurred are the tire tracks stamped into the soil atop the City of Tulsa’s recreated mass grave.[62] A sign near the site of reinternment at Oaklawn Cemetary. Photo by Stuart Hetherwood/Well-Told, LLC. A sign near the site of reinternment at Oaklawn Cemetary. Photo by Stuart Hetherwood/Well-Told, LLC. Acknowledgments When asked to comment on this story, Michelle Brooks, City of Tulsa Director of Communications, provided this statement: “The City is committed to the 1921 Graves Investigation and will continue working with the Public Oversight Committee through the investigation. The City is currently working to secure a company to begin the DNA portion of this investigation and we also expect the formal report for the June excavation to be complete and presented to the Public Oversight Committee by the end of the year.” Disclosures In addition to being a member of the 1921 Graves Public Oversight Committee, Chief Egunwale Amusan is also a Board of Directors member for Center For Public Secrets. Endnotes: [1] For “colored” potter’s field, see the Oaklawn plot map. [2] There is some uncertainty as to the total number of burials discovered. Dr. Kary Stackelbeck, State Archeologist, reported that there were thirty-four burials, with fourteen adult caskets and six infant/children caskets disinterred. Fourteen were left in place. One of the disinterred infant caskets was found to contain no remains. Thus, a total of nineteen human remains were transferred to the laboratory for study and later reinterred on July 30, 2021. July 27, 2021 Public Oversight Committee private briefing, 1:50 to 2:25. For video of the July 27, 2021 private briefing. Various media reports claimed that thirty-five caskets were discovered. For purposes of this paper, Dr. Stackelbeck’s July 27, 2021 summary of thirty-four burials, one discovered to be a vacant casket, will be used. [3] The reference to a pregnant woman is drawn from an interview with Public Oversight Committee member Kristi Williams on September 7, 2021. As noted in endnote 2, one of the twenty disinterred coffins was found to contain no remains. [4] See authorities and evidence cited in Randy Hopkins,”The Plot to Kill 'Diamond Dick Rowland' and the Tulsa Race Massacre” https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/the-trail-of-atrocity. The paper will also be published by the Oklahoma Historical Society in a forthcoming issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma. [5] For a description of the reparations plan, see “Niles Blames Lawlessness for Race War,” Tulsa Tribune, June 2, 1921, 4 (Niles calls it a “plan of reparation in order that homes may be rebuilt and families as nearly as possible be rehabilitated” and “as quickly as possible rehabilitation will take place and reparation made.”). Also see, “Reparations Commission” Aiding Homeless Negroes,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 3, 1921, 1. [6] See news headlines and articles cited in Randy Hopkins, “Mask of Atonement: The Plan to Rebuild the Homes of Greenwood,” https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/post/mask-of-atonement-the-plan-to-rebuild-the-homes-of-greenwood [7] “Tulsa in Remorse to Rebuild Homes; Dead Now Put at 30,” New York Times, June 2, 1921, 1. [8] For Bynum’s promises and commitments, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pjua7e9UDo. For the video of the entire July 2019 meeting, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QN62XmWLZc. [9] For evidence and authorities cited in this section, see Randy Hopkins, “Mask of Atonement: The Plan to Rebuild the Homes of Greenwood” https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/post/mask-of-atonement-the-plan-to-rebuild-the-homes-of-greenwood [10] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight Committee private briefing, 29:50 to 37:00, 41:40 to 42:40 (discussion between Oversight Committee members Amusan and Regina Goodwin, Mayor Bynum’s Deputy Chief of Staff Rodrigo Rojas and Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield of the City’s Physical Investigation Committee regarding whether Oaklawn was a crime scene, the lack of living perpetrators and the absence of criminal investigators). [11] For Bynum’s promises and commitments, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pjua7e9UDo. [12] “A white Republican mayor seeks the truth about Tulsa’s race massacre a century ago,” Washington Post, March 13, 2020. [13] For Kellough’s presentation, see May 17, 2021 Public Oversight Committee public meeting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdoOnzVInuE. Videos of this and other public meetings are contained in the City of Tulsa’s 1921 Graves Investigation webpage located at https://www.cityoftulsa.org/government/mayor-of-tulsa/1921-graves-investigation/committee-meetings-and-members/ [14] See the discussions cited in endnote 10 above. [15] For discussion of how many burials, coffins and remain were discovered and handled, see endnote 2 above. [16] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight Committee private briefing, 53:00 to 54:05. (Dr. Stubblefield). [17] Again, one of the extracted coffins was found to contain no remains, meaning that only nineteen sets of remains were later reinterred. [18] January 28, 2021 Public Oversight Committee Meeting, 1:31:50 to 1:33:20 (Dr. Stackelbeck). [19] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight Committee private briefing, 51:40 to 55:10. (Dr. Stubblefield, “This whole investigation targeted plain casketed individuals.”); 55:10 to 57:20 (commentary by Amusan that fact that findings do not match pre-set “target” is no reason to stop digging once more coffins in a mass grave are discovered). Compounding the confusion over the decision to leave fourteen in the ground, the Mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff Rojas explained in an email to the Oversight Committee that some of the “nicer coffins” were in fact exhumed. Why some and not the others? [20] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:14 (Dr. Stackelbeck re: shipping crate). [21] March 23, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 41:00 to 43:30 (including per Dr. Stubblefield, “But I don’t expect this particular feature, this mass grave, to have only males…” and “I’m not reserving it to only males….we are talking about pillagers, these are the worst kind of pirates, there is going to be raping and murdering not just shooting guys…”). [22] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:06:00 to 1:06:30 (discussion by Dr. Stubblefield, including, “I do have a target of eighteen Black males and it is more efficient and just reasonable to expose burials that belong to those plain casketed individuals and not those individuals that are in fancy caskets.”). [23] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:03 (Amusan) [24] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 50:20 to 51:36, 1:03:05 to 1:04:50) (Amusan). Notwithstanding the new target of Black males, some female and infant-bearing coffins were extracted, adding yet more confusion to the decision to leave fourteen in place. As with the “fancy coffin” explanation, the actual practice only raised more unanswered questions. [25] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:44:25 to 1:46:15 (including per Amusan, “…on top of that, you have fourteen remains that were not exhumed. We are just completely discounting fourteen remains for whatever reason and they are going to get covered up and buried and it doesn’t match what the Mayor said we are going to do, which is that we are going to do everything in our power to find out who these people are…we keep revisiting this trauma and doing this incomplete search and that to me seems a waste of time and a waste of effort and for the next hundred years you’ll be questioning who these other fourteen were…Who made the decision to stop?… Who made that decision to stop and to conclude the dig?” To which, Dr. Stubblefield replied, “Yeah, I have no information for you on that.”). [26] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:33:05 to 2:34:10. [27] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:37:45 to 2:38:30 (responding to Committee chair Kavin Ross’ advocacy of reburying in above-the-flood line Sexton vs. the “mud pit,” Dr. Stubblefield said, “That’s actually not a bad idea. I wish we had a cemetery representative on hand….Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s not a bad idea. I say that in the context that I have real concerns…We are using airtight vaults because we want them to stay airtight, but our excavation area has a creek through it, underneath, and maybe through it. It fills up readily. I am really worried that they won’t stay there. But I’m not, I don’t build cemeteries so I have to yield to my own ignorance. We don’t have a cemetery representative on this call, but, yeah, you raise a valid call.”) (emphasis by Dr. Stubblefield). [28] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:34:30 to 2:36:10 (Dr. Stackelbeck). [29] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:36:10 to 2:44:25. (Includes several statements by Chair Ross interspersed with comments of others). [30] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight Committee private briefing, 49:40 to 50:20 (includes Dr. Stackelbeck, “There is a possibility that we could return and disinter these other individuals if we feel a compelling reason to do so…”). [31] For video of the July 27, 2021 private briefing, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_39KeR1rO2o. The City’s Mass Investigation webpage concerning Oversight Committee meetings is located at https://www.cityoftulsa.org/government/mayor-of-tulsa/1921-graves-investigation/committee-meetings-and-members/ [32] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private meeting, 1:50:50 to 1:51:08; 2:13:45 to 2:14:20. [33] July 27, 2021 private briefing, 1:55:50 to 2:06:30 (extended exchange between Regina Goodwin and the Mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff Rojas); 2:09:40 to 2:12:45 (includes Chair Kavin Ross, “I still have questions that are not answered. I still don’t see a rush to have this ceremony on Friday…Is it an issue with funding? I’ve been screaming that from the top of this whole…before everybody started jumping ship. I asked where is the next round of money? Was it placed on the city budget? How much do we have in our budget? I could never get any clear cut information on why I cannot get that kind of information.”) (emphasis by Ross). [34] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private meeting, 1:39:50 to 1:42:06 (Regina Goodwin asks, “Why are we putting them back in the ground Friday?” In response, Deputy Chief of Staff Rojas said, “Well, I’ll say, Regina, that when we did put in the request to get approval from the state to start excavation this summer, we needed a reinterment plan and as you may recall I want to say probably in February or in March we made a decision to temporarily reinter all of the individuals back into Oaklawn after the excavation was over.”); 1:51:08 to 1:53:18 (includes Deputy Chief of Staff Rojas, “In terms of the reinterment and for the reburial on this upcoming Friday, that decision was made as we paused, again that goes back to what we discussed in the spring…”). [35] The re-interment plan is available at https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/15407/oversight-committee-meeting-slides-1-28-21.pdf. [36] For prior consultations, see January 28, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 11:00 to 11:54 (Deputy Mayor Brown). For Brown’s representation, see January 28, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 26:40 to 27:55. [37] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Descendants-of-Tulsa-Race-Massacre-victims-16359958.php [38] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:57:00 to 2:58:45 (Dr. Stubblefield). [39] https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/15407/oversight-committee-meeting-slides-1-28-21.pdf [40] January 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:47:25 to 1:48:00 (Dr. Stubblefield said, “I did not make the timeline of the ceremony.”); 1:50:50 to 1:55:48 (includes Amusan saying, “We agreed that we would do temporary interment at the conclusion of the dig. I know what the word conclusion means. But you didn’t define who made the decision to stop this dig. If it is a pause, we don’t need to do a commemoration on Friday, right, if we are pausing this work… Somebody made a decision without our input. Somebody made a decision to stop and somebody made a decision to reinter without our input.” After Amusan again asked who made the decision, Deputy Chief of Staff Rojas said, “The decision was made essentially by the teams that were on the ground, Cardno and the City of Tulsa,” to which Amusan responded, ”But Phoebe just said she didn’t make the decision, so that can’t be the case.”) ; 2:33:00 to 2:34:05. See also, endnotes 25 and 26 and related text for more quotations on the decision to stop the dig. [41] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:29:15 to 2:34:15; 2:34:45 to 2:46:00; 2:47:30 to 2:56:00. [42] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:34:45 to 2:46:00; 2:47:30 to 2:56:00. See also quotations in endnotes 27, 28, and 29 and related text on the flooding issue. [43] February 23, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 29:30 to 30:45; 33:57 to 35:30. [44] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:34:45 to 2:46:00; 2:47:30 to 2:56:00. See also quotations in endnotes 27, 28, and 29 and related text on the flooding issue. [45] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:34:45 to 2:46:00; 2:47:30 to 2:56:00. Moving the caskets to Sexton would allow the pit of the graves to be filled with dirt, thus minimizing the “swimming pool” problem, as Dr. Stackelbeck noted. [46] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:29:15 to 2:34:15. (Dr. Stubblefield said, “I would appreciate a recommendation from the Public Oversight Committee. What I’m hearing from you is that we should not be having a commemoration and I am concerned to yield to your decision. I agree that there is a bad perception. I share your sentiment that we found something interesting, then almost immediately stopped…I can’t answer your question about who gave the order. I don’t have that knowledge. But I can accept your recommendation about being open to the public (with) going forward Friday or not.”) After the reburial, an article in the Tulsa World described Dr. Stubblefield as saying there was no reason to keep the remains above ground while DNA and “other data” were being analyzed. The City, in the same article, continued to blame the team on the ground for the reburial decision. Nonetheless, Dr. Stubblefield expressly joined with the Committee in asking for a delay of the reburial and a consideration of the Sexton location — actions that would have avoided the traumatic events of July 30. Whatever Dr. Stubblefield’s preferences on reburial in general, such action also was precluded by the re-interment plan which first required a determination of whether the remains were Massacre victims and the completion of forensic analysis. https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/racemassacre/critics-air-grievances-over-reinterment-of-possible-tulsa-race-massacre-burials/article_38dc20b6-f56d-11eb-a3ef-1b4d213a70c5.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share [47] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:56:00 to 2:57:30. [48] On August 2, 2021, the Mayor’s deputy sent a long email to the Oversight Committee. It was largely bureaucratic busywork that created the mere appearance of substance. Most of it was just a link to videos of prior Oversight meetings that the members already possessed. It was condescending in treating the Committee like children who could not remember the events through which they had already lived. [49] “Watch Now: Exhumed remains reburied at Oaklawn amid protests from Greenwood descendants,” Tulsa World, July 30, 2021, updated Sep. 6, 2021, at https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/racemassacre/watch-now-exhumed-remains-reburied-at-oaklawn-amid-protests-from-greenwood-descendants/article_3b04fb58-f08e-11eb-95c1-d78bc2d50b27.html; “Descendants of Tulsa Race Massacre victims protest reburial of mass grave remains,” Washington Post, August 3, 2021, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/03/tulsa-mass-grave-reburial-protest/ [50] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:49:15 to 1:50:50. [51] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/03/tulsa-mass-grave-reburial-protest/; https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Descendants-of-Tulsa-Race-Massacre-victims-16359958.php [52] Oklahoma Statutes Title 63. Public Health and Safety, Sec. 63-1-319, https://www.ok.gov/health2/documents/Title%2063%2011-1-19.pdf.The re-interment plan, presented in January 2021, debated in February, and approved in March is available at https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/15407/oversight-committee-meeting-slides-1-28-21.pdf. [53] Even if a permit to disinter had been requested and granted, there is nothing in the statute or the permit form that would have imposed a July 30 deadline. Thus, the Mayor’s press release was misleading at multiple levels. Oklahoma Statutes Title 63. Public Health and Safety, Sec. 63-1-319, https://www.ok.gov/health2/documents/Title%2063%2011-1-19.pdf. The Mayor’s press representative also leveraged the permit alibi by emphasizing that it was “filed” with the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office. Sending something to the District Attorney had absolutely no legal significance. It was equivalent to saying “we put something in a file cabinet.” [54] Oklahoma Statutes Title 63. Public Health and Safety, Sec. 63-1-319 (D). [55] https://oklahoma.gov/health/birth-and-death-certificates/birth-and-death-registration-rover/disinterments.html [56] For prior consultations, see January 28, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 11:00 to 11:54. For Brown’s representation, see January 28, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 26:40 to 27:55. [57] February 23, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 1:31:20 to 1:33:32 (Bynun speaks). [58] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 2:29:15 to 2:33:07. [59] July 27, 2021 Public Oversight private briefing, 1:55:50 to 1:59:45. [60] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/18/doj-tulsa-mass-graves-race-massacre/ [61] February 23, 2021 Public Oversight public meeting, 1:46:25 to 1:47:05 (Ross said, “My main concern is…if anything that should stand up in this whole deal is that we sit on the right side of history this time. For the next hundred years, what we do now, what we say now will haunt the history books. Good or bad.”). Hopefully, it’s not too late for the good to replace the bad, which for the moment reigns triumphant. [62] I would like to thank Mark Singer, journalist extraordinaire, for editing this paper and helping to see it through to conclusion. To the gang at the Center for Public Secrets, thanks for all your help and being such a consistent pleasure with which to work. Any mistakes or errors are all mine.

