Review: America struggles to reconcile the Tulsa genocide

No one really knows what 19-year-old Dick Rowland did or said to Sarah Page in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he rode the elevator she operated to the fourth floor of the Drexel Building, the nearest place to Rowland’s shoeshine stand where a Black person could use the washroom. But the 17-year-old Page screamed, Rowland ran and police were called. Page declined to press charges but police arrested Rowland the next day anyway.

Soon, a white mob showed up at the jail, bent on administering their brand of justice through a rope hung from a tree.

But Blacks from Greenwood rushed to defend Rowland and that was enough to trigger a flash flood of falsehoods, chiefly, that Blacks were planning an uprising.

As Scott Ellsworth notes in his book “The Ground Breaking: An American City and its Search for Justice,” radio had not yet come to Tulsa and in the absence of facts, fiction took over. Within hours, white Tulsans by the thousands were mobilizing to exterminate Greenwood.

And that night, they did, killing, looting and burning to the ground stores, hotels, churches, houses — everything in the Black community.

The fire department rolled to the scene, but only to protect nearby white-owned houses.