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

Dick Rowland was the 19-year-old boy falsely accused of the attempted rape of Sarah Page on May 30, 1921. He was working at a shoe shine parlor after he dropped out of high school following the end of his high school football career. He was orphaned as a child and raised by two of his sisters until he was adopted by Damie Ford, a store owner who moved with him to Greenwood.

Rowland was a diligent worker, but since he was Black in Jim Crow Oklahoma, he had to use the segregated bathroom in the Drexel Building, where Page worked as an elevator attendant. Rowland tripped and fell, grabbing onto Page, who screamed in shock. Another white store clerk heard the scream and saw Rowland fleeing the scene and assumed Rowland attempted to rape Page. However, some, including Rowland’s aunt Damie, thought that Rowland and Page had a consensual romantic relationship, something that would not have been legal as interracial marriage was not legal until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling.

When Rowland left his home the next day on May 31, 1921, he was arrested. His arrest was then publicized in the Tulsa Tribune, which incited a lynch mob to kill Rowland for his alleged offense. This mob would later destroy Greenwood and commit the Tulsa Race Massacre after armed Black men from Greenwood came to defend Rowland. In the chaos of the massacre, Rowland escaped unharmed and, after Page wrote to the court to drop any charges against him, was never heard from again. Rowland was at the center of the massacre and his story is central to Colbert’s historical research, as she traces the events of the massacre through his fate and the buildup to the violent actions of the white mob.

Ottowa W. Gurley was the cofounder of the Greenwood District, alongside J. B. Stradford. His parents were enslaved prior to the Civil War, but he was born free in 1868. He grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in a predominantly Black community. He attended segregated schools and educated himself before he graduated from Branch Normal College with a teaching degree.

He held an unspecified role appointed by Grover Cleveland, but the historical details of this role have been lost. He worked in the Postal Service before he resigned when he was 20 and left the South, moving west to Oklahoma to find new economic ventures. He obtained land near Perry during a land run, but eventually, after starting a general store and making more money, he purchased 40 acres of land near Tulsa that would become Greenwood. He set aside some land for business and some land for houses, with the goal of creating a community for “upwardly mobile” Black Americans to create new economic opportunities (104). Gurley, along with Stradford, succeeded in this venture.

However, Colbert complicates Gurley’s legacy. She notes that when others went to the courthouse to defend Rowland from the white mob, Gurley thought they could not win the fight and that the leader of the group, who was a WWI veteran, “came back from France with exaggerated ideas of equality” (97). Though he wanted to make Greenwood a place for Black Americans to thrive, his ideas of equality were clearly informed by the racist oppression he grew up under. After the massacre, Gurley left Tulsa to move to Los Angeles and never returned, not participating in the attempts at rebuilding.

Dr. A. C. Jackson was a well-respected physician and surgeon in Greenwood. He was born in 1879 to formerly enslaved parents in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Townshend Jackson, was a Civil War veteran. Despite his military service, Jackson’s father was threatened by a lynch mob for entering a white-only segregated tobacco store. The Jackson family then moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma.

A. C. Jackson attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville to obtain his medical degree before returning to Guthrie. As Jim Crow laws took hold, Jackson and his wife moved to Greenwood. Jackson was so well respected he even had white patients and was well regarded by William and Charles Mayo, the doctors who founded the Mayo Clinic.

This respect could not save his life, however. During the riots and despite protests from his white neighbor and retired judge John Oliphant, members of the white mob shot Jackson numerous times, Jackson later dying at the internment camp at the Convention Hall. He had worked throughout the night to help early victims of the mob’s violence but was murdered right outside his own home. Jackson had sent his wife away when the violence first broke out, saving her life. Despite Oliphant’s testimony about one of Jackson’s killers being a police officer named Brown, no one was ever indicted or arrested for Jackson’s murder.

Buck Colbert (B. C.) Franklin was an attorney who moved to Greenwood in 1921, the same year as the massacre, from Rentiesville, Oklahoma, another predominantly Black community where Franklin served as justice of the peace, postmaster, attorney, and entrepreneur. He came to the Tulsa community to find increased economic opportunity as the discovery of oil made the area more profitable.

Franklin found economic success as an attorney in Greenwood prior to the massacre, but Colbert’s inclusion of Franklin in her historical analysis is primarily because he served as witness to the atrocities of the massacre and wrote about them. For example, he recorded seeing the planes flying around Greenwood and dropping bombs on the community, writing:

Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way Hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from the top. […] Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues in the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air (142).

Franklin’s writing is lyrical as it describes the horrors that he and the other Greenwood residents endured. He also witnessed John Ross, a WWI veteran, on fire after fighting against the mob. Of the idea of Ross fighting, Franklin wrote, “I somehow, felt happy. I cannot explain that feeling. I never felt that way—before nor since” (146).

Franklin’s words offer a unique and emotional insight into the events of the day, the complexity of feeling a strange happiness while witnessing trauma. Franklin’s daughter Mozella helped preserve photos of the massacre, and the reconciliation center in Tulsa was named for Franklin’s son John Hope, showcasing the lasting legacy of the Franklin family in Tulsa.