By Randy Hopkins The front page of the Wichita Daily Eagle on June 3rd, 1921 On Thursday morning, June 2, 1921, one of Tulsa’s many problems was that of optics. A large chunk of the city had been obliterated in a matter of hours and an embarrassingly large portion of the city’s population had a hand in the obliterating. How this was going to look to outsiders was far from an irrelevant concern for many Tulsans, especially the city’s elite for whom pride in the city’s accomplishments was keen. To a nation relentlessly steeped in images of knuckle-dragging Huns savagely rending their enemies asunder during the World War, how would Tulsa look now? Would businesses go elsewhere? Would other “better citizens” from other places look down their noses? Fortunately for those most concerned with the city’s image, relief arrived the very next day in the form of nationwide publicity that placed Tulsa in a far more favorable light, even a heroic one. Bold, black headlines in Friday’s Daily Oklahoman told readers, ”TULSA WILL REBUILD HOMES OF NEGROES.” The Chicago Tribune headlined that $500,000 would be raised for the effort. The New York Tribune reported it was to be “done in part as an atonement for the harm done, and also as an example for other cities” and that no difficulty was expected in obtaining the money. Newspapers from Lawton to Los Angeles and Pawhuska to Philadelphia spread the news.[i] Courtesy of The Daily Oklahoman The Greenwood rebuilding “plan” was a major feature of the second full day of national newspaper coverage of the then-called Tulsa Race Riot. The first day’s coverage had dealt with the dramatic destruction itself. Day two would put matters in context for the now-intrigued national audience. The New York Times described how the home rebuilding plan came about, reporting that a “host of bankers, businessmen, and civic leaders assembled in mass meeting” on the morning of June 2.[ii] The meeting produced a “committee of seven,” said by the Associated Press to consist of “men who do things.”[iii] They were called the “reparations committee” by the Pittsburgh Daily Post, drawing on a report by Major Alva Niles, president of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, who presided over the June 2 meeting.[iv] The committee selected former Tulsa mayor Loyal J. Martin, the most hawkish of all speakers in favor of complete restitution, as its chairman.[v] The committee named itself the Board of Public Welfare. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Daily Post Courtesy of The Lawton News Courtesy of The New York Times The rebuilding plan was itself constrained. No businesses would be rebuilt and renters were out of luck. Only negroes who owned and occupied houses would be helped. The national newspapers did not always draw these distinctions. The New York Times was particularly wide of the mark. In a front-page article “Tulsa in Remorse to Rebuild Homes; Dead Now Put at 30,” the paper told its many readers that “the mile-square burned area would be rebuilt” and “a thousand business men will contribute to start a city-wide fund for the rehabilitation of the devastated district." To better highlight the heroism of the effort or for other reasons, the Board of Public Welfare also determined to reject all aid from outside Tulsa. Precisely at the time that tens of thousands of dollars could have been raised by a campaign that would have been child’s play for the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, the Board stepped on the throat of such contributions. Indeed, the order appears to have resulted from reports reaching the Board from “all over the country that money is being collected in many cities toward the $500,000 building fund to replace wrecked homes.”[vii] A thousand dollar check from the Chicago Tribune - who also urged others to give and promised to forward their gifts - was ostentatiously returned.[viii] The “orders” not to donate were transmitted by the Associated Press to all the major papers in the country.[ix] By Saturday, June 4, the Tulsa Race Riot was moving off the nation’s front pages and out of its attention, sent that way in part by the Board’s directive to move along. Courtesy of the St Louis Post Dispatch The Greenwood rebuilding plan did not survive its national birth announcement. After the national publicity blitzkrieg of June 3, the plan was never again mentioned in Tulsa newspapers. When the Board of Public Welfare listed its accomplishments on June 6, the rebuilding plan received nary a word. Instead, the Board suggested “conversion of the burned area into an industrial and wholesale district,” a scheme first advanced by Tulsa’s Real Estate Commission.[x] The Tulsa Board of Public Welfare courtesy of the Tulsa Tribune The $500,000 reconstruction kitty never arrived. No serious effort to collect it ever took place. During World War I, Tulsa’s elite had proven extraordinarily adept at raising money for all sorts of causes.[xi] By June 5, however, the Board of Public Welfare had collected less than nine thousand dollars, whereas temporary relief for the many refugees alone was estimated at $75,000. By June 6, the Board suspended all efforts to collect any money for reconstruction until “the legal status of the riot damages can be fixed.” On June 7, the Board’s Relief and Restitution Fund was $9,006. H. L. Standeven, a member of the Board and the man in charge of the Exchange National Bank’s Trust company, was listed as giving $525. Cyrus Avery, treasurer of the Board of Public Welfare, contributed $150, as did Major Niles of the Chamber of Commerce.[xii] There is no record of any other member of the Board of Public Welfare making a donation. The failure to raise rebuilding funds locally dovetailed with the refusal to collect money from the outside. On June 9, the Board gave up completely and turned over all its funds, barely $12,000, to the Red Cross. Perhaps, it suggested in closing, some housing corporations could come along and allow negroes to buy homes at low payments.[xiii] Nothing came of that. Some histories paint the Board of Public Welfare as having been rudely shoved aside on June 14 by the Evans administration’s decision to create its own, far more miserly “reconstruction committee.”[xiv] Far from a wrenching away of authority, it was a face-saving godsend for “the men who do things.” They were off the hook. The Board of Public Welfare’s final report made no mention of the Greenwood rebuilding plan, which had momentarily put the Board in the nation’s spotlight. Several Board members, as well as Major Niles of the Chamber of Commerce, simply shifted over to the new committee. The Chamber of Commerce was allowed to approve subcommittees of the new board.[xv] It was like a tag-team changing fighters. By June 17, the hatchets were buried and the Chamber of Commerce and the Evans Administration celebrated a “love feast” in the front page words of the Tulsa World.[xvi] Civic wounds healed easily in those days, at least on the south side of the tracks.[xvii] The plan to rebuild the homes of Greenwood may not have lasted more than forty-eight hours, but for a critical moment when the nation’s eyes were fixed on Tulsa, it provided a newsprint-thin mask of atonement which helped to conceal Tulsa’s own mark of the Hun.[xviii] Endnotes: [i] “Tulsa Will Rebuild Homes of Negroes,” Daily Oklahoman (OK), June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa Plans Half Million Building Fund,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1921, 1; “U. S. Inquiry in Tulsa Race Riots Ordered,” New York Tribune, June 3, 1921, 1. See also, “Tulsa Organizes to Atone for Tragedy,” Muskogee Daily Phoenix (OK), June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa to Rebuild Burned Area.” Lawton News (OK), June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa Citizens to Rebuild Razed Negro District,” Wichita Daily Eagle (KAN), June 3, 1921, 1;“Tulsa to Rebuild Homes of Negroes,” New York Herald, June 3, 1921, 1; “Will Rebuild Homes for Tulsa Negroes,” New York Evening Post, June 3, 1921, 2; “Tulsa to Rebuild Houses Burned in Negro District,” Austin American (TX), June 3, 1921, 1; “Citizens Form Committee to Reconstruct Homes in the Burned Area,” Baltimore Sun (MD), June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa Business Men to Rebuild Negro District,” Houston Post (TX), June 3, 1921, 1; “Inefficient Police Held to Blame for Tragedy at Tulsa,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa Quiz Ordered - Homes of Negroes to be Rebuilt,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1921, 1;“Tulsa Will Erect Houses for Destitute,” Enid Daily Eagle (OK), June 3, 1921, 1; “Plans to Rebuild Negro Section of Tulsa Are Made,” Ponca City News (OK), June 3, 1921, 1; “City to Meet Demands Out of Own Purse,” Tulsa Tribune (OK), June 3, 1921, [ii] “Tulsa in Remorse to Rebuild Homes; Dead Now Put at 30,” New York Times, June 2, 1921, 1. The Board members were Harry C. Tyrrell, Loyal J. Martin, Grant R. McCullough, Dr. Samuel G. Kennedy, Herbert L. Standeven, Major Charles F. Hopkins, and Cyrus S. Avery. Also, “$2,000 To Start Fund for Relief,” Tulsa Daily World, June 2, 1921, 1 [iii] “Tulsa Committee Says It Can Raise All Needed For Relief,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), June 3, 1921, 1. [iv] “" Reparations Commission” Aiding Homeless Negroes,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 3, 1921, 1. For Niles’ speech, “Niles Blames Lawlessness for Race War,” Tulsa Tribune, June 2, 1921, 4 (Niles calls it a “plan of reparation in order that homes may be rebuilt and families as nearly as possible be rehabilitated” and “as quickly as possible rehabilitation will take place and reparation made.”). [v] “Tulsa Race Riot Will Be Probed,” Atlanta Constitution, June 3, 1921, 1 (per Martin, “As the final outcome, we must rebuild these homes, see that the negroes get their insurance, and get their claims against the city and county,” and also urging “outraged families of negroes to file their claims for damages at the hands of the mobs”). [vi] “Tulsa Will Rebuild Homes of Negroes,” Daily Oklahoman, June 3, 1921, 1. [vii] “Looters Give Tulsa Guards New Anxiety,” Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 3, 1921, 1; “Tulsa’s Mayor May Lose His Job After Inquiry,” Evening World (NY), June 3, 1921, 2 (Wall Street edition). [viii] “Tulsa Plans Half Million Building Fund,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1921, 1; “City to Meet Demands Out of Own Purse,” Tulsa Tribune, June 3, 1921, 1. [ix] “Tulsa Committee Says It Can Raise All Needed For Relief,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), June 3, 1921, 1. [x] “Local Situation Well in Hand,” Tulsa Daily World, June 7, 1921, 2. The industrial district plan was first formulated by the Tulsa Real Estate Exchange’s own Reconstruction Committee on June 2. “Plan to Move Negroes Into New District,” Tulsa Tribune, June 3, 1921,1. By no later than June 6, the real estate men’s plan had prevailed. [xi] “Niles Blames Lawlessness for Race War,” Tulsa Tribune, June 2, 1921, 4. [xii] “‘Give at Once’ Avery’s Plea to Save City,” Tulsa Tribune, June 5, 1921, 1; “Need Relief Funds,” Tulsa Tribune, June 6, 1921, 1 ($75,000 for temporary relief must be collected before any funds for reconstruction can begin); “City Awakens to Fact That It Must Give,” Tulsa Tribune, June 7, 1921, 2; “More than $12,000 Now in Relief Fund; Must More Needed,” Tulsa Tribune, June 9, 1921, 4. The Board of Public Welfare’s efforts appears constrained to small, front-page ads titled “Tulsa Must Restore” and asking citizens to send money to the “Relief and Restitution” fund. These ran six times in the Tulsa Tribune from June 3 until June 8 and once in the Daily World on June 4. The Board’s efforts could not have been helped by the Tulsa Bar Association and Oklahoma Attorney General Prince Freeling who announced that neither the City of Tulsa nor Tulsa County were liable for race riot damages. “City is Not Liable, Says Legal Board,” Tulsa Tribune, June 8, 1921, 1. [xiii] “Welfare Board Drops Control of Relief Fund,” Tulsa Tribune, June 9, 1921, 1; “All Relief Funds Go to Red Cross,” Tulsa Daily World, June 10, 1921, 7. Chairman Loyal J. Martin appears to have pushed the housing corporation idea as a last-ditch effort to save the rebuilding effort. “Corporation to Re-build Homes, Plan,” Tulsa Tribune, June 8, 1921, 1. [xiv] “City Hall Breaks With C. Of C.,” Tulsa Tribune, June 14, 1921, 1; “Public Welfare Board Resigns,” Tulsa Tribune, June 15, 1921, 1, 11; “New Board on Tour of Burned Area,” Tulsa Tribune, June 15, 1921, 1, 11. [xv] “9 Committees Appointed to Help Negroes,” Tulsa Tribune, June 24, 1921, 10. [xvi] “Hunt Peace in City Hall Row,” Tulsa Tribune, June 17, 1921, 1; “Ouster Order of C. Of C. Rescinded,” Tulsa Daily World, June 18, 1921, 1. [xvii] One man cast aside was Loyal J. Martin. His maximalist claims that the city was responsible for the ruin and restitution had proved a public relations blessing, but he and his point of view became quickly out-of-date. It is possible that he was the only one who truly in favor of rebuilding something. No one else spoke out so directly. Following his resignation, he opted to retire from public life. “From Autobiography of Former Tulsa Mayor Loyal J. Martin,” Ruth Sigler Avery Collection, Special Collections, and Archives, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa. [xviii] The masking may have paid dividends. Glen Condon, the former managing editor of the Daily World and current editor of the Vaudeville News in New York, happened to be in town and reported to a Tulsa Chamber of Commerce meeting that “the recent riot had not affected Tulsa with the outside world.” “C. of C. and Commission Meet Today,” Tulsa Tribune, June 17, 1921, 1.

