Black Birds in the Sky Read online

  Jimmie, who called his adopted mother Aunt Dame, quickly made himself useful, shelving products and cleaning the one-room grocery store and endearing himself to Ford’s customers. However, though Ford was generous in spirit and made sure Jimmie was clothed, fed, and housed, the store didn’t bring in a lot of money, and she struggled to support the two of them. About a year after Jimmie came to live with her, they moved to Tulsa, where he met Ford’s family, the Rowlands, and where Ford hoped for more opportunities in the booming oil town.

  Ford moved to the Greenwood District, a thriving Black community in Tulsa across the train tracks from where most of the white homes and businesses were located. At the time, Oklahoma was still heavily enforcing Jim Crow laws: mandates that segregated Black Americans from white Americans. This included housing, and because Black people were often banned from moving into white neighborhoods, they created their own district. Greenwood was founded in 1906, when a Black businessman named O. W. Gurley purchased forty acres of land to establish an all-Black residential and business district.

  The landmark 1896 US Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the legality of Jim Crow legislation, stated spaces and accommodations segregated by race were legal as long as they were comparable; this is where the standard of “separate but equal” was born. The “equal” part rarely came to fruition with Black spaces and accommodations; Greenwood, however, was something of an anomaly in this respect. By 1914, the neighborhood boasted all kinds of Black professionals, from doctors and lawyers to business owners, educators, and newspaper publishers—and they kept their wealth within the community, continually supporting the businesses of what became known nationwide as Black Wall Street.

  After moving to Greenwood, Damie Ford initially worked various jobs to make ends meet, eventually buying her own home on Archer Street. She rented out rooms to tenants to bring in money; Jimmie cleaned these rooms and also took on odd jobs to help out with expenses.

  Maybe it was the change in location, or maybe it was getting to know his adopted family, but Jimmie soon took on a new name. His first day in elementary school, he introduced himself as Dick Rowland, and at home, he asked that Aunt Dame use that name for him, too. As a young kid, Rowland was a good student, but his interest in academics waned the older he got. By the time he was a teenager, he was known more for high school football—he would drop out of school at times when the football season was finished—and his participation in Greenwood’s nightlife scene.

  Rowland began ditching classes at Booker T. Washington High School to take a job shining shoes at a white-owned establishment in downtown Tulsa. He made a decent amount of money at the shoeshine parlor with generous tips from its white clientele and so found no reason to get his high school diploma and work toward a higher-paying, higher-status job, as Aunt Dame encouraged him to do.

  On Memorial Day 1921, Rowland found himself in the Drexel Building on Main Street, where he had to go to use the restroom, as there were no “colored” bathrooms in the shoeshine parlor. Back then, elevators required manual operation to run up and down the floors of buildings, and the elevator operator that day was a young white woman named Sarah Page. While little is known about Rowland’s life, even less seems to be known about Page. She had supposedly already been married and divorced by the time she was seventeen, in 1921, and had moved to Tulsa from Kansas City, Missouri, to start over, renting a room in a boardinghouse on North Boston Avenue.

  It is rumored that Rowland and Page had known each other prior to that Memorial Day, which would make sense, as Rowland had to visit the Drexel Building to use the facilities during his work shifts and would likely run into Page sometimes. But it was also said by some, including Rowland’s Aunt Dame, that they had, perhaps, been romantically involved—and one of the biggest taboos in early-twentieth-century America was a relationship between a Black man and a white woman. Black men were routinely met with threats, violence, and murder for dating white women. In fact, the majority of lynchings that occurred at the time were of Black men arrested for unproven accusations of raping white women—some of which were cover-ups for situations in which white women were caught in consensual relationships with them.

  Few details have been confirmed about what happened in that elevator on May 30, 1921—Rowland and Page may be the only ones who actually knew. But what is known for sure is that Rowland used the elevator that day, which Page was operating. The police later determined that Rowland tripped while entering the elevator, reached out, and caught Page’s arm for balance, causing her to scream out in surprise. A salesclerk from Renberg’s clothing store on the first floor of the building heard the scream, saw Rowland hurrying out of the building, and called the police, assuming Page had been the victim of an attempted rape.

  There are no records of what Page told the police, but the damage was already done by the time they spoke to her and the Renberg’s clerk. They had a description of an alleged assailant.

  Dick Rowland was a wanted man.

  That was the saddest day of my life. That riot cheated us out of childhood innocence. My life dreams were destroyed too by that riot.

  —Beulah Lane Keenan Smith,

  Tulsa Race Massacre survivor

  1

  Oklahoma! Soon Be Livin’ in a Brand-New State

  What comes to mind when you think of Oklahoma? Perhaps one of the thirty-nine Native Nations who call the state home, such as the Cherokee Nation, or Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Or maybe it’s the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, which was first performed onstage nearly eighty years ago. Some people simply refer to it as part of “flyover country,” one of the large, blocky states between the coasts that many travelers don’t encounter unless they’re setting off on a cross-country road trip.

