CHAPTER 1
BEYOND HATRED’S REACH
On a warm May night in 1913, in the shadowy lamplight of Greenwood’s First Baptist Church, Mrs. Lucy Davis read the audience a short essay on love, and the Rollison sisters nervously stepped to the altar to sing a lovely duet. Men wearing expensive suits and white gloves and women in their finest white dresses applauded politely. But those were only the quaint preliminaries to the primary attraction, one anticipated in the Greenwood community for days. Scarcely a spot in the pews was empty that night, for the principal speaker at the annual meeting of one of Greenwood’s leading fraternal orders was none other than Captain Townsend D. Jackson—ex-slave, revered Black lawman, and militia leader in both Oklahoma and Tennessee, a man who had cast off the shackles of slavery and now looked the white governor of Oklahoma straight in the eye without blinking.
Or so the Tulsa Black community had heard. Just a few months before, Jackson and his family had moved to Greenwood from the Oklahoma town of Guthrie, preceded by Jackson’s considerable notoriety, and his new neighbors were certainly anxious to hear for themselves the man’s thoughts on the great racial questions of the day. That night at the church, they would finally get their chance.
He was impressive enough to look at—a stately, six-foot fellow whose short, dark hair had gone mostly gray. Jackson was also what African Americans called a “light,” a multiracial person whose creamy skin color gave rise to suspicions that he had been fathered by his Georgia slave owner in the 1850s, a common enough occurrence in those days. Little matter. As the Rollison sisters warbled their final note, Jackson rose and slowly stepped toward the pulpit, away from the front-row pew where his wife and youngest son, the handsome young physician Dr. Andrew Jackson, were sitting with him.
As he did, Andrew J. Smitherman removed a piece of paper and pencil from his breast pocket and leaned forward in his own pew near the front, poised to capture Jackson’s every word. Smitherman, a bulldog-like man, was the irascible editor of the Tulsa Star, Greenwood’s leading publication and its most authoritative public voice. In the eight years between that night in the church and the great burning to come, Smitherman doggedly chronicled all the local news, from street brawls to potluck dinners. But he also never missed a chance to rail in print against injustices perpetrated against his people, and had intervened personally in attempted lynchings in neighboring towns. An early banner headline summed up his belligerent disposition where race matters were concerned: YOU PUSH ME, the headline promised, AND I’LL PUSH YOU.
Seated next to Smitherman was John B. Stradford, a short, dapper, mustachioed man, the son of a Kentucky slave and an owner of a law degree in Indiana. He quickly had emerged as one of Black Tulsa’s most successful entrepreneurs, including among his ventures the famously luxurious, fifty-four-room Stradford Hotel on Greenwood Avenue, one of the state’s largest Black-owned businesses. But like his friend Smitherman, Stradford’s overriding concern was the African American’s plight in America, and like the editor, Stradford wasn’t shy about saying so. Just ask the white deliveryman Stradford had beaten to within an inch of his life for a racist remark made within earshot.
Others in the First Baptist audience that night were less inclined toward racial militance perhaps, but were no less noteworthy. John Williams and his wife Loula owned a drugstore, an auto shop, and a movie theater, and were the first Tulsa Black people to purchase an automobile. O. W. Gurley owned Greenwood’s first hotel and grocery store. Dr. R. T. Bridgewater was Black Tulsa’s first physician; Barney Cleaver, the towering fellow seated near the back, was the first Black deputy. Lawyers and schoolteachers were in the audience, too, people who memorized Shakespeare and read Latin.
On the issue of race, some no doubt shared the confrontational notions of Smitherman and Stradford. Others preferred a quieter course. But each in his or her own way had put the lie to the prevailing theories of Black inferiority with which the white people of that time continued to justify so much of their cruelty. Indeed, to visit First Baptist on the night of Jackson’s speech was to observe Greenwood’s gentry in its proud entirety—educated, literate, affluent African Americans packed into the sanctuary, estimable folks curious about Captain Jackson, just the latest in a series of remarkable success stories that continued to unfold in the place called Greenwood.
* * *
They were the children of slaves, or, in a few cases, had been born into slavery themselves. Some of the Greenwood gentry, in fact, remembered the dreary years after the Civil War, when four million Black people were emancipated but without the skills, education, and experience in public life to guide them in their new freedom. In the decades after the war, tens of thousands of freedmen were thus obliged to work as sharecroppers or as tenants for their former owners for pitiable wages or no wages at all, earning a standard of living a slim notch above slavery itself.
Copyright © 2001, 2021 by Tim Madigan.