By John Neal The demolition of the building that originally housed the Booker T. Washington School in Sand Springs, OK. Image from the TAPP Development Corporation. “MOVE THE NEGROES OUT” – James Baldwin commenting on Urban Renewal in 1963. In 2003-2004 Sand Springs and Tulsa, Oklahoma metropolitan officials crafted a plan. The plan was to demolish Sand Spring’s largest Black community and replace it with a retail and commercial district. Using the powers of urban renewal and both the threat and use of eminent domain condemnation, they dislocated the residents of the neighborhood. Then they demolished their homes, two Black churches, and the Booker T. Washington School that had educated Black students in segregation until the mid-1960s. The Black neighborhood vanished after being in Sand Springs since the City’s founding nearly 100 years earlier. THE SETUP It all appeared to begin innocuously enough with Tulsa, Oklahoma community leaders wanting to build a sports arena. They devised a sales tax referendum, the proceeds from which they could use to issue revenue bonds for its construction. [1] Because the sales tax referendum would be countywide, Tulsa needed support from other municipalities in the county and their voting residents. To secure that support they solicited projects to be added to the referendum from these governments. In early 2003 Sand Springs submitted several projects, the largest of which was the “Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Project.” [2] The countywide projects were collectively referred to as Vision 2025. The “Keystone Corridor” referenced that section of the Sand Springs Expressway that ran through Sand Springs from Tulsa to the Keystone Lake recreation area. The genesis for the proposal is unknown but it was developed, written, and presented by the Indian Nations Council of Governments (INCOG), which doubled as the regional Municipal Planning Organization, of which the Sand Springs municipal government was a member. The role of Vision 2025 countywide leaders who selected the project, and that of the INCOG planners, were central to what was about to transpire in Sand Springs. Following the successful sales tax referendum, the project plan was presented by INCOG in early 2004 as the Sand Springs Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan, or the “Corridor Plan”. (APPENDIX A) It was ninety-four (94) pages, including eight (8) appendices. This paper addresses the Corridor Plan document extensively for several reasons: A. It is the document accessible to the public, setting forth what was proposed, and was the document submitted to the Sand Springs Urban Renewal Authority, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council for consideration and approval. B. The Corridor Plan constituted an amendment to the Urban Renewal Plan governed by Oklahoma Statutes, which among other things authorized the involuntary acquisition of real property and structures. C. It provided the legal, policy, and administrative context for everything that followed in Sand Springs concerning these events. The Corridor Plan states: “Prior to the vote Sand Springs residents selected the Keystone Corridor project, which was included in Proposition 4 on the successful ballot.” [3] It is difficult to understand what is meant by “Sand Springs residents selected” as there was no referendum on the project in Sand Springs. And as to the project being “included” on the ballot, here is the actual ballot Proposition 4 text as voted on September 9, 2003: PROPOSITION NO. 4 (Capital Improvements/Community Enrichment) “SHALL THE COUNTY OF TULSA, OKLAHOMA, BY ITS BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS LEVY AND COLLECT A SEVENTEEN AND ONE-HALF PERCENT (17.50%) OF ONE PERCENT (1.0%) SALES TAX FOR THE PURPOSE OF CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS FOR COMMUNITY ENRICHMENT WITHIN TULSA COUNTY, OKLAHOMA, AND/OR TO BE APPLIED OR PLEDGED TOWARD THE PAYMENT OF PRINCIPAL AND INTEREST ON ANY INDEBTEDNESS, INCLUDING REFUNDING INDEBTEDNESS INCURRED BY OR ON BEHALF OF TULSA COUNTY FOR SUCH PURPOSE, SUCH SALES TAX TO COMMENCE ON JANUARY 1, 2004 AND CONTINUING THEREAFTER TO JANUARY 1, 2017?” FOR THE PROPOSITION-YES AGAINST THE PROPOSITION-NO [4] The Keystone Corridor Redevelopment project was not stated in the Proposition, but the funding for the project of $14.5 million was included under the vague reference to a number of projects described as “capital improvements for community enrichment.” A casual reader also might not immediately grasp its planned consequences from the first two paragraphs in the Corridor Plan introduction: “On September 9, 2003, the voters of Sand Springs and Tulsa County combined in approving the Vision 2025 plan and program to encourage economic development and growth in area cities and towns and in Tulsa County. The Sand Springs Vision 2025 Keystone Corridor Redevelopment project is the $14.5 million dollar initiative to redevelop the Keystone Corridor. [5] “The purpose of the Sand Springs Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan: 2025 (Corridor Plan) is to arrest the decline of an area in the central part of the City’s economic downtown area, assemble the land, implement a strategy for clearance, and promote redevelopment to make this area a central and positive focus of community growth and attraction- a point of destination for persons living within the Sand Springs market area, as well as a point of attraction and destination for persons from the larger metropolitan area and northwest Oklahoma.” [6] In this context and use, a layperson may be inclined to interpret “redevelopment” as meaning “the act or process of changing an area of a town by replacing old buildings, roads, etc...with new ones”, as is found in the online Cambridge Dictionary. [7] In reality, “redevelopment” is used interchangeably with “urban renewal” in Oklahoma Statutes. [8] Area Map included the Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan document. THE TARGET The principal target was the “three South Side Additions” [9] which was the largest Black neighborhood community in Sand Springs. The Corridor Plan, and thus the extension of the area subject to urban renewal and all its powers, included this Black residential area. As a factual matter, this neighborhood (most of Area A in the Corridor Plan) was just that, a residential neighborhood, and not a “central part of the city’s economic downtown”, as had been referenced previously. Charles Page, the town's founder, made certain of that when he platted the African American Southside Addition in 1911, separated from the white community by the Katy railroad tracks, quite literally. The original Southside Addition plat of 33 acres slightly overlaps the 25.7 acres in Area A of the Corridor Plan. It is true that over time Sand Springs officials had allowed manufacturing, industrial, and later commercial businesses to surround and encroach into the neighborhood and diminished its size. But the residences, churches, and school were not part of the economic heart of the downtown area. This sort of distortion of facts and misleading statements riddle the Corridor Plan (urban renewal mechanism) and prevented neighborhood residents from full knowledge of what was happening until it was too late. Indeed, the stage was being set for this as Sand Springs submitted this project in early 2003 for inclusion in the referendum by declaring this area “blighted.” Prior to the use of the powers of urban renewal, an area must be declared blighted. On March 24, 2003, the Sand Springs City Council adopted Resolution No.03-09. [10] It was done without fanfare or much publicity, but it did an extraordinary thing. It immensely increased the blighted area in Sand Springs subject to urban renewal and the powers derived from it. It increased the designated blighted area from approximately 26 acres, adding 454 more acres (including the 94 acres in the Corridor Plan). This immense swath of land constituted more than 3% of the entire City and more than double the size of the downtown business district. This was done months prior to the Tulsa County sales tax referendum and was a legal prerequisite for including the proposed redevelopment area in the revised urban renewal plan. The Corridor Plan includes this Resolution but makes no reference to the amount of increased land this would add to the Urban Renewal Area. The Resolution adds 454 acres all said to be ”… blighted areas and specifically a blighted area south of the downtown area… which constitutes a serious and growing menace, injurious and inimical to the public health, safety, morals, and welfare of the residents of the City of Sand Springs…” [11] Seriously, one must doubt that the Sand Springs Early Childhood Center, the three Black churches, McDonald's, other businesses, and the area residents ever knew they constituted such a serious threat to the City. One can draw a straight line through the declaration of blight, submission of the project for the inclusion in the referendum, development of a Corridor Plan, and the subsequent exercise of the threat and use of condemnation under urban renewal (eminent domain), to the destruction of Sand Springs’ largest Black neighborhood community. As the Corridor Plan finally makes clear in Part II Objectives, “The primary objectives of the Corridor Plan are…Remove substandard residential, commercial, and industrial buildings…Develop a new retail and commercial center for Sand Springs and the market area.” [12] The preservation and rehabilitation of the Black neighborhood was never an alternative even though this could have been accomplished in a number of ways. The blight Resolution states “salvable blight areas can be conserved and rehabilitated,” [13] mirroring State authorizing language of “rehabilitation or conservation in an urban renewal area” and “carrying out plans for a program of voluntary and compulsory repair and rehabilitation of buildings and other improvements.” [14] So a legal and administrative framework within urban renewal existed to repair and rehabilitate the neighborhood as an alternative. THE BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD The residents of Area A, the first phase of the redevelopment plan, deserve special attention not given in the Corridor Plan. They constituted by far the largest Black neighborhood in Sand Springs and one-half of the Black population. Based on the Corridor Plan the number of occupied residences was 68 (sixty-eight). [15] The Corridor Plan does not mention that the “repair and rehabilitation of buildings or other improvements” was an alternative to “demolition and removal.” [16] The Plan does not subdivide the Estimated Finance Plan budget by area, but the acquisition, clearance, and relocation budget was $9,425,000 in total. [17] Area A represents 27% of the total acreage. Tens of thousands of dollars could have been spent repairing or rehabilitating these 68 occupied residences. Instead, City officials decided to spend the money on acquiring and demolishing these properties. It is also noteworthy that 50 of the 68 occupied residences were rentals. [18] One white landlord owned dozens of properties. [19] Thus a vast majority of the alleged blight from the residences were due to landlord neglect, and subject to “compulsory repair and rehabilitation” under the powers of the Urban Renewal Authority and/or property code enforcement by municipal officials. [20] At a minimum this could have been used as an adjunct tool, further stretching Plan funds for repair and rehabilitation. Clearly, the Corridor Plan and municipal officials had goals other than preserving and rehabilitating this Black neighborhood, namely a retail and commercial district. The Corridor Plan itself, adopted after the ballot measure, makes no mention of “eminent domain”, the legal mechanism by a public legislative body to take private property involuntarily for a public purpose. This power was automatically granted in Oklahoma State Statutes with the adoption of the Corridor Plan incorporating the 94 acres into the new Urban Renewal Area, having declared the entire area blighted the previous year. [21] Nor does the Corridor Plan disclose that Sand Springs Development Authority (SSDA) acting as the Urban Renewal Authority had bestowed upon it by these series of actions the power of “condemnation” of property. [22] The phrase “eminent domain” is not stated or explained in the Corridor Plan and “condemnation” appears only once without context or explanation on page 87 of the 94-page document. Ironically, the section where the word “condemnation” appears is in the innocuously titled “City of Sand Springs Relocation Assistance Plan, Policies and Guidelines” (Appendix G). Eminent domain and condemnation would later be used overtly against 14 parcels of property and threatened in other cases. [23] This action to exercise the power of eminent domain and commence proceedings would occur on May 22, 2006. The SSDA acting as the Urban Renewal Authority could have acted without the City Council approval but Oklahoma law required the governing body to act when used against unimproved real estate or, in this case, 11 vacant lots. [24] Another example of the Corridor Plan mischaracterizations is the demographic characterization of “Area A.” The Corridor Plan reflects an abundance of ignorance or deceit in not providing accurate demographic information. Instead, it merely notes, “The demographic data for the Corridor Plan area according to the 2000 U.S. Census is shown in Appendix C.” [25] In Appendix C it asserts that “84 persons or 47.5% of the Residential Study Area is African American alone.” [26] Even a minimal amount of due diligence would have the Corridor Plan identifying the area as a Black neighborhood, corresponding to Area A. Using the study’s own occupied house count (68) and persons per household (2.36) in Area A, that is the Black neighborhood, there are approximately 160 persons, all African American! Thus, this neighborhood was home to half of all African Americans residing in Sand Springs at that time. [27] THE PROCESS One should again note the Corridor Plan is being presented “after” the approval of the project in the sales tax referendum. The initial public meetings referred to in the Corridor Plan were not made by the governing body. They were meetings of the Sand Springs Development Authority, the newly designated Urban Renewal Authority. The Plan also says these public meetings were “not required”, appearing to ignore the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act in effect at that time. [28] These public meetings were also several months or more before the City Council would ultimately adopt the Plan. Nevertheless, the meetings sparked discontent in the Black neighborhood. KOTV, the CBS affiliate in Tulsa, reported in the summer of 2004: “City Planners estimate about 177 people would have to move. And many of these folks aren’t happy about that prospect.” [29] The scope of this amended Urban Renewal Plan and its impact on people’s lives and property deserved a more truthful and transparent public participation process. For example, the Sand Springs Planning Commission met on September 21, 2004, to consider the Corridor Plan’s compliance with the City’s Comprehensive Plan. Irving Frank, INCOG Manager of Community Planning, led the Plan presentation at the meeting. “Frank said it appears those businesses impacted as well as residences and churches are satisfied with the plan and are anxious to move forward.” [30] When the City Council met just weeks later the reality was far different than Frank’s characterization. It came on October 11, 2004, after just one public notice on September 26, 2004, and no newspaper articles preceding it in the Sand Springs Leader. “Lloyd Johnson spoke on behalf of a good number of the residents in Area A that would be displaced by the redevelopment. ‘We are those crying in the wilderness’ Johnson said, ‘We do not know when we are going… we’re just told we’re going. “Johnson added that “many of the residents are older” and “worrisome.” “Johnson shared pictures of those available in Sand Springs.” (homes). “Some of those are not as good as the ones we’re living in.” [31] But the official minutes of the meeting would reflect none of this. It would simply and officially record Mr. Johnson’s comments as having been that they wanted to be only “paid fairly for their homes” and “kept informed of the progress of the plan.” [32] The Sand Springs Leader opened the article stating: “Following a public hearing on what is still being called a preliminary draft the Sand Springs City Council Monday night approved the Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan.” [33] It was not a preliminary draft as events would later demonstrate. Promotional video for the River West Development Project produced by Tapp Development Corporation in 2011. EMINENT DOMAIN This Area A, the Southside Addition, was created as a segregated place of residency by the town founder in 1911. In the early 2000s, the city was still mostly segregated in housing. The Corridor Plan, or any plan for that matter, which considered this neighborhood should have weighed the impact of their dislocation and destruction of their homes and other property, placing the residents’ needs and desires at the forefront. But like so many places across America, Urban Renewal had the effect, if not intent, to “move the Negroes out” as James Baldwin observed in 1963. So, when eminent domain was aimed at this humble Black neighborhood in the fall and winter of 2005, an eruption occurred. It garnered national attention in the National Review Online and in The New York Times. [34] Churches from around the area banded together to try to protect the three Black churches in the neighborhood from property seizure. City officials had sought to characterize the redevelopment area as just an “old industrial area” and as a “golden opportunity.” [35] The Corridor Plan falsely characterizes the neighborhood thusly, “Since its initial development and reaching its prime, the area has been characterized by vacant lots, dilapidated vacant residential and commercial buildings…” [36] And when the threat of eminent domain became known, Sand Springs City Manager Loy Calhoun, only days after the reports, said that, “There is no eminent domain action going on there. No action, no intents- nothing like that’s been done in the area.” [37] And just a few months later the Tulsa World would title an article “Sand Springs Council OKs Condemning 14 Properties.” That meeting was on May 22, 2006. [38] The condemnation proceedings included 11 vacant lots, one occupied and two unoccupied single-family structures. All but one Council member approved the action. That Council member said some of the properties met the definition of blight, others were viable lots. [39] Blight conditions may have been exacerbated by the fact that nearly 75% of the occupied residences were rental properties and landlords likely knew years in advance these properties would be taken. An INCOG representative told the City Planning Commission that “the Corridor Plan actually dates back to 1980…with city planners.” [40] Also beginning in the 1950s and completed in 1973, an expressway was built between Black and white communities reinforcing the segregation, and as elsewhere in the U.S., contributed to the deterioration in the Black neighborhood. [41] Centennial Baptist Church in Sand Springs, OK. Image courtesy of the Tulsa World. CENTENNIAL BAPTIST CHURCH One church held out, the Centennial Baptist Church. It was not among the properties condemned on May 22nd. It steadfastly refused buyout offers, the church pastor Reverend Roosevelt Gildon saying at one point, “The Lord didn’t send me here to build a mini-mall.” [42] And the church’s legal counsel, the Becket law firm, promised that the use of “… eminent domain will be challenged by immediate legal action” in a letter sent to the City. [43] Two important factors were in the church’s legal favor. One, the property was clearly not part of the alleged blight having been remodeled just years before, though it had been swept up in the City Council’s former blight resolution. The second reason was an interrelated one. Up until this point, the city officials had relied on economic development or redevelopment as its reason to exercise these powers. And in Kelo vs New London et al, the United States Supreme Court in June 2005 affirmed that the use of economic development was a “public purpose.” [44] So, the City of Sand Springs had proceeded with confidence that “economic development” could be used as the basis for the taking. However, the U.S. Supreme Court had noted that the City of New London had relied on an invocation of a “State statute… to effectuate this plan.” [45] Thus, the Court left it to each State’s constitution and laws to determine whether eminent domain for economic development was a valid public purpose. Unfortunately for the City on that May 22nd, 2006 meeting day, the Oklahoma Supreme Court had, thirteen days earlier, invalidated using eminent domain for private economic development. [46] It did affirm its use for blight. So, the city reversed its well-publicized position that this was a “redevelopment plan” to being all about blight. And the church, while in the designated and grossly overstated blighted area, was not itself blighted. The city dropped its case against the church with City Attorney David Weatherford saying “there’s no reason to.” (use eminent domain) [47] The church stands on the same site today. The Booker T. Washington School in Sand Springs, OK. Image courtesy of the Tulsa World. THE BOOKER T. WASHINGTON SCHOOL There was another property in the Southside Addition that also warrants special attention. It was the Early Childhood Center owned by the Sand Springs School District. It was formerly the Booker T. Washington School in which Black students of all grades had been taught for half a century until the integration of public schools in 1966. [48] It was briefly a Head Start facility before being converted to an Early Childhood Center (public school kindergarten) and was still being used for that purpose. The School District had no reason to sell it. And the City could not possibly assert it was blighted. But the City was determined to tear it down. In 2006 the City and the school district came to terms. The City would pay a staggering $3.5 million dollars for the “blighted” property and would not take it until a new kindergarten was built elsewhere in 2009. [49] This single purchase represented 37% of the Plan budget for acquisition, clearance, and relocation. [50] This marked another major blow to the Black community and its heritage. THE GREED At its core, the Corridor Plan was designed to attract the “40,000 motorists a day on the Expressway…to create a point of destination… for commercial and retail services for customers across the region.” [51] This would include for Area A “major retail stores, restaurants, specialty retail shops and services.” The taxpayers would pay for the property and its demolishment, and the city would be the beneficiary of additional sales and property taxes. One could easily reason that is why the project was conceived. For example, and continuing with the BTW school experience, a CVS pharmacy replaced it. In 2020 it had a tax fair market value of $2.7 million dollars and was paying $36,663 in property tax annually as well as inestimable sales taxes. [53] Thus a tax-generating business replaced a school. What overall effect has this redevelopment had on the city’s sales and property tax revenue? Sales tax is the main source of revenue for funding municipal government operations and property tax is used to pay down debt. [54] While the full impact cannot be known because some properties are still vacant, thirteen (13) major commercial and retail service businesses are in the former, now displaced, Black neighborhood. Some effects can be measured. For example, the City’s 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) shows sales tax increasing from $9.2 million in 2011 to $14 million annually in 2020. Adjusting out the portions that were contributed by a higher sales tax rate in 2017-2020, this is a 31% increase over a nine (9) year period. [55] Between 2013 and 2020 property tax increased by 34%. [56] Most of the growth occurred from 2017 to 2020 following the great recession and when many of the new businesses were added in the redevelopment area. Had Sand Springs relied solely on its internal population growth for increases in sales and property taxes, and thus its resident-based purchasing power, the growth would have been a mere 6% over the same period. [57] Of course, not all of this 30%+ tax growth is solely attributable to the redevelopment commercial effect, but no one can doubt it represents a sizeable chunk of the growth as the Corridor Plan anticipated. In the words of City Manager Elizabeth Gray in 2019, “After Vision 2025 the city made a very conscientious effort to invest in itself.” (Keystone Corridor Redevelopment project). “We took a blighted area and turned it into River West Shopping District. That’s probably been the biggest catalyst of any.” [58] But at what human and cultural cost, and by what means? Sixty-eight families lost their homes, two churches, and their historic school. The Black neighborhood that had been there for a hundred years at the town’s founding disappeared victims of commercial profits and tax greed. In 2013, Mayme Crawford a former Booker T. Washington alumni and resident of the Southside Addition said this of the area, “There were only three or four streets, and that was just the nucleus of the African American community at that time. All of a sudden, there is an extreme reconfiguration of the community as if there was never an African American community there.” [59] She would later note fewer than five of those families would remain in the Sand Springs area. [60] Or, as Reverend Willard Jones, who lived in the community described it, “I go through there and cry. There’s not anything there to remind us that this used to be a black community there that was alive and vibrant. We were like one big family there." [61] Move The Negroes Out. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Former Sand Springs, Oklahoma resident John Neal is well versed in urban renewal, its uses, and abuse from his time as a former City Manager in Oklahoma and Departmental Consultant for the City of El Paso, Texas. In 2008, Neal served as El Paso Planning Director when the city won multiple awards for its urban planning accomplishments. He is now retired and resides in Austin, Texas. APPENDICES Sand Springs Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan: https://www.sandspringsok.org/DocumentCenter/View/419/Keystone-Corridor-Plan Oklahoma State Statues: Statutes cited are for those in effect at that time: http://www.oklegislature.gov/osstatutestitle.aspx Commercial and retail businesses in the former Black neighborhood include: McDonald's, IHOP, Aldi (grocery), El Maguey (restaurant), Cotton’s Steak House, Warren Urgent Care Clinic, Holiday Inn Express, Starbucks, CVS Pharmacy, O’Reilly’s Auto Parts, TTCU Federal Credit Union, Sand Springs Dentistry, Schlotzsky’s Deli. ENDNOTES [1] http://vision2025.info [2] Julie Delcour, “A River Runs Through It”, Tulsa World, August 24, 2003 [3 Sand Springs Keystone Corridor Redevelopment Plan: 2025, Corridor Plan P.I-4 [4] Tulsa County Election Board-elections, Tulsa, Oklahoma [5] Corridor Plan. P.I-1 [6] Ibid [7]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/redevelopment, retrieved October 27, 2021 [8] O.S. Title 11-38-101 9 [9] Corridor Plan P-II-2 [10] Sand Springs City Council Resolution No.03-09, March 24, 2003 [11] Ibid [12] Corridor Plan P.II-13 [13] Resolution No. 03-09 Section II [14] O.S. Title 11-38-101 9 [15] Corridor Plan P.II-3 [16] O.S. Title 11-38-101 9 [17] Corridor Plan Appendix H P. H-I [18] Corridor Plan P. II-3 [19] Mayme Crawford resident, verification email to author, 12/19/21 and Janice Ross, verification email to author 1/18/22 [20] O.S. 11-36-101 9e [21] Resolution No. 03-09 [22] O.S. Title 11-38-111 A [23] Manny Gamallo, “Sand Springs City Council OKs Condemning 14 Properties”, Tulsa World March 23, 2006, [24] O.S. Title 11-38-111 C [25] Corridor Plan. P. II-1 [26] Corridor Plan. C-1 [27] U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census (African-Americans 1.85% of the total population of 17,451) [28] O.S. Title 25 Sections 301-314 [29] KOTV News on 6 “Sand Springs development concerns”, June 17, 2004 [30] Don Diehl, Managing Editor “Corridor plan OK’d” Sand Springs Leader September 22, 2004 [31] Don Diehl, Managing Editor “ Corridor Plan moves forward” Sand Springs Leader October 13, 2004 [32] Sand Springs City Council Meeting Minutes October 11, 2004, Ryan Adams, City Clerk [33] Diehl, September 22, 2004 [34] National Review Online “Unholy Land Grab" by Heather Wilhelm, January 17th, 2006 and The New York Times “Humble Church is Center of Debate on Eminent Domain" by Ralph Blumenthal, January 1, 2006 [35] Susan Hylton, “Industrious Plan Pondered”, Tulsa World, February 23, 2003, and P.J. Lasek “Vision is Golden for Sand Springs Officials”, Tulsa World, September 5, 2003. [36] Corridor Plan PII-2 [37] Louise Red Corn, “Eminent Domain Claims Disputed", Tulsa World, January 21, 2006 [38] Manny Gamallo, “Sand Springs City Council OKs Condemning 14 Properties”, Tulsa World, March 23, 2006 [39] Dustin Hughes, “City Council Gives Ok to Condemnation”, Tulsa World, March 25, 2006 [40] Diehl, September 22, 2004 [41] Deborah Archer, “White Men’s Roads Through Black Homes: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction”, Vanderbilt Law Review, Volume 73 Number 5, October 2020, p 1260 [42] The New York Times, Humble Church [43] Becket Legal Document, Centennial Baptist Church, Decision Date April 27, 2006 [44] SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, KELO V CITY OF NEW LONDON ET AL, Syllabus No. 04-08 March 23, 2005 [45] Ibid. [46] OKLAHOMA SUPREME COURT, BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF MUSKOGEE COUNTY V LOWERY, May 9, 2006 [47] Manny Gamallo, “Condemnation Against Sand Springs Church Unlikely”, Tulsa World, September 15, 2006 [48] Nathaniel J. Washington, The Historical Development of the Booker T. Washington School, 1978 p1-2 [49] Manny Gamallo, “Child Center Deal Complete” Tulsa World, August 30, 2007 [50] Corridor Plan Appendix H [51] Corridor Plan P.I-2 [52] Corridor Plan P III-15 [53] Tulsa County Assessor, Parcel 62282-91-11-31030, 2020 [54] City of Sand Springs, “Citizen’s report for Fiscal year ended June 30, 2012” [55] City of Sand Springs Oklahoma, CAFR, Governmental Activities Tax Revenue by Source, Table 5, June 30, 2020 [56] CAFR. Table 5 [57] U.S. Census Bureau Quick Facts: Sand Springs Oklahoma 2020 Census [58] Rhett Morgan, “Shaping a city: Sand Springs puts economic development on front burner”, Tulsa World, June 2, 2019 [59] Susan Hylton, “River West Development Expected to Progress This Year””, Tulsa World February 24, 2013. [60] Mayme Crawford, email to author, December 2, 2021, 7:21 PM CDT [61] Hylton, February 24, 2013

by Steve Gerkin J.B. Stradford We will never understand. How could we allow the racial brutality of slavery, the lynching of Blacks as legit Saturday night revelry or prime entertainment for Sunday afternoon family picnics, children and parents laughing as Klansmen strung up Negroes from the hanging tree in the park? How can we grasp the butchering of Ukrainians by the Russians? How can irrational actions be assigned a rational explanation? We try, but futilely. American social justice is in the same boat. Since the Mayflower landed on the east coast, white men have sought to disenfranchise minorities—even slaughter them. The autocratic notion of Manifest Destiny within the early United States, perpetrated by D.C. legislators and their all-white constituency, created a no-holds-barred approach to claim what the white nationalists considered their just-due. Indians? Out of the way or else. And else happened through butchery and false promises with the naïve and desperate Native tribes, who wanted peaceful and respected sovereignty, who signed treaties disregarded then and now. Post-Civil War, there was a glimpse of freedom for the enslaved Black Americans. They headed out of the Deep South to prairie states like Oklahoma to form dozens of all-Black enclaves by the late 1800s. Life was better for the newly unrestrained, perhaps, even good; like it seemed for the Greenwood residents adjacent to downtown Tulsa, a burgeoning city with a critical railroad system, the presence of Black gold in nearby oil fields, and industries to support business needs. Community leaders disdained yet welcomed the migration of formerly enslaved people to their city if they worked hard for their white masters—sound familiar?—and stayed on the north side of the tracks. Would a form of urban manifest destiny change Tulsa’s core? Would the Black community of Greenwood, the largest such in the United States, be allowed unfettered success? Or are they just marking time? John the Baptist moved to Tulsa in 1899. The Stradford family called him J.B. (Their master named his slaves, calling J.B.’s’ Father Julius Caesar or J.C..) Stradford was a former Kentucky enslaved person who was not afraid to preach the gospel of equal treatment and racial solidarity for Black Americans. College-­‐educated in Ohio at Oberlin College, Stradford received his law degree from Indiana University, practicing in Indianapolis and yearning to influence Black equality. Tulsa became his destiny. Leaders of the local white community yearned for his demise. The late 1800s provided an unpainted canvas of opportunity for post-emancipation Blacks in America. They were free to relocate, free to join with other freshly freed Blacks and freedmen from Creek native enslavement, free to start communities separate from the white population. While racial distrust of the white’s intent remained, their new Tulsa beginning symbolized the expansion of minority-based entrepreneurship. Over sixty percent of the U.S.Black population— census numbers show that the Black population in 1890 of 250,000 ballooned to more than 2 million by 1920—served the white community as domestics, restaurant cooks, bootblacks, and laborers. Wages were brought back to their new settlements and spent with Black grocers, lumberyards, saloons and gambling enterprises, theatres, and a cadre of like-­skinned businesses. E.P. McCabe Oklahoma’s future looked bright for Blacks. Led by the vision of Edwin McCabe, founder of the first Black community of Langston in 1890, the state became a mecca for Black towns and self-­‐reliant communities—fifty by 1920. McCabe sent recruiters to the South, appealing to racial pride, and hoped to recruit enough Blacks to become the majority race forcing the whites to turn over the region. McCabe’s dream of a politically powerful, Black-­friendly state lured Stradford from Indianapolis to the dirt streets of Tulsa’s undeveloped Greenwood area. "What will you be if you stay in the South? Slaves liable to be killed at any time and never treated right. But if you come to Oklahoma, you have equal chances with the white man, free and independent." The New York Times warned on March 1, 1890, that a Negro settlement is a camp of savages. Buying up large tracts of undeveloped land northeast of the tracks that bordered downtown, thirty-­nine-year-­old Stradford sold his Greenwood parcels to Blacks only. The acknowledged founder of the new community, O.W. Gurley, did the same as Black Tulsa took shape. Yet, Stradford was not a real estate man by trade. He was a University of Indiana educated attorney who used his investment profits to aggressively litigate for Black social justice, who was never shy to voice his outrage, and who occasionally declared, “The day a member of our group was mobbed (lynched) in Tulsa, the streets would be bathed in blood.” The activist put himself on the line to prevent lynches. In 1918 he turned back a lynching mob in Bristow, Oklahoma. When Stradford suffered Jim Crow discrimination, he did not sit idly. Walking along Greenwood Avenue, a white deliveryman made a racist remark about Stradford’s skin color. Nearly beating him to death, friends pulled Stradford off the bloodied iceman, telling him that if he killed the white man, he would be mobbed—a euphemism for lynching. Though