  Life in Oklahoma may not be as familiar to people living in other parts of the country, but its history is as rich and complicated as the rest of the United States. In 1907, Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state admitted to the Union, although the land first became part of the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase: a deal the young nation had brokered with France to purchase nearly 830,000 square miles of land in North America between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. French military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte had acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain in 1800—with plans to use the land as a granary for his proposed sugar empire—and this had made Americans nervous; the French, who were more powerful, now controlled New Orleans, which was significant because it served as a port for Americans to trade goods. So, at the request of President Thomas Jefferson and with the help of US minister to France Robert Livingston, founding father James Monroe sailed overseas to France and eventually purchased the land for $15 million.

  However, the land that would become Oklahoma had been settled by Indigenous people centuries before the Louisiana Purchase.

  Crossing into the state from the Texas border, travelers are greeted by a sign that reads:

  WELCOME TO OKLAHOMA: NATIVE AMERICAN COUNTRY

  Today, Indigenous people and Alaska Natives comprise 17.4 percent of Oklahoma’s population—second only to Alaska, where Indigenous people encompass 27.9 percent of the population. But how did nearly forty Native Nations come to call the area home?

  The Clovis and Folsom cultures, known as Big Game hunters capable of taking on mammoths, mastodons, and massive giant bison, lived in the area as early as 9500 BCE. They also collected a wide variety of plants and engaged in trade networks that brought goods from great distances. This period was followed by the Archaic, where for the next six thousand years, people lived by collecting and gathering, with supplemental hunting. Later, Southern Plains Villagers lived in the central region, building villages near water so they could utilize the farmland, growing food such as beans, corn, and squash. They were successful at working with their hands in a variety of ways, creating pottery and tools made from bone. By the 1500s, these Indigenous groups suffered large population losses, decimated by v
iolent European colonizers and the diseases those invaders brought with them. Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado first set foot in present-day Oklahoma in 1541 and eventually claimed the land, even though several Native Nations lived there. Explorers from France then arrived in the early 1700s, beginning a decades-long struggle for power with Spain over land that belonged to neither one of the countries—a struggle that continued until the United States acquired the land in the Louisiana Purchase.

  One of the United States’ most shameful and disruptive periods in history occurred twenty-seven years after this land was purchased, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson—whose face you may know from the earliest versions of the twenty-dollar bill and who was himself no stranger to cruelty. Jackson was born into poverty but grew his wealth through slave labor: he enslaved about 150 people, some of whom were forced to serve him even during his tenure at the White House. Jackson was a violent man, brutally whipping his enslaved workers in public and promising extra lashes to runaways who were captured. As president, he worked hard to uphold the institution of slavery, opposing laws that would prohibit holding enslaved people in the rapidly expanding western territories.

  However, Jackson is perhaps better known for his vicious treatment of Indigenous people. The Indian Removal Act would force nearly fifty thousand Indigenous people to leave their homes and relocate to unsettled land in the West so that their more desirable land east of the Mississippi could be given to white people. These millions of acres in southern states like Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia—which had been owned and cared for by Indigenous people for several generations—were prime areas for growing cotton, one of the most prosperous crops for plantation owners. White people also wanted access to Cherokee land in northern Georgia to mine for gold.

  Even considering America’s long history of anti-Native behavior and policies, the Indian Removal Act was notable in its unfairness and cruelty. Similar to the enslaved people he forced to work for him, Jackson didn’t see Indigenous people as fully human, much less American; he believed they were uncivilized simply because they had different ways of life than white people, and he referred to them with paternalistic ethnic slurs to justify his anti-Native views. Dating back to the nation’s first president, George Washington, many colonists called the mere existence of Indigenous people “the Indian problem” and continuously worked to strip them of their customs and land. In some cases, white elected officials and church leaders actively pursued policies that would have the citizens of Native Nations abandon their own languages and spiritual beliefs, and even encouraged them to purchase enslaved Africans for labor.

  * * *

  The Five Tribes of Oklahoma

  The Five Tribes of Oklahoma, previously referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes, hail from the southeastern United States and include the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. The federal government forcibly removed all of these Native Nations to what is now the eastern half of Oklahoma, but was then called Indian Territory.

  The term Five Civilized Tribes was primarily assigned to these Native Nations because of their perceived assimilation into white US culture. Many of them spoke English, practiced the Christian religion, drew up written constitutions, married whites, and enslaved African people. Civilized was a term that also served to foster division within these Native Nations among their citizens, who had a variety of lifestyles, including those that held more closely to traditional ways. While some leaders within these Native Nations saw adopting parts of Anglo customs as necessary to avoid removal and stop the encroachment of whites taking their land, they were mistaken.

