Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Ottowa W. Gurley, or O. W. Gurley, was instrumental in creating the Greenwood District. The son of former enslaved people, he was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on Christmas 1868. His family moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a primarily Black community, when he was young, and he was able to attend public school and educate himself until he completed his degree at Branch Normal College, an institute that trained Black educators to teach at the segregated schools in Arkansas.

Gurley taught and held a job in the Postal Service, eventually even having a role appointed by President Grover Cleveland, though the details of that role have been lost. He married Emma Evans and then left for Oklahoma, hoping to seek better opportunities further west and to face less racial discrimination. He participated in a land run in 1893 and settled in Perry, about 80 miles from Tulsa.

Gurley had success as superintendent of the Perry schools, but eventually found his gaze set on oil in Tulsa. He bought a parcel of land in Tulsa in 1906 with the goal of making a community for ambitious Black people. He designated some land for businesses and some for housing, while also starting his own general store. He received help from J. B. Stradford, a Black man born during the start of the Civil War who obtained both an undergraduate and a law degree before moving to Tulsa to work with Gurley to form the Greenwood District. Stradford began the Stradford Hotel, the largest Black-owned hotel in the country at that time that had numerous luxurious amenities. While getting involved in business, Stradford also fought for racial equality through peaceful protest, using his law degree to dismantle discriminatory pieces of legislation. Gurley continued to expand his businesses and invest in real estate alongside Stradford.

By 1921, Greenwood had “a Black hospital, a Black public library, two Black schools, two Black newspapers, two theaters, three fraternal organizations, five hotels, eleven boardinghouses, and about a dozen churches” (108). There were numerous stores, restaurants, beauty shops, transportation companies, a printing press for the Tulsa Star, a confectionary store and soda fountain, a movie theater, and much more. There were 15 Black doctors at the Greenwood hospital, one of whom was Dr. A. C. Jackson, a renowned physician and surgeon who even had both white and Black patients and eventually became president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association. Black lawyers also flourished in Greenwood, as Buck Colbert “B. C.” Franklin set up his law practice in town in 1921. The school system in Greenwood, especially Booker T. Washington High School, set students up for admission to elite white universities, like Columbia and Oberlin, and prestigious historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), like Howard and Spellman. Educators were valued and highly compensated in Greenwood.

Despite this prosperity, white resentment, jealousy, and fear still simmered in Tulsa. Above all, Colbert attributes the root of the massacre to jealousy: Poor white people, and white people in general, believed themselves to be superior to Black Americans, so seeing Black Americans obtain wealth and success angered them, and this anger ultimately led to violence.

Colbert opens the chapter with an exploration of the history of newspapers in the United States and the way the different biases of newspaper publishers shaped the news. At the start of the colonial period of the United States, there were a number of newspapers run by white publishers, but there was not a Black-run newspaper until Freedom’s Journal began in 1827 in New York City. The newspaper covered stories of Black Americans, advocated for their rights, and also discussed stories about African nations.

Though the paper only lasted for two years, it inspired more and more Black newspapers to begin nationwide. In Tulsa, the first weekly newspaper was the Indian Republican in 1893. In 1895, a group started the New Era, which later became the Tulsa Democrat. In 1904, the Tulsa Democrat was sold again at the same time that the Republican newspaper the Tulsa Daily World began publication. In 1919, the Tula Democrat was sold to Richard Lloyd Jones, and he renamed it the Tulsa Tribune-Democrat, then just the Tulsa Tribune. The Tulsa Star, started in 1912 by A. J. Smitherman, was Tulsa’s first Black newspaper.

Though politically conservation, Smitherman was an advocate for Black equality and worked diligently to prevent lynching in the Oklahoma Black community. Jones, on the other hand, printed an editorial calling for Rowland’s lynching in the Tulsa Tribune under the title “TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT” (129). He also sensationalized accounts of Rowland’s alleged assault of Page, which further encouraged the formation of the lynch mob. Colbert notes that, although there is no physical evidence of the editorial with the headline that encouraged the violence in Greenwood, both white and Black citizens of Tulsa alike recall seeing it, and Colbert speculates that it’s possible all copies of the newspaper were burned or lost to time. Regardless, Jones and the Tulsa Tribune certainly helped to incite the violence that led to the massacre.