prosecuted for violating Oklahoma Jim Crow laws, he received an acquittal. He persisted in his vigilance. Riding a train from Kansas to Tulsa in 1912, nearly fifty years after the end of the Civil War, Stradford experienced the continuation of Jim Crow slave law in Oklahoma. When the locomotive reached the Oklahoma border, the conductor stopped the train, and Stradford was forcibly removed from the Black luxury car although he had paid the higher fare. Today, when a gun often does the talking, would he have survived? Oklahoma exempted railroads from the expense of such cars if it did not make economic sense. Stradford sued Midland Valley Railroad in state and federal courts for false imprisonment. All-white courts ruled against his demand for justice by law, angering Greenwood residents. In 1916, Stradford railed against the Tulsa City Commission for its segregation ordinance that he claimed casts "A stigma upon the colored race in the eyes of the world; and to sap the spirit of hope for justice before the law from the race itself." The upside of segregation was the “white” dollars earned by Black Tulsans stayed in the district, giving Deep Greenwood merchants the spoils of their neighbors, while the Black print media continued to pull no punches. Like a heavy-weight boxing match, frustrated Black journalists got up off the mat before the ten-count. W.E.B. DuBois The most militant Black voice in America and a founder of the NAACP fanned the embers during a Greenwood speech. Brought to the community by Stradford and newspaperman A. J. Smitherman, in March of 1921, the first Black Harvard Ph.D., W.E.B. DuBois lectured the crowds that the hatred in the white man's heart was still intense. The professor sometimes proposed that the only possible solution to hate is hate. Du Bois argued in those times, "We have suffered and cowered. When the armed lynchers come, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with sticks and clubs and guns." The outspoken trailblazer was an early-day Malcolm X without an attachment of bodyguards nearby. Greenwood experienced a rising tide of passion and self-respect. Buoyed by the cadre of residents who fought courageously in World War I and enjoyed the freedom of non-judgmental living in Europe, Greenwood servicemen steeled themselves to forcefully defend the promise of equality under the law. White Tulsa became less enchanted with the likes of J.B. Stradford. Tulsa leaders considered Stradford a legitimate businessman; many Tulsans despised him. Looking down on the pugnacious firebrand was the same as looking down on all of Greenwood. The bubbling cauldron became hotter. Stradford and his close friend, Andrew J. Smitherman, the owner/publisher of the Black newspaper Tulsa Star situated on Greenwood Avenue, spoke out against the trio of leading civil rights causes in Oklahoma – lynching, voting rights, and the railroad segregation policy. The Black Dispatch, a Black Oklahoma City newspaper published by Roscoe Dunjee, regularly fired up Greenwood residents. He declared the courts were full of dead men's bones. He claimed the courts denied enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decision, guaranteeing Black Oklahoman's right to vote. He alleged local magistrates upheld Oklahoma’s railroad segregation statute. During vaudeville shows at the famed Dreamland Theatre on Greenwood, a frequently bantered slogan was “Don’t let the white man run it over on you, but fight.” Racial rhetoric primed Tulsa. The Williams Dreamland Theatre in Deep Greenwood. While inflammatory verbiage continued in district tabloids and on street corners, business was good. Stradford amassed a sizeable bank account. With fifteen rental houses, including a sixteen-­room brick apartment building, he earned a real estate income of nearly $10,000 a month in 2022 dollars. Stradford decided it was time that Black travelers of means should have accommodations as swank as downtown’s Hotel Tulsa. He envisioned this hotel as the pinnacle of his dreams, remarking, “The Stradford would be a monument to the thrift, energy, and business tact of the race in Tulsa (and) to the race in the state of Oklahoma.” It would symbolize hope in Greenwood, in Black Americans. It would stand the test of white ridicule and hatred as a fortress of freedom. The exuberant opening of his eponymous hotel on June 1, 1918, signified the realization of his promised land, adding credence to Booker T. Washington’s description of this district as Negro Wall Street, which morphed into Black Wall Street; the terminology used today. The three-­story edifice of pressed brick above the windows and stone slabs below would cost a glitzy $700,000+ today. The segregated Stradford, serving Blacks only, was the largest owned and operated Black hotel in America. While it fulfilled his dream, the hotel's construction created financial difficulties. Stradford borrowed $20,000 to stem the rising tide. Still, when a boxcar of beds, rugs, and chandeliers rolled into the station, the new hotelier could not pay the $5,000 bill. Stradford was out of money. The furnishings for the fifty-­four modern "living rooms," gambling hall, dining hall, and saloon languished on the rails within eyeshot of the hotel. Stradford negotiated a deal to pay a quarter of the total and the remainder in monthly payments. The Stradford Hotel at 301 N. Greenwood was open for business. The Stradford Hotel Pre-Massacre It was a gay time. A new form of music ricocheted up Greenwood Avenue from the dancehalls. With its gyrating rhythms and freedom to improvise, Jazz stimulated the dancers and frightened the white community, who considered the music style as vibrations for the half-­‐savage—an improvement compared to the New York Times’ portrayal of fully savage. The piano in the Stradford Hotel pounded out Jazz for its distinguished clientele who tripped the toe-fantastic. Amid the glamor of the Stradford Hotel, Greenwood residents tried to downplay the racial tension in Tulsa and suppressed the racial tension in the region. That changed as desperate events stoked emotions. Greenwood celebrated the success of a group of Muskogee Black men in mid-­‐April 1921 that stormed the city jail, liberated a Black man (John McShane), and shot a white deputy sheriff in the process. The local Black community justified the action, claiming they prevented a lynching. Their defiance energized Greenwood. Stradford and Smitherman agreed that a community must be vigilant if a Black man were in danger of being lynched. It was justice—a legal right, they reckoned, to take aggressive action, and encouraged their community to support armed militancy towards lynching. James Jones, then known as "Diamond Dick" Roland on the streets of Greenwood, from the Booker T. Washington High School yearbook. In the afternoon edition of May 30, 1921, a front-page story in the Tulsa Tribune announced a "negro will be lynched tonight." The following day, a Greenwood teenager, Dick Roland, was arrested under the allegations that he attempted to rape a seventeen-­year-­old white girl, Sarah Page, in an elevator. Although a Grand Jury indictment against him was rendered several days later and then dismissed within three months for lack of a prosecution witness (Sarah, according to oral histories from Greenwood survivors, was his taboo lover), the yellow-­journalism article fomented the deadliest and most destructive “riot” in the history of the United States. This event became labeled the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. A.J. Smitherman’s office of the Tulsa Star was the center of activity the night before the battle. Several carloads of passionate armed veterans made repeated trips from the newspaper’s curb to the jail holding Roland, repeated their resentment toward a growing white mob. Dedicated to stopping a lynching by any means, Stradford held court with the gathering Greenwood crowd. He repeated his oft-used statement about "blood in the streets." Within his memoirs, he declared to the nervous onlookers what he would do if there were a lynching: “If I can’t get anyone to go with me, I will go single-­‐handed and empty my automatic into the mob and then, resign myself to my fate,” he roared. His comments encouraged men, including a tall, light-­‐skinned veteran named O. B. Mann, to continue making trips to the courthouse. Mann, a successful Greenwood grocer, returned from the War with inflated ideas about equality and sure he could take on the world, according to O. W. Gurley. During court testimony on an insurance claim relating to property damage from the Riot—now called a Massacre, he declared that the unintentional discharge of his handgun, when grabbed by a white man, activated the fatal chain of events. At dawn, the sound of an air horn commanded the heavily armed white armada, loaded with Klansmen, to step over the tracks. The zealots attacked an under-­‐armed band of Black veterans in uniform and frightened Greenwood residents' intent to defend their families and homes. Hundreds died within a matter of hours, and homes and businesses were looted and burned as thousands of arrested Black Tulsans were herded into detention. Some ran north on the railroad tracks with as many possessions as they could hold. Some had no possessions. All feared an escape in vain. A Black man killed by white mobsters lies on a Greenwood street. Dick Roland was a forgotten man. Sheriff McCollough claims Dick spent a safe evening in the County Jail and was secreted out of town by 8 AM amidst the gunfire of the massacre, never, according to most, to return to Tulsa. The carnage continued throughout the day. The June 1, 1921, evening edition of the Tulsa Tribune reported, "A motley procession of negroes went down Main Street to the baseball park with hands held high above their heads, their hats in one hand, a token of their submission to the white man's authority. They returned not to their homes but heaps of ashes, the angry reprisal for the wrongs inflicted on him by the inferior race." Some of that race-­under-­siege resisted the roundup. Attempting to hold the mobsters from advancing, Stradford and others fired from the second-­‐story porch that fronted the hotel. The building represented Black equality, and he preferred death rather than losing it. A machine gun smashed the west-­‐facing windows on the third-­floor. Six men were wounded, and one was dead. The hotel became a haven for Black families. Most left, surrendering to the militia. A sobbing Augusta, Stradford’s wife, pleaded with him, “Oh, papa, let us go, too.” A young J.B. Stradford and his wife, Augusta. “If you want to go with the crowd, then go,” he said, “I intend to protect my hotel.” Augusta stayed. A message of hope reached Stradford. The militia promised to keep the hotel from further destruction if Stradford surrendered. He agreed. A short, slightly rotund man with a pencil-­‐thin mustache perched above his squared chin, the now sixty-year-old Stradford was reportedly the wealthiest man in Greenwood with nearly 2 million dollars of investments in today's currency. He stood with his gun in the doorway of his hotel, waiting for his captors' car. His dark, piercing eyes surveyed the burning buildings in Deep Greenwood. Hundreds of the 8 to 10,000 Greenwood residents ran through the street before him. White enforcers marshaled columns of Blacks with raised hands to detention centers; shots fired at their feet and hopelessness on their faces. Greenwood residents enter the Tulsa Convention Center for detention following the Race Massacre. A man described by descendants as having the strength of a Mandingo warrior watched mobsters enter his building. They took him to the Convention Center, where city officials took $2,000 from his pockets. There is no mention of Augusta's whereabouts. Although not detained for long, Stradford was still in harm's way. One day later, an order asked for the arrest of Stradford so he could face a Grand Jury. The contention was he had encouraged carloads of armed Blacks that organized and left from the Stradford Hotel. Without his presence, the jury indicted him for inciting a riot. The penalty for the charge was death or life imprisonment. The white community needed a definable villain, and they decided on Stradford. Could he get a fair trial after an incursion that needed a whipping boy? The Tulsa white community well knew him. His railroad segregation lawsuit and his defiance of the segregation ordinance put him squarely opposed to their values. He named a hotel after himself, so they knew he was a man of ambition. As Greenwood's Republican Party leader, the local papers called him a "henchman." Since the media labeled the Riot a "Negro uprising," they reasoned that the wealthiest, most defiant, and outspoken man must be the ringleader, and he fled, so he must be guilty. Such was their logic and the thrust of their need to bring him back for justice. They reckoned that he was the perpetrator of the bloodbath, and the white mob merely protected the citizens of Tulsa. Tulsa’s positive image would remain untarnished, and business could continue as before; take the messy story off the nation’s front pages, leave it out of textbooks, and bury it forever. Simple. Done deal. With authorities on his heels, Stradford leaned back in a segregated railroad car headed for Independence, Kansas. Stradford gazed up Greenwood Avenue through a gentle rain, spying his symbol of Black pride, reduced to smoldering ashes and charred brick. Oklahoma was no longer the promised land. The Stradford Hotel, reduced to smoke and ash by marauders. Like thousands of homes, businesses, and possessions stolen or burned, the Stradford Hotel never enjoyed reconstruction. The crown jewel of Black Tulsa shined a scant three years to the day. On June 6, J.B. Stradford became the first person formally charged with inciting a riot. To be proven guilty, the county district attorney only needed to show he abetted the Riot that resulted in murder, looting, and theft. It made no difference that the white mob committed those crimes. Shortly after arriving at his brother's house in Independence, local police paid a visit to Stradford at the request of Tulsa authorities. Asked if he would turn himself in, he replied, "Hell, no." Arrested and booked, he called his son in Chicago. Cornelius Stradford, a graduate of Columbia University Law School, took the first train to Kansas and posted the $8,000 bond (2022 value). The local lawmen told Stradford to stay put and appear in court on June 10. Convinced he would not get a fair trial if returned to Tulsa, Stradford and his son boarded the next train to Chicago. Incensed Tulsa litigators vowed to extradite and try him for the charge of inciting a riot. Wrangling successfully against the extradition attempts, the aging Stradford settled into Chicago life with his wife, son, and numerous grandchildren. Trying to re-­‐create his success in Tulsa, he practiced law and filed a suit in September against the American Central Insurance Company for $65,000 to recover some of his real estate losses. Stradford did not appear at the hearing. Due to the riot exclusion clause in insurance policies and local leaders defining the travesty as a "riot," all riot victims' claims, including the one by the gentleman considered by some as an outlaw, were knocked out in legal fights. Desiring to re-­create his real estate prowess, he formed a group of investors to build a luxury hotel like the Stradford. The project ran out of money, and the building's construction ended. He did, however, construct a candy store, barbershop, and a small pool hall. His modest business holdings in Chicago reminded him of what once was. Stradford lost more than money in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. He lost his Black sense of place. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, "It is incredible to believe that in this civilized age that a white man could be so void of humanity. My soul cried for revenge and prayed for the day to come when I could personally avenge the wrongs perpetrated against me." He died in 1935 at the age of seventy-four. Sixty years later, family members extracted his atonement. Cornelius E. Toole was a former NAACP lawyer and a Cook County, Illinois circuit court judge. He was also a great-grandson of J. B. Stradford. Toole harbored resentment for smearing his relative's name, destroying his properties and dreams. Through impassioned communications with Mayor Susan Savage and local Black leader Don Ross in 1996, the sixty‐three-year-old former judge insisted on dismissing all Stradford's charges. The decision rested on the shoulders of first-year District Attorney Bill LaFortune, who needed to render an opinion on a single legal question—did evidence support the notion that Stradford incited a riot? Nancy Little was assigned the investigation. She performed a detailed inspection that revealed innocent Black families suffered a ruthless attack. She was shocked. While Stradford undeniably violated the law by jumping bail and refusing extradition, Little concluded he was innocent of inciting a riot. LaFortune vacated the charges. In October of 1996, Stradfords from Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New York set foot in Oklahoma; for the first time since June of 1921. The vindication ceremony at the Greenwood Cultural Center featured moving statements from Governor Frank Keating. Quite simply, District Attorney Bill LaFortune presented the motion to dismiss, and Judge Jesse Harris accepted it. John the Baptist Stradford was the first Riot victim indicted, and the last alleged outlaw exonerated— first charged, last freed: carnage. Steve Gerkin, is a Tulsa-based freelance writer with a Master's in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He has authored three books and had two dozen essays published in This Land Press, where he was a Contributing Editor; nineteen of the Tulsa-focused This Land pieces composed the contents of his first book, "Hidden History of Tulsa", published by History Press in May of 2014. Nearly twenty of his works have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Territory, The Frontier, and others. See his website at www.stevegerkinwriter.com. Gerkin and his wife, Sue, live in Tulsa, OK.