  * * *

  As president, Jackson signed nearly seventy individual removal treaties with Native Nations, which ultimately bullied them into trading the land they and their ancestors had cultivated for a new life on reservations in Indian Territory, including those in what is now Oklahoma. Not all the tribes agreed with these treaties. Some of them were signed by smaller groups within larger bands or tribes that did not believe they should give up their home. And although some outright refused to relocate, they were all eventually forced off the land by the US military, in violation of the law, which required the government to negotiate the removals “fairly, voluntarily, and peacefully.”

  The Choctaw Nation, who lived in present-day Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida, were the first to be removed, in 1831—and they were forced to travel to the unfamiliar territory on foot. Not only were they made to walk hundreds of miles, but they didn’t receive any food or supplies from the very government that had forced them off their land. Thousands of Choctaw people died on this unnecessary journey. Five years later, the US government forced the Muscogee (Creek) from their land, who also lost thousands of their people.

  Like other Native Nations, the Cherokee people did not want to leave their homeland—and they used several methods to resist. They sent young representatives around the country to speak out on the issue; circulated a petition that garnered thousands of signatures of Cherokee people protesting the removal; started a newspaper to broadcast their opinions; and tried to appeal to Congress, even going as far as the US Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. However, President Jackson didn’t always follow the law when it worked against him, and he dodged the decision by enforcing yet another treaty. So beginning in the fall of 1838 and lasting through winter 1839, the Cherokee people were removed from their land in Georgia, imprisoned in “roundup camps,” and forced to walk over a thousand miles to their new home in Oklahoma. More than four thousand Cherokee people died along the way, with about half of the deaths occurring in the camps due to unsanitary conditions, and the rest during their routes along land and water.

  A Choctaw leader called this brutal and often deadly migration that forced Indigenous people from their land “a trail of tears and death,” and it has been known as the Trail of Tears ever since. The National Park Service has commemorated the plight of the Cherokee people with the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, which encompasses 5,043 miles across nine states.

  The National Park Service’s Trail of Tears National Historic Trail commemorates the routes traveled by the Cherokee people after their forced removal from their ancestral homelands.

  Tulsa was first settled by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in the 1830s, after their forced migration from the South. The Lower Muscogee (Creek) people settled in present-day Tulsa in 1833, then entered into a treaty with the US government that negotiated boundaries between their tribe and the Cherokee Nation in what was then known as Indian Territory. Upper Muscogee (Creek) citizens from the town of Loachapoka, Alabama, made their way along the Trail of Tears with ashes from the final fires in their homeland. When they arrived at the end of the trail in 1836, they spread the ashes over the place that would become their new home. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation built their new locations by several rivers, including the Arkansas River. This particular site would eventually become Cheyenne Avenue, not far from where the Greenwood District would one day be established. The Council Oak Tree is a historic landmark that denotes the site where the Muscogee (Creek) citizens settled, marking present-day Tulsa. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation holds an annual Council Oak Ceremony at Creek Nation Council Oak Park to “celebrate the Mvskoke (Muscogee) people and reflect on the tribe’s history and triumphs over the years.”

  So how did Tulsa get its name? Like those of many cities and towns in the United States, its name was derived from an Indigenous language. According to some historians, Tulsa comes from the word Tullahassee, which was a Muscogee (Creek) town in present-day Alabama. Still, others believe it was derived from the Mvskoke word Tallasi, a shortened version of Tullahassee or Tallahassee, which means “old town.”

  Tulsa was incorporated in 1898, but one of its most important families, the Perrymans, first settled there seventy years earlier. Benjamin Perryman, whose mother was a Muscogee (Creek) wom
an and whose father was thought to be a white Englishman, relocated to Indian Territory in 1828, beginning his family’s long history in the city now known as Tulsa. Benjamin’s Muscogee name was Steek-cha-ko-me-co, meaning “great king.” He settled into his new home with his family, which included eight children.

  The Perryman family would come to manage thousands of cattle on the more than 200,000 acres they owned. According to a 1937 issue of the Chronicles of Oklahoma, Benjamin’s grandson George was known as the “Indian cattle king of the Creek Nation.” Another grandson, Josiah, was the first postmaster of Tulsa, and his brother Legus was principal chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation for several years.

  The family tree is diverse with many branches, as in addition to marrying within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, some Perrymans married interracially, and some of the Africans they enslaved also took the Perryman name. The Tulsa area is still home to many of the family’s descendants, and a significant portion of the city sits on what was once Perryman land.

  Land has always been a fundamental issue in the United States. This was, perhaps, never truer in Oklahoma than in the late 1800s, also known as the era of land runs. White settlers had previously seen Oklahoma as undesirable land, which was one of the reasons the government chose it for relocation of the Native Nations forced from their homelands in the first half of the nineteenth century. But by the end of the 1800s, as the country continued to grow and expand west, people found better methods for tending to land and animals—and white colonizers turned their eyes to Oklahoma and the surrounding areas.