By Steve Gerkin - Beno Hall, Tulsa's Klan Headquarters at 501 N Main St. in Tulsa Think of a hall. Well, there's a pool hall, city hall, concert hall, dining hall, great hall, and Carnegie Hall. So many halls. Tulsa had a historically significant hall that few know about today. One might call it a public secret. It was a clubhouse filled with men of conviction, men for law and order, men who espoused Christianity, men for America first, men who were manly: their opinions. My dad went to his Masonic hall — an extravagant temple, really — in Sioux City, Iowa. It was hush, hush, about the goings on inside the three-story building close to the YMCA. They had rings, rituals, and rites. That much I knew. They were community leaders, who espoused to the value of law, God, and nationalism. That much I knew. But they did not wear white sheets, nor rough-up Black Americans. The members of this specific hall on Tulsa’s North Main Street did. That much I know. Men asked to join went through a ceremonial induction, like a fraternity. There were nominal dues, like those of the Elk, Rotary, or Moose Clubs, whose credos have the public's best interests at heart. One such Tulsa brotherhood built a meeting hall, a physical structure to plan secret ceremonies and clandestine adventures for the good of the community; actions steeped in post-civil war traditions, sacred beliefs, and a history of violence. And when they chose, their services became public spectacles to remind the citizens the Klan still cared. In today's political world of the 2020s and commensurate with the number of immigrants entering America—immigrants of color, this group has seen its numbers swell. There are no apparent temples today. Oh, but there was in early Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a sight to see. Beno Hall was north of downtown, for members only and during social occasions for their wives and kids, no matter the ages—kids in training to be members one day, like their heroes, like their dads. Perhaps, a family that terrorizes together stays together? The monstrous, three-story, steel-reinforced, stucco building towered along the western edge of race massacre-decimated Greenwood. It dominated the landscape at the foot of Standpipe Hill, sporting a bright whitewash, the favorite color of its primary residents. Inside, its members vowed to protect their "100% Americanism notion." They reasoned that you had to swear to secrecy and seclusion to become a guardian of liberty. And you had to embrace intimidation and violence as a way to assert your values. In January 1922, the Tulsa Benevolent Association of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was officially formed as a holding company for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated. Among its founding members was Washington E. Hudson, the attorney for Dick Roland – the young black who was a scapegoat for the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, now Massacre. They provided the financing and leadership to build their Klan temple, or Klavern, known as Beno Hall—Beno, short for Benevolent. One could imagine the mission statement as Make Tulsa White Again in today's parlance. Locals jokingly called it “Be No Hall," as in “Be No N–––er, Be No Jew, Be No Catholic, Be No Immigrant.” Six months after its inception and bolstered by a raffle of 13 Ford automobiles netting nearly half of the $75,000 (2022 value) purchase price, the Benevolent Association bought the Centenary Methodist Church at 501 N. Main St.—at Main and Easton streets. The organization quickly outgrew this facility, and the church was razed, making way for the future monument of white supremacy. Beno Hall cost $200,000 ($3.4 million in today’s currency). Financing of the construction remained undisclosed, but the land for the building belonged to the entrepreneur, politician, and early booster of Tulsa, Tate Brady, and his wife Rachel Brady, who received a large parcel as a Cherokee allotment in 1910. The completed Beno Hall was one of the largest auditoriums in the Southwest, holding 3,000 people. Its size provided Tulsa with a visual reminder of the Invisible Empire's power, passion, and presence. Abundant evidence points the finger at the Klan for fanning the sociological tinderbox that was 1920s Tulsa. Yearning for a spark, if even an invented one, a fired-up mob of whites took the bait and burned Greenwood to the ground in the Memorial Day, 1921 Race Massacre. Two months later, a national Klan official, Caleb Ridley—a Baptist minister, lectured at the Tulsa Convention Hall on the principles of the Klan, calling the Massacre a complete success, adding that it "was the best thing to ever happen to Tulsa and judging from the way strange Negroes were coming to Tulsa we might have to do it all over again." Such a banty rooster riles up crowds of like-thinking, like-looking, like-dressing infidels. Could political racists have the same sway over vast segments of vulnerable countries? Think Hitler, Mussolini, and others closer to home. Did the Ridley rabble-rousing cause a groundswell of believers who cottoned to his swagger and confidence? Under the watchful eye of its Tulsa leader, the Exalted Cyclops William Shelley Rogers, membership grew to include all civic and social levels, from law enforcement to welders, bankers, dry cleaners, judges, commissioners, and oil field workers. All partook in the Beno Hall sessions that focused on increasing membership and efforts to keep Tulsa free from moral corruption and centered on family values. Three months after the Massacre, some 300 Tulsans, supported by a crowd of 1,500 onlookers, were initiated as the first class of the Tulsa Klan No. 2. A year later, in a field north of Owasso, a nighttime "naturalization" ceremony inducted 1,020 Tulsa Klavern members before a fiery, 70-by-20 foot cross. Barely old enough to shed its diapers, the Tulsa Klan was a Goliath, towering over the personal liberties of those they deemed unworthy. An official KKK membership certificate from Sapulpa, OK "klavern." Klan recruiters were known as Kleagles, who “capitalized upon the emotions in the wake of the race riot (sic) to propagandize the white community of Tulsa,” writes Carter Blue Clark in his 1976 dissertation, A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma. While the Oklahoma Klan boasted over 150,000 hooded devotees in the early 1920s, the Tulsa Klavern—a reference to the local unit of the organizational structure, wherein ritual ceremonies and Klan Khoral Klub rehearsals were held—swelled to 3,000 members. Hence, the need for a permanent structure—an enormous, secure structure. Nestled near the two-year-old ashes of upper-class black homes that once sprawled up the slopes of Sunset and Standpipe hills, overlooking Greenwood's industry, Beno Hall towered over 2,000 black Tulsans as they huddled in makeshift tents. These disenfranchised Americans lived within earshot of members' revelry. Beno Hall was the starting point for midnight parades, cross burnings along the boundaries of Greenwood, night-riding terrors, and meetings that determined political candidates' success or failure. And fine-tuning a strategy to squash the proliferation of filthy people with filthy morals who bootlegged, gambled, consorted with prostitutes, or were unfaithful husbands—all of which conflicted with the Klan's version of white, Protestant ideology. The Tulsa Klan parades through downtown Tulsa, August 1922 The Klan loved parades. The most spectacular occurred in August 1922, while the wounds of the 1921 Massacre were still fresh. The parade featured 1,741 white-robed members marching silently through downtown Tulsa before an estimated crowd of 15,000. The Women of the Klan provided extra pizzazz, carrying signs with various slogans such as, “Kiss the flag or cross the pond,” a reminder that immigrants were not Americans; therefore, there should “Be None” on American soil, certainly not in Oklahoma. The Knights had nothing against what they deemed “good n–––ers.” They were also morally incensed by the behavior of white men– especially the oil field workers who used the trolley system to come to downtown Tulsa, where they spent their cash on booze, dames, and pounds of cocaine, morphine, and heroin. In Tulsa, Biography of the American City, Danney Goble wrote, “Kluxers meted out rough justice to those that lived beyond the law’s bounds”— justice that predominantly involved acts against white Protestants. A new inductee is welcomed to the Women of the Ku Klux Klan with roses The Klan wasn’t just for older white men, either. The Tulsa Klavern vigorously promoted the Women of the Klan society and an adolescent male branch called the Junior Ku Klux Klan, which recruited boys aged 12 to 18. According to an invitation on Junior Ku Klux Klan stationery of the Tulsa Benevolent Association, a Junior KKK “Open Air Initiation” at the Lynch Farm north of Rose Hill Cemetery began at 7:30 p.m. Friday, September 18, 1924. It promised a ride to the event, if needed, and “lots of fireworks.” Although not mentioned, extra surprises of cross-making and a fashion show of the latest Klan wardrobe were crowd-pleasers. The bowels of Beno became the initiation site when the seasons turned chilly. On January 22, 1925, "All members were expected to be there, members received $.50 for each candidate they bring, and new initiates must pay at least $2 on his initiation.” Further, it announced the “Final Plans for the Big Weiner and Marshmallow Roast on Thursday night, January 29, when you can bring your girl.” The attraction of the evening proved to be a talk by the assistant to the Exalted Cyclops and “ice cream sandwiches—O Boy!” Invitation to a recruitment event for the Junior Klan Beno Hall supplied recruits with official Klan gear. For a premium price, reportedly pocketed by national officials, the home office in Atlanta regularly shipped cheap, white sheets and pointed hats, all with the tightly sewn-on patch of the organization. Yet, a Tulsa Knight’s trappings were incomplete without the Klan weapon of choice, the official KKK whipping strap. The strap was a piece of top-grain leather four inches wide and three feet long, the handle wrapped in industrial tape, its last six inches cut into ten slits, effective for slicing through skin. Guaranteed a lifetime of satisfying lashes, hundreds of these prized weapons arrived in Tulsa. Likely, monogrammed with initials or nicknames of the owners, they hung in a secret closet. During the Oklahoma Klan heyday years between 1921 and 1924, officials knew of 102 Klan floggings, three killings, three mutilations (including castrations), and numerous tar-and-featherings that, as a rule, followed whippings of the victims’ backs. Official but incomplete tallies showed Tulsa County provided the most violations with 74, Okmulgee County chalked up 20, while the rest of the state totaled 37. At the time, lawlessness prevailed in Tulsa. A local reporter witnessed the flogging of J.E. Fletcher, an alleged car thief, and bootlegger, on a remote Sand Springs road in September 1921. County Attorney John Seaver declined an inquiry, stating Fletcher had gotten what he deserved and an investigation would lead to criticism of the investigators. Seaver's proclamation gave carte blanche to extralegal marauding. During that same month, a statement by H.O. McClure, president of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, put the writing on the wall in a Tulsa World article: “In Tulsa, our courthouse and city hall are practically filled with Klan members, elected to office with Klan support.” Nestled in the arms of the Special Archive Library of Tulsa University are two volumes containing members, names, addresses, and occupations, which substantiate the journalistic claims. It wouldn’t be long before an Oklahoma governor would step in to throttle the free hand of Tulsa’s hooded fraternity. After local Klansmen used their whipping straps to mutilate the genitalia of accused drug peddler Nathan Hantaman, the already unpopular Governor Jack Walton, on August 14, 1923, declared martial law in the city and county of Tulsa. The results of the military court investigation drew statewide attention to the horror of the Oklahoma extremists, who watched as twelve local believers entered custody. The Oklahoma legislature passed an anti-mask bill hoping to stem vigilante violence. The flamboyant Walton, aiming squarely at the Tulsa Klavern, even calling them by name, went on the attack, saying, "I don't care if you burst right into them with a double-barreled shotgun. I'll promise you a pardon in advance." Additional irresponsible statements, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, censorship of the press, an effective Klan defense and counter-attack, and the extension of military rule to include the entire state further weakened public sentiment toward the state's leader. Governor Walton’s declaration of war on the Order exposed their reign of terror, but they would get the last laugh. The Klan influenced the impeachment of “Jazz Band Jack” Walton, who served but ten months as governor. The boys in white cheered the departure of their nemesis in their newly dedicated Beno Hall that had earlier been the site of the Tri-State Klan convention. The short-termed, corrupt Governor of Oklahoma, “Jazz Man” Jack Walton The next few years saw a healthy Klavern using their North Tulsa facility for holiday dances, ice cream socials, and political plotting. The outer foliage appeared robust, but inside, the society was withering from internal disagreements, greed, and graft. By 1928, the Oklahoma Klan had negligible power. The Nazi party lost its leader, yet today, the party is a political force. Stalin died, yet Russian Vladimir Putin rises from the former general's ashes. Other autocrats languish after losing elections, spinning wrong-doing through random and continuing conspiracy theories, as those ever-faithful to Hitler and Stalin continue the mad hatter ways of these historical bad-boys. So it goes with America’s Klansters. The Tulsa Benevolent Association sold the storied building to the Temple Baptist Church in 1930. During the Depression, the building housed a speak-easy, then a skating rink, then a lumber yard, and then, finally, a dance hall before radio evangelist Steve Pringle turned it into the Evangelistic Temple of the First Pentecostal Church. In his first revival meeting, Pringle introduced a little-known Enid preacher named Oral Roberts, who worked his animated, faith-healing magic on the empty lot next door. Roberts impressed in the tent atmosphere and preached with his cohort inside the vast auditorium once known as Beno Hall. His fire and brimstone were fitting bookends to the fiery crusades of the Klan. The interior of Beno Hall shortly before its razing in 1976 Beno Hall became a Main Street blight in the seventies, where vagrants gambled; drug transactions took place, and money bought sex; before its demolition in 1976. The empty lot now belongs to the Oklahoma Department of Highways. Steve Gerkin, is a Tulsa-based freelance writer with a Master's in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He has authored three books and had two dozen essays published in This Land Press, where he was a Contributing Editor; nineteen of the Tulsa-focused This Land pieces composed the contents of his first book, "Hidden History of Tulsa", published by History Press in May of 2014. Nearly twenty of his works have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Territory, The Frontier, and others. See his website at www.stevegerkinwriter.com. Gerkin and his wife, Sue, live in Tulsa, OK.

by Colleen McCarty Esq. – April Wilkins is serving life in prison in Oklahoma, despite maintaining her innocence and compelling evidence that she was defending herself at the time of the crime. Ms. Wilkens proclaimed that the decedent in her case was lunging at her and threatening to kill her when she was able to reach her handcuffed hands behind her and grab a gun from her rear vest pocket. The man she shot was her wealthy, chronically-abusive ex-fiance, Terry Carlton. Any person would've been in reasonable fear of their life after being violently raped, and told, "I'm going to rape you up the ass, then kill you." The decedent turned to find Ms. Wilkens holding a gun. He flew into a rage and she shot him until the gun would not fire anymore. Ms. Wilkens stayed at the scene, awaited the police, and confessed everything once they arrived--even though she was told she could not receive a SANE exam for the rape she endured until after she gave her statement to the police. The key witnesses against Ms. Wilkens were: the arresting officer--Laura Fadem--who downplayed April’s rape and told the jury she “gave in” to going upstairs with Terry; Robert Martin--Terry's best friend--readily admitted on the stand that Terry lied repeatedly to him about the nature of his drug use and prior violence against Ms. Wilkens; and Luke Draffin--a known drug dealer--whose pending cases were all dismissed or pled down after testifying in the State's case-in-chief against Ms. Wilkens. Terry had a propensity for violence against women, as shown by the two prior protective orders filed by an ex-girlfriend, Melinda Wallace, and an ex-wife, Sherry Blanton. There were also two protective orders introduced at trial that Ms. Wilkens herself had filed. In a case riddled with obvious sexual discrimination and slut-shaming — including the elected District Attorney at the time asking potential jurors if the fact that Ms. Wilkens was a young "moderately attractive" woman would prevent them from finding her guilty of first-degree murder—evidence shows Ms. Wilkens never had a chance to overcome the jury's biases toward people who have mental health diagnoses and those who use drugs. The state even introduced photos of Ms. Wilkens on vacation with her then-fiance Carlton that showed her lifting her skirt and laughing. The state used this evidence to suggest to the jury that any abuse Ms. Wilkens endured was deserved because she was somehow asking for it. The prosecution–even in the face of copious physical evidence of injuries from the rape–concludes “this wasn’t rape, members of the jury, this was consensual sex.” In addition to the atrocities she endured leading up to the incident, Ms. Wilkens’ attorney in the case did not prepare for the trial. Even though she testified from the stand for three days, her attorney did not adequately prepare her for direct or cross-examination. The expert her attorney called to testify about Battered Women’s Syndrome called April, “stupid and unreasonable,” from the stand. Her attorney also did not offer a manslaughter instruction to the jury, which would've given the jury the opportunity to consider a lesser sentence. In these ways, and many others, Ms. Wilkens' rights under the state and federal constitutions have been violated and her conviction and LIFE sentence should be given another look. Since her appeals have been exhausted, there are few ways to obtain sentencing relief now in Oklahoma. The Evidence 90% of the state's case against April corroborates her version of events. Mr. Carlton was found in his basement with eight bullet holes in his body. One of the bullets went through his hand, which would've been outstretched toward April at the time the gun was fired. He fell backward on his back with one leg bent, suggesting he was stepping toward April--or lunging at her as she states--when he was shot. There was stippling on the gunshot wounds to Mr. Carlton's face but not to the ones on his hand or neck, which suggests that the hand and neck wound came first, and as the inertia of his forward movement continued, he got closer to the gun and the stippling occurred on those wounds. There was no evidence offered by the State to refute April's version of events--including testimony about the blood spatter evidence, ballistics, and autopsy results. A test of his blood after the shooting showed Mr. Carlton had both meth and heroin in his system. This corroborates April's testimony that he was shooting up meth earlier in the morning, and then he switched to a mixture of meth and heroin. April tested negative for all drugs on the day of the shooting. A subsequent search of Mr. Carlton's house revealed two large gun safes full of long guns. In addition, there were four grenades in his basement, and testimony is not consistent about whether these were live rounds. In addition, Mr. Carlton had a room in his attic for growing psychedelic mushrooms. There was a .22 Baretta pistol sitting on the side table of the basement which was the gun April told police she used to defend herself. On the back of the couch--where Terry was leading April to "rape her up the ass then kill her," there was later found an Iver Johnson pistol that was not loaded. April was allowed to receive a SANE exam after her statement was made to the police. That SANE exam showed signs of vaginal tearing in two places and bruising all over April's body--including her neck, hip, chest, and head. Their Past April and Terry had an abusive relationship that turned into one of serial stalking, coercive control, and physical/sexual abuse. Her earliest memory of abuse was April 25th, 1996. Mr. Carlton strangled Wilkens during an argument. Evidence shows victims who are strangled are 750% more likely to be murdered by their intimate partners. Carlton moved on to forced sex, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and stalking through the years of 1996, 1997, and 1998. A heinous rape was documented on December 6, 1997--Carlton drugged Wilkens with valium and raped her until she went unconscious. She awoke unable to move and police were called. Throughout the Spring of 1998, Carlton compulsively broke into Wilkens' house and was heard by neighbors outside her house "at least five nights out of the week," according to trial testimony. Police Inaction Throughout her time being abused and stalked, officers from the Tulsa Police Department often acted with indifference or outright disbelief of her claims. She was told she was "annoying" officers by calling so much, and one officer told her he "just kept expecting to find [her] dead." After the rape on December 6th, officers responded and put Carlton in handcuffs. A Sargent came over the radio and ordered his officers to "uncuff him and just file a report." Wilkens made over 14 police reports throughout the time she was being abused by Carlton. Only one of those calls led to his arrest for carrying a loaded and chambered Glock 9mm pistol in front of her house. That misdemeanor required him to appear in court on March 25, 1998--he did not. The Court ordered a bench warrant for his arrest. Even though there was a warrant out when Wilkens called DVIS (who ultimately called the police) on April 11th, 1998, officers did not arrest him. They committed both Wilkens and Carlton to involuntary commitment at Parkside Mental Hospital. Carlton was released hours later, while Wilkens was transferred to Eastern State Hospital and placed on a regimen of the anti-psychotic drug, Lithium, for which she was contraindicated. Ultimately, April shot Terry Carlton in a life-and-death struggle because she had no other choice, and the system showed her time and again that no one was coming to save her. What you can do April is still in prison 25 years later. You can help us bring her home. To learn more about this case and the unbelievable nightmare April endured, visit www.freeaprilwilkens.com and listen to OK Appleseed's new true-crime-advocacy podcast about April, Panic Button: The April Wilkens Case. Follow along with Oklahoma Appleseed’s social media as we work toward bringing April home. This story is republished with permission in collaboration with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. To learn more about Oklahoma Appleseed, visit their website at www.okappleseed.org.

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] Dick Roland (seated third from left) courtesy of the Booker T. Washington High School Media Lab. The reason Roland mattered was that Gustafson and his force were killers, who already had one successful lynching on their record. They notched that one nine months earlier when they entered into cahoots with a mob who removed Roy Belton from the Tulsa County Jail and lynched him amidst a theatrical display witnessed by thousands. Gustafson’s force helped stage-manage the show. Gustafson bragged to both of Tulsa’s white newspapers about the cleansing impact of Belton’s means of death.[xx] A successful lynching must have been an exciting, even addictive affair. Now, there was a far more towering target than the white teenager Roy Belton. Even more tempting, the police could set up the hated Richard Lloyd Jones, owner of the Tulsa Tribune, to take the blame. Jones had been tormenting the police with sanctimonious editorials and outrageous headlines. Jones was also in league with the state attorney general’s investigation that brought the police even more public grief. So, the police who controlled the investigation gave Jones’ paper a scoop based on false, tarted up information - torn clothes here, a scratched face there, all belonging to a teenage white orphan cruelly treated by the hands of a negro bragging “to the police” that his name was the suddenly infuriating Diamond Dick. After it was over, the police played innocent, solemnly announcing that Sarah Page denied the truth of facts printed in Nab Negro. They put everything down to Richard Lloyd Jones’ newspaper. Chief of Detectives Jim Patton headed the investigation. On Wednesday, while the embers still glowed in Greenwood, he delivered a statement to the Daily World calling Jones’ Nab Negro article yellow journalism, colored and untrue, and as having incited a disastrous racial spirit. Patton concluded that “If the facts in the story as told the police had only been printed I do not think there would have been an (sic) riot whatever.”[xxi] In other words, if the Tribune had only printed Sarah Page’s story, there would have been no event now called the Tulsa Race Massacre. If the police and anyone above or behind them gave thought to other possible consequences of their scheme, they did not let it stop them. Later, when chaos replaced a lynching, the chaos was quickly repurposed. Barely seven hours passed between gunfire and the coordinated invasion of Greenwood with starting whistles and buzzing airplanes. That was more than enough time and planning to render the police, City of Tulsa officials, and others guilty of a premeditated “Loot, Arson, Murder!” as Dunjee called it.[xxii] Sarah Page’s reaction to the catastrophe was not recorded. Both the Tulsa Tribune and Daily World made brief but unsuccessful attempts to locate her, but quickly lost interest and never secured an interview. The Great Forgetting was already underway. On June 4, a Missouri judge put pen to paper and freed Ray and Sarah Page from the bonds of matrimony. It was default decree as Sarah, true to her word, made no attempt to contest it. After the divorce, Sarah reverted to her maiden name, though it was now spelled Bever. She also moved her residence back to Springfield. Her last appearance as Sarah Page was in mid-June as a witness testifying before the Tulsa grand jury investigating the terrible disaster. Clarence Poulton was also listed as a witness.[xxiii] What they said and how it differed from their earlier versions, if at all, is unknown absent the grand jury records. The jurors indicted Dick Roland for assault and attempted rape, but there was only a minuscule chance that they would have set him free. After Greenwood was torched, were they going to say it was all a mistake? How would they be able to face their friends, neighbors, or parishioners if they let the negro known as “Diamond Dick” take a walk? The Grand Jury witness list courtesy of The Avery Collection, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa Special Collections. One of Dick Roland’s arresting officers, Henry Carmichael, also testified. He would have given the police department’s then-current version of the elevator incident. The most curious witness, however, was Fred E. Voorhies, who was the building superintendent for the First National Bank, located next door to the Drexel building. The Drexel itself was owned by the president of the Bank. What Voorhies told the grand jury also remains unknown.[xxiv] It was likely in support of Sarah, as things turned out. Any remote possibility that Sarah Page and Dick Roland were an “item” before Memorial Day, evaporated completely afterward. In early September 1921, Sarah Bever returned to Tulsa to begin a new life. On the way, she stopped in Claremore, there to enter into her third and final marriage. This one was to her grand jury co-witness, Fred E. Voorhies.[xxv] Voorhies was thirty-seven and had served in an engineering company with the U. S. Army. The Voorhies-Bever marriage record courtesy of Randy Hopkins. On September 27, after efforts by Roland’s lawyers to set him free failed two weeks earlier, Sarah was summoned to appear at a September 28 docket call. The court’s appearance docket notes that the “prosecutrix” failed to appear and that the case against Roland was dismissed. In a small back-page article, the Tulsa Daily World reported that she had sent a letter declining to pursue the case, though neither her name nor reasons were given.[xxvi] The Tulsa Tribune, whose article had triggered so much ruin, made no mention of the dismissal. Fred and Sarah Voorhies remained together for the rest of their lives. By 1924, they had moved to California. Fred died in 1956, Sarah in 1967. Sarah’s grave maker is graced with the words “beloved mother.” The gravestone of Sarah Voorhies courtesy of the author. One lingering question is why Sheriff Willard McCullough would so wildly mischaracterize Ray Page’s divorce petition. Given all that he did to protect Roland during and after the Race Massacre, a reasonable conclusion is that he was convinced of Roland’s innocence. Whatever the cause, the white Tulsa County Sheriff appears to have been lying in order to help a black teenager stay safe and escape a false charge of attempted rape.[xxvii] Sarah Page’s reputation as a notorious woman was the collateral damage - until now, when her permanent record has been expunged of the Sheriff’s unkind cuts. Acknowledgments: I wish to express my appreciation to Steven Haberman, Reference Archivist of the Greene County (MO) Archives and Records Center, for his remarkably fast location and production of the Ray Page divorce files. Kudos. I send my thanks to Kris Rose, author of White Riot/Black Massacre: A Brief History of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, for sharing research concerning Sarah Page. I also thank Juanita Ruebke Spitzenberger for sharing her family photos. Endnotes: [i] U.S. Census Bureau, Twelfth Census of the United States, Cedar Township, Carroll County, Arkansas (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), ancestry.com; U. S. Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, Cedar Township, Carroll County, Arkansas (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), ancestry.com. [ii] For July 27, 1899 birth date of Sarah E. Voorhies, U. S. Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 [database on-line at ancestry.com]; State of California, California Death Index 1940-1997 [database on-line at ancestry.com]. Her father’s gravestone places his date of death as September 21, 1920. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25673063/allen-jefferson-beaver. Her mother’s gravestone is dated January 1, 1938. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25673100/nancy-ann-beaver. [iii] “DickRowland_09.pdf,” Ruth Sigler Avery Collection, Special Collection and Archives, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa (hereafter “Avery Collection”), 3. [iv] Robert Fisk-Sarah Beaver marriage license dated March 16, 1918, Arkansas, U. S., County Marriages Index, 1837-1957, ancestry.com; U. S. Census Bureau, Fourteenth Census of the United States, Campbell Township, Springfield City, Greene County, Missouri (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), ancestry.com. [v] “Marriage Licenses,” Springfield Missouri Republican, February 14, 1920, 4; Draft Registration Card, Raymond Maron Page, dated June 5, 1917, U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [database on-line at ancestry.com]; Draft Registration Card, Ray Marion Page, undated, U.S., World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942 [database on-line at ancestry.com]. [vi] R. M. Page vs Sarah B. Page, No. 80,322, Circuit Court of Greene County, Missouri. All references to the court papers are drawn from the file in the Greene County Circuit Court archives. [vii] “Loot, Arson, Murder!,” The Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City, OK), June 10, 1921, 1. [viii] There is no indication in the divorce file that the couple ever lived in Kansas City, and the short duration of the marriage combined with their move to Tulsa argues against it. On the other hand, Roscoe Dunjee’s private investigator reported that the Pages had split up in Kansas City. “Loot, Arson, Murder!,” The Black Dispatch, June 10, 1921, 1. The Damie Rowland Ford interview in the Avery Collection also puts Sarah in Kansas City, along with the claim that she and Dick Roland later united there. There is no other evidence that Sarah Page ever lived in Kansas City and Ford was absolutely wrong about the later relationship, as will be shown. [ix] Beginning in 1926, Springfield city directories show Ray Page living or married to first one woman, then another, then back to the first, then onto a third who was sixteen years his junior. The latter was his longest known relationship, but by World War II, he was 47, unemployed, and the person who would “always know his address” was his sister. Springfield City Directory (1926), 299 (Ray & Bessie); Springfield City Directory (1928), 271 (Ray & Sadie); Springfield City Directory (1929), 264 (Ray & Bessie); Springfield City Directory (1932), 256 (Ray & Edna); Springfield City Directory (1940), 252 (Ray & Edna). All published in Springfield, Missouri by R. L. Polk & Co.’s. As for Robert H. Fisk, he last appears in the historical record at age 39, living alone with his 71-year-old mother in her house in Michigan. U.S. Census Bureau, Fifteenth Census of the United States, Union Township, Branch County, Michigan (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), ancestry.com. [x] Roland’s version of events is taken from “Loot, Arson, Murder!,” The Black Dispatch, June 10, 1921, 1. Dunjee’s investigator got it from “many Negroes who say they know his story.” [xi] “Girl Attacked By Negro Not At Home Today,” Tulsa Tribune, June 1, 1921, 4. [xii] Walter F. White, “Tulsa Riot Based on Girl’s Mistake,” New York Evening Post, June 8, 1921, 5 (Victor F. Barnett, managing editor or the Tribune, stated that his paper had since learned that the original story that the girl’s face was scratched and her clothes torn was untrue). [xiii] “Girl Attacked By Negro Not At Home Today,” Tulsa Tribune, June 1, 1921, 4. According to Green, Page showed bruises on her arms where Roland grabbed her and the purse broke when she struck him. The Tribune article confirms that the paper had not talked to Sarah Page before printing Nab Negro. It appears the paper never interviewed Page. Seeking to bolster its earlier disastrous report, however, the Tulsa Tribune assured its readers that Page had been attacked. By the time Anna Green’s story reached the Chicago Tribune, Page’s face was bruised during her fight with the “would-be rapist.” Unless the Chicago Tribune conducted a separate interview with Green, which seems unlikely, that paper simply processed the Tulsa Tribune’s article through its creative writing department. “Soldiers Subdue Big Race Riot; 77 Known Dead,” ChicagoTribune (ILL), June 2, 1921, 1. [xiv] “Story of Attack on Woman Denied,” Tulsa Daily World, June 2, 1921, 14. [xv] “Loot, Arson, Murder!,” The Black Dispatch, June 10, 1921, 1. [xvi] Tulsa City Directory, 1918, (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co., 1918), 515 (Renberg’s tailor); Tulsa City Directory, 1935 (Tulsa, OK: R. L. Polk & Co., 1935), 445; U. S. Census Bureau, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Tulsa, Oklahoma (Washington, D. C.; Government Printing Office, 1940). [xvii] “Story of Attack on Woman Denied,” Tulsa Daily World, June 2, 1921, 14. Sarah’s quoted version to the police on Tuesday - “when he grabbed my arm, I screamed and he fled” - was substantially the same story she told to Anna Green on Monday. One modern writer has accused Page of backing down from her original version by Tuesday afternoon, but her stories appear consistent throughout. It was the police’s agenda that changed. James C. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 82. [xviii] Deposition of John Gustafson, Stradford v. American Central Ins. Co.; Superior Court of Cook County, No. 370,274 (1921), 26. [xix] The Booker T. Washington high school photos were unearthed by Steve Gerkin. Steve Gerkin, “Is This the Face of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot?, Race Reader (Tulsa, OK: This Land Press, 2017), 43-51. Bespeaking the quality of his dress, Roland was identified as a tailor in 1920. Tulsa City Directory 1920, (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co., 1920), 433. Thus, when he and Poulton had their momentary confrontation outside the Drexel elevator, it was a meeting of two tailors. [xx] For role of Gustafson and the police in Belton’s lynching, see detailed authorities cited in Randy Hopkins, “Racing to the Precipice: Tulsa’s Last Lynching,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma, 98, no. 3 (Fall 2020). [xxi]“Story of Attack on Woman Denied,” Tulsa Daily World, June 2, 1921, 14. [xxii] For more on the role of City officials and the Tulsa police department in connection with the attempted murder of Dick Roland and the resulting Race Massacre, see detailed authorities in Randy Hopkins, “The Plot to Kill “Diamond Dick Rowland & The Tulsa Race Massacre,” at https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/the-trail-of-atrocity. The article will also be included in a future issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, published by the Oklahoma Historical Society. [xxiii] Dick Rowland_07.pdf, Avery Collection, 2. They are also listed as witnesses in the information filed by Tulsa County Attorney Seaver in September 1921. State of Oklahoma vs. Dick Rowland, No. 2239, maintained the Tulsa County Court Clerk’s archives. [xxiv] For Voorhies as superintendent of First National Bank, “Tulsa City Directory 1922,” (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Company, 1922), 607. For Grant McCullough as president of Bank and owner of Drexel, Randy Hopkins,”The Plot Kill “Diamond Dick Rowland” and the Tulsa Race Massacre - Part Two,” at https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/post/the-plot-to-kill-diamond-dick-rowland-and-the-tulsa-race-massacre-part-two, endnote xxiv. [xxv] Fred Voorhies - Sarah Bever Application for Marriage License, Rogers County, Oklahoma, U. S., County Marriage Records, 1890-1995, at ancestry.com; “No Hardship Whatever to Kiss the Bride,” Claremore Progress (OK), September 8, 1921, 2. The marriage license shows both Fred and Sarah were residents of Springfield, Missouri. Perhaps they had moved there together after all that had happened. It is possible they were dating even before Memorial Day. Performing the marriage in Claremore might have been a way to keep it below the public radar. Tulsa’s city directories show them residing together in Tulsa in 1922 and 1923. “Tulsa City Directory 1922,” (Tulsa, OK: Polk-Hoffhine Directory Company, 1922), 607; “Tulsa City Directory 1923,” (Tulsa, OK: R. L. Polk & Co.’s, 1923), 629. For Voorhies’ Army service as an engineer, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/69643711/frederick-edward-voorhies/photo. [xxvi] Appearance docket, State of Oklahoma vs. Dick Rowland, No. 2239, contained in the Tulsa County Court Clerk’s archives; “Continue Riot Cases,” Tulsa Daily World, September 29, 1921, 7. [xxvii] For Sheriff McCullough’s efforts to shield Roland from violence, see authorities cited in Randy Hopkins, “The Freeing of Dick Roland,” at https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/post/the-freeing-of-dick-roland.

By Steve Gerkin - The Tulsa Klan parades through downtown Tulsa, August 1922. Some things don’t add up. Some things seem incongruous. How can a state legislator and the legal representation for the Black scapegoat of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre be the leading founding father of the Tulsa Ku Klux Klan: at the same time? How can a man who started the first law school in Tulsa condone egregious social justice crimes? Some realities do not seem in harmony with each other. I suppose we should understand that is the way it goes—sometimes. We see the recurring reality of world leaders, committed by sacred oath to preserve the foundation of their countries, act out by issuing executive orders to secede from world organizations that promote global peace and safety and a healthy environment for the future. You might be thinking, “That makes no sense. Doesn't one plus one always equal two?" Guess not. In today's world, we see similar confusing scenarios in national and local arenas. And such was the case in Tulsa post-World War I. ** The attorney smelled good. Damie Roland remembered certain things about her son’s court-appointed attorney, Washington Elias Hudson, known around town simply as "Wash." The squeaky-voiced, bowtie-wearing Hudson sported prominent ears and a neatly trimmed mustache, providing fodder for numerous cartoon caricatures. He had an intense look, which the Rolands might have found reassuring. Dick Roland was a young black man who was questionably accused of assault with intent to rape a white seventeen-year-old named Sarah Page. Yellow newspaper journalists used Roland's arrest in their reporting, which many argue helped provoke the deadly Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Much of Tulsa seemed anxious to get ahold of Roland. As a prominent Vanderbilt-trained attorney and a successful state politician, Hudson was the ideal lawyer for Roland in many respects. With one glaring exception. Wash Hudson was the leader of Oklahoma’s Ku Klux Klan. Wash Hudson, Tulsa attorney, Oklahoma legislator, and KKK activist. Hudson’s father served as a Cyclops in the Tennessee Klan following the Civil War. Wash saw Tulsa as a lawless city and relished the chance to lead the Klan as an opportunity to fight crime. “The law had broken down completely,” Hudson recalled in a 1960 Tulsa Tribune article. “Women were raped on the streets. Men were robbed.” He continued, “We cleaned things up.” ** Dick Roland disappeared. Damie, Dick’s adoptive mother, claims Sheriff McCollough told her that officers took him to friends of Sarah Page’s in Kansas City– ostensibly to keep him safe from a lynch mob. But there are few traces of his existence afterward. With some blacks infuriated with him, Dick's time in Tulsa was over while the Klan gained momentum. Wash Hudson decided to do the unthinkable, despite the racial tension. Instead of backing away from the Klan, he and several civic-minded Tulsans agreed to make it official. All five of the white trustees of the Tulsa Benevolent Association (TBA) were pillars of the city: Wash E. Hudson (Chairman), John Rogers (Secretary), C. W. Benedict, Wm. “Shelly” Rogers, and Alf G. Heggem (trustees). On January 5, 1922, they signed the articles of incorporation for the Tulsa Benevolent Association, which officially established the Ku Klux Klan as a legal organization in Oklahoma. The Tulsa KKK was born six months after the Tulsa Race Riot. But who, precisely, were the fathers of Tulsa’s Klan? Wash Hudson, Roland’s attorney, served as a state legislator and founder of the Tulsa Law School. John Rogers, a future Dean of the University of Tulsa College of Law, served as general counsel for McMan Oil company. Heggem was a well-respected mechanical engineer; Benedict was a banker, and Shelley Rogers was a private attorney. Three men worked in the First National Bank building in downtown Tulsa. A second-floor office of The Mayo Building at 420 South Main became the first office of the Tulsa Benevolent Association. But such a location would not suffice for such a popular organization. Overwhelmed with a tsunami of new initiates following the Riot, the Klan founders moved to secure a Klan Klubhouse. The first Klubhouse for Tulsa’s KKK: Centenary Methodist-Episcopal Church on North Devner Ave, in Tulsa. They bought Centenary Methodist-Episcopal Church, located on the edge of the riot scene, but even it could not contain the rapidly growing membership. In 1923, they erected a 3,000-seat, white plaster behemoth for its meetings. Locals called it "Be-No Hall," as in "Be No N____ s, Jews, Catholics or Immigrants.” The monolith of menace at 501 N. Main stood above the ashes of the former dwellings of Race Massacre survivors and overlooked the tents that had replaced their homes. The Tulsa Benevolent Association wasn’t the only extremist group in town; vigilante squads became authorized law enforcement. Imagine a brigade of residents from a subdivision deciding those neighboring subdivisions harbored non-Believers or people dressed inappropriately or listened to that crazy rock and roll and set out to straighten them out. Imagine them walking down streets with torches and AR-15s loaded to the gills with ammo, looking for those who offended them. ** Organized under the supervision of the Tulsa County Sheriff and Klan member W. M. McCollough, the Tulsa Law Enforcement Club was established on a cold December 1921 night during a citizen's mass meeting at the First Baptist Church. The club selected five men, including TBA trustees John Rogers and Alf Heggem, to wage war with the criminal community and eradicate the bordellos, "Choc" beer joints, and dope dens of Tulsa County. This commission and their representatives, along with County Attorney William Seaver and several justices, crafted guidelines that produced a cleanup squad of nightriders, whose responsibility was to systematically purge Tulsa's immoral element—much of which they believed was in Greenwood. Beno Hall, according to Tulsa historian David Breed, “was the launching point of midnight parades and they would bring crosses and burn them along the boundaries of the Greenwood district." Some legal salvo landed on inspired enforcers. Twenty-three Tulsa KKK Knights faced charges of civic rioting and assaults on citizens. They were nightriders, who wielded their brand of moral cleansing. Downtown Tulsa parades of sign-toting Klansmen, Klanswomen, and Klan Juniors marched in their white finery. According to a Tulsa police history, 1,741 Klan members in full regalia marched through downtown on April 1, 1922. The empire’s presence in state and local politics was undeniable. Three of five Tulsa County's State Representatives in 1923 enjoyed membership as Klansmen. Political meetings at Beno yielded a slate of candidates that won the local municipal elections in 1924. Several Association founders were instrumental in the legal community. ** In addition to founding a civic club, Wash Hudson yearned for a law school in Tulsa. With four other attorneys, including his son, Hudson was granted a state charter in 1923 to open the Tulsa Law School: a free-standing school with no educational institution affiliation. Hudson became the first Dean and taught those first years in the basement of Central High School. Wash loaned his name to the school for twenty years, but he eventually sought a collegiate relationship for the law school. Rogers and Hudson found another common civic bond. While serving on the University of Tulsa Board of Trustees and Chair of its Committee on Faculty and Curriculum, Rogers squired the acquisition of Hudson’s law school into the university family, creating the University of Tulsa College of Law in 1943. E. E. Hanson ran the school from his Mayo Building office while Rogers served as a strong-handed overseer. Once a professor and Dean of the law school, Bruce Peterson maintained, "You did not sneeze without Mr. Roger's permission." John Rogers became the official Dean of the TU law school in 1949. John Rogers as a young Tulsa attorney and future Klansman. Several years later, a racial episode surfaced when Kenneth Dones, an African-American and the son-in-law of Edwin Goodwin, publisher of the newspaper Oklahoma Eagle, applied for admission. Rogers did not admit him but allowed him to audit the first year if he promised to transfer to another law school the following year. Dones completed his law degree at Washburn University. Oklahoma Eagle publisher Goodwin applied successfully in 1958 to the TU College of Law, gaining admittance without a hint of discrimination. The Klan, by then, had lost its clout. What would drive a man like Rogers to help establish the Tulsa Benevolent Association? He was a joiner. Rogers was instrumental in forming the Oklahoma American Legion and the Tulsa YMCA, served as Chamber of Commerce President in 1936, was a University of Oklahoma Regent, and held multiple University of Tulsa positions while creating the Tulsa Council of Churches. Outside of his wife and son, the First Christian Church in Tulsa and its national organization were the focal points of his life. Along with other TBA trustees, his contributions to the Tulsa Community are unquestioned and significant. While Rogers’ membership in the Klan was ill-chosen and short-lived, Wash Hudson's involvement was more complicated. Hudson was open regarding his Klan affiliation throughout his tenure as a Democrat in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives from 1915-1917 and in the Senate from 1923-1927. During his first year as a Senator, Hudson became the Majority (Democratic) Floor leader. He prepared and presented a successful impeachment charge against Governor Jack Walton, a known opponent of the Invisible Empire, who referred to the Klan as "that whipping crowd" while offering "a pardon in advance if you burst right into them with a double-barreled shotgun." The November 1923 regular meeting at the recently dedicated Beno Hall celebrated the ouster of "Jazz Band Jack" Walton. ** In 1924, a Klansman from the East speaking at Beno Hall promoted a stand against Catholics, Jews, and Negroes. This rhetoric sharply contrasted with the assurance given by a national Klansman, who recruited Hudson several years earlier, that the Klan oath had nothing religious about it. Hudson retorted with his own fiery speech and quit the organization, nearly causing an uproar. He claimed the entire Klan organization was under the direction of the national Republican committee. Subsequently, the Grand Dragon of the Oklahoma Klan, N.C. Jewett banished Hudson. After a change in the leadership of the Oklahoma Realm, Wash, along with his son Robert D. Hudson, rejoined the Tulsa Klavern. However, the organization was gradually declining, and his friend John Rogers was no longer on the rolls. Alf Heggem—a Norwegian immigrant and Tulsa civic leader. And what became of the other three founders of the Tulsa Benevolent Association? Klan member and mechanical engineer Alf G. Heggem was one of the original directors of the International Petroleum Exposition that brought thousands of oil-related professionals to Tulsa. The Tulsa Chamber of Commerce magazine, Tulsa Spirit, described Alf as an "apostle with keen business sense." Heggem supported the Trinity Episcopal Church, served as the Chamber's President in 1927, and belonged to Rotary and various Masonic rites. The Norwegian descendent was issued numerous patents for his gas preservation inventions and made a fortune primarily from the Cushing oil field bonanza rather than lawyering like the other TBA founders. From his office in the First National Bank Building, attorney William Shelley Rogers led the Tulsa Klavern as the Exalted Cyclops at the time of the Benevolent Association's creation. He succeeded Wash as the corporation's Chairman. Living on 15th Street just shy of Utica, Shelley orchestrated the activities of the Junior KKK for teenage boys, the Khoral Klub, and the Klan's women's auxiliary. He also organized dances and ice cream socials held in Beno Hall. Channing Benedict left Tulsa as a bank VP and bought the Chief Motel in Houston. Serving for years as a Vice President of the First National Bank in Tulsa, Klansman Channing W. Benedict and his wife headed south by 1940, becoming the manager of a camp in Harris, Texas, and the last manager of the Chief Motel in Houston. While Benedict was content only to practice law in Tulsa, Wash Hudson and John Rogers shared larger aspirations. They ran against each other for the Oklahoma State Senate in 1922. With the substantial Democratic political clout of the Klan behind Hudson, Wash soundly defeated the Republican Rogers, who later joked he had the Klan to thank for keeping him out of politics. Rogers removed himself from the Klavern, while the diminutive Hudson continued marching to the Klan Klubhouse on North Main until the bitter end. By 1925, the Tulsa Benevolent Association ceased to exist. The departure of Wash and other prominent Knights who objected to the Klan pressuring members to change their party affiliation to Republican deflated the empire’s stature. A withering membership, a decline in political panache, and internal politics became death knells for the Tulsa Klan. Steve Gerkin, a Tulsa-based freelance writer with a Masters in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He has authored three books and had two dozen essays published in This Land Press, where he was a Contributing Editor; nineteen of the Tulsa-focused This Land pieces composed the contents of his first book, Hidden History of Tulsa, published by History Press in May of 2014. Nearly twenty of his works have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Territory, The Frontier, and others. See his website: stevegerkinwriter.com. Gerkin and his wife, Sue, live in Tulsa